Seasonal Affective Disorder and similar symptoms affect over 10 million Americans every year. Here are some effective perspectives and actions that have been effective remedies for me and my clients.
Note: This is not medical advice, nor is it a diagnosis or alternative to medical care. If you feel you have a clinically diagnosable condition, please seek the professional guidance you need to be your best.
Podcast transcript:
Thank you for joining me for another edition of the sovereign mind, body and soul podcast. And today we're going to talk about sad, being sad, more specifically, seasonal effect disorder, seasonal mood swings.
Maybe you're one of the millions of Americans that are affected by this every year.
Maybe you're one of the millions of Americans who's just accepted the label and diagnosis by the pharmaceutical industry. So they can give you some fresh new drugs.
That you can get addicted to and help. Maybe there'll be enough side effects to create a brand new disease for you. So you'll have to see your doctor even more and be beyond more prescriptions and visit the pharmacy even more. But before we get into that happy subject, that happy topic, a little note from our sponsor.
Today's episode of the Sovereign Mind, Body, and Soul podcast is brought to you by Euphoric HealthWorks, workshop based app.
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Alright, on to our topic today of sadness. We're gonna, we're gonna make sadness a happy topic today. Sadness. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Like I said, it affects 10 million Americans. An additional 10 to 20%, that's 660, 000 Americans have mild seasonal affective disorder, otherwise known as SAD, SAD is four times more common in women than in men.
And I like to think of the seasons as almost like the the emotional body of our universe, of our earth. I
mean, just think about what summer, what is summer? Summer is where we have really long days, really short nights. You might find that you need a little bit less sleep in the summer. You might find that you have more energy in the summer.
Now a lot of that is because there's just more to do. More activities to be excited about. But it's more than that. That continued exposure to sunlight. is adding more vitamin D to your system. Your body is synthesizing more vitamin D.
Vitamin D is critical in your ability to manufacture and convert energetic and youthful hormones in your body.
If we're thinking in terms of yin and yang, summer is the ultimate yang.Summer is when the earth goes type A. Summer is when the earth gets extroverted. Summer is when the earth is burning more energy than it's creating. This is a catabolic phase, but we can't do summer year round in most places.
So most of us live in an area where there are four seasons, And if we think of summer is like a high intensity workout, like high intensity workouts are great. They're going to bump your metabolism. They're going to increase your testosterone.
They're going to make you stronger and more conditioned. But if you never take a break from high intensity workouts, eventually you'll burn out. Things will start to break down, they'll start to wear down, you'll start to get injuries, you'll start experiencing recovery debts. Particularly if you aren't sleeping, eating real food, hydrating yourself.
Because those are the important aspects of recovery. Those would represent the winter in our day. Because if high intensity interval training... Our high intensity training is the summer of our day,
then the sleep, the stretching, the foam rolling, the hydration, eating real food, nutrient dense food, that's going to be the winter of our day. So the earth goes through the same thing. Summer is like the high intensity workout for the earth, and like I mentioned earlier, we cannot You can't have summer 24 7 365, otherwise the earth will burn up. The ground will stay dry, the plants will dry up, maybe invasive species that grow well in dry weather, hot weather, will take over. So while summer's good, just like a high intensity workout is good, we can't do it all the time.
So eventually the earth ramps down and goes from summer into fall. So we go from this massive yang state and we start gearing more towards yin. So to compare yin and yang to the physiology in your body or the physiology of the earth, Yang is representative of our output. It's our burning of our energy.
It's spending our energy.
It's like going shopping is yang. Saving money is yin. So yang is outward. Yang is expressive. Yang is extroverted. Yin is going inward. It's the feminine side of us. The feminine receives inward, the masculine delivers outward. So yang is the masculine, yin is the feminine.
As we go into the fall season on the earth is preparing itself to go into yin phase. It's preparing itself to go into hibernation. Where things can heal, things can pause, things can take a time out, regulate themselves. So winter is the yin for Earth. And we have yin in our day. We have yin in our week.
We have yin in our year. So we have seasons to our life. But our work schedule doesn't have seasons, generally. Our family obligations doesn't have seasons, generally. While the activities and responsibilities might change by the season, sure. You still gotta be a mom or dad 24 7, 365. I'm sure if you work seven to five, five days a week in the summer, you're probably working something close to that in the winter.
If the Earth is going into a yin phase,well, what happens when we switch phases? We see a change in air temp, don't we? We see a change in the humidity. We see a change in the amount of daylight. And our physiology responds to all of that. Our physiology is responding to the daylight, our physiology is responding to the air temperature, to the humidity.
So our bodies start preparing for the winter yin cycle with the earth.
Now as we go from fall into winter, we're in full blown yin mode. Where I live in Montana, the sun doesn't come out until 8, 8. 30 in the morning, and it sets around, between 30 in the evening. It's a real short day. So you get a lot of days where you're waking up in the dark, and you're going home from work in the dark.
It's tough on your circadian rhythm. And because we live in this modern world, that doesn't allow us really to wind down our body with the changing seasons of the earth.
We go right from summer, yang, into winter, yin, yet we still have the same work schedule. Our kids have the same school schedule. We have the same responsibilities and commitments that we always had, but now we're not seeing the light of day. We're not getting as much vitamin D as we were in the summer.
It's just natural for our physiology to change. It's natural for our mood to change. Our hormone profile is going to change.
Remember, we're not getting socked with vitamin D all day, every day. You're seeing a lot more darkness than you used to see. You're not seeing daylight.
So all these things happen, and then we get a label of seasonal affect disorder. And I'm not here to give you medical advice, and I'm not saying your seasonal affective disorder isn't real, and it's a false stu That's not what I'm saying.
But what I'm saying is, we're really quick to just look for a label, so we can explain what we're going through. And there's people that are all too willing to slap a label on you. Now once we've been labeled, It's really hard to see your condition through any other lens besides the lens of the label that you've been given.
That's why labels can be dangerous.
So now we got a label, it's an explanation.
📍 Now we can go ahead and manifest this sad disorder every year. Why? Because we accept the label. And the label corresponds with the season. And as the season comes, we pull our label out of the box and we say, Oh, gotta get ready to put this label on. Winter's 📍 coming. My seasonal disorder is coming to with it.
What if this mood shift that you're experiencing that has been labeled as Seasonal Affect Disorder, mild depression, what if this was just your body's normal physiological 📍 response to the change in the Earth's seasons and the different daylight? And you're just feeling a hormonal regulation occur in your body.
And you only feel sad because of the lack of daylight. You only feel sad because your Earth is going into a yin phase and your body's trying to follow it. But your work schedule, your life schedule is yang. What is the difference between a yin state and a yang state? A yin state is an introspective state.
If you think about ancient times, indigenous cultures, they had four seasons in their day. When the sun went down, they didn't turn on the lamps. They didn't turn on the lights. They didn't turn on social media. They didn't turn on Netflix. They likely sat around a fire. Maybe they told some stories. Maybe they did some singing and dancing.
Maybe they just stared at the fire and did what we would call nowadays is meditate. But they would have that winter every day, but they would also have it. During the winter, they would go into their yin phase because there's a lot less camp to manicure, right? There's lots of grounds around the area that's, you got to keep weed free and you might have to keep it, de iced and keep the snow away, but you're not out harvesting a bunch of plants.
You might be doing some hunting, but you're not going to be out in that freezing cold snow much of the day. So there's probably a lot of time where we're hunkering down with the family, we're gathering around a fire, we're thinking about how the last season went, maybe we're praying for a bountiful harvest come spring.
But we would naturally go into a Yin phase. Now, from what I've seen with my clients and with myself, is that when we utilize this time for what it's for,
we can have such a powerful experience in our wintertime. Because we've just yanked the heck out of ourselves all through summer. It's been go. It's been burn burn spend. And now we get to go inward and we get to take a look at how our seasons were. We get to take a look at our next seasons coming up.
The next year coming up. What are our plans for that next year? Am I living in a life? Am I manifesting my best self? If not, where did I go off track? What got me off track? How do I get back on track? That's the beauty of the yin approach. That's the beauty of what that time that gets delivered to us can be used for.
📍 But as a society in general, we're a real yang summer society. We don't like to do that. We don't like to go inward. We don't like to look at our thoughts and our feelings. We don't like to plan our future. And I won't go too deep into that, but When we think about our future, when we think about our trajectory, when we think about how far we are in or out of alignment, it brings up a lot of our self doubts and our insecurities, and that's honestly what we don't like to look at.
If I'm not where I want to be in life, then I got to take a look at whether or not I believe I deserve it, whether or not I believe I'm capable of it, and along the lines of looking at that, there's a lot of opportunity for self judgment. being critical. So we tend to just avoid that. So a lot of this seasonal mood swing is just a pure resistance to looking at the inner world.
Shadow work is great. Looking at our blind spots, looking at our unacknowledged aspects of ourself is great, but it's really almost traumatic. When someone does it for us when someone comes into our world and they shine a flash flashlight on our shadows And they point something out to us matter of factly something about ourselves that we've been in a denial of we don't like that winter is a whole bunch of that So if you suffer from seasonal mood swings if you suffer from the seasonal effect And you don't have a regular habit of going inward if you don't have a regular habit of introspection, meditation, journaling, tracing your triggers, getting real with your traumatic events in your life and what they really mean to you.
If you don't have a regular habit of doing that and you experience the effects of the season, seasonal changes, you might be a likely candidate. For some inner work therapy.
Now, if you think that stuff's a bunch of nonsense or a bunch of hogwash, I invite you to try it. And if you say no to that, then you're actively choosing to either a deal with the effects of the mood disorder or taking those non efficacious prescription medications.
that numb you from your feelings, that invite you not to get real with why you're feeling the pain you're feeling.
And in doing that, what you're gonna do is you're only gonna make the problem worse. These things that you're resisting, think of it like a big beach ball that you're keeping held under the water. And the more trauma you resist sourcing, the more your triggers that you refuse to dismantle and dissolve, every time one of those comes up.
You're putting more into that ball, more air into that ball, and pretty soon that ball just gets so full of air, it can't be held under the water. And that's when we break down. That's when we lose our shit.
So if you're taking something that's keeping you from feeling, that's keeping you from taking a look at what, what's really causing your situation, your mood, then you're choosing to try to keep that beach ball under the water, and inevitably,
you will not be able to submerse that beach ball any longer.
Now if you do winter right, if you do yin properly, when spring comes,
You will feel that your inner world matches the state of the planet as you start seeing wildflowers start to bloom, as you start seeing the hillsides turn green, as you start seeing the leaves turn green on the trees, that's going to reflect your new spirit coming out for all the introspection and inner work that you've done in the winter that's planting all these seeds of growth and all these seeds of hope that sprout in the spring,
and that's where you get your energy to go out into the summer and really show off the new you, the energetic happy, Motivated you
and a good way to tell if you're not taking advantage, or if you're not following suit of the seasons of the universe and your planet is take a look at how your day goes. Do you have winter, spring, summer and fall in each of your days? Do you have a part of your day where you were just straight yang?
That would be a workout, right? Do you have a part of your day where you're ramping down from yang to yin?
Maybe after your workout, you're doing a sauna and a cold shower. Maybe a little stretch routine. That would be your fall. Do you have a winter in your day? Do you make time to think about your day, to think about your triggers? Think about your responses to life's events. Journal your experience. An act of imagination meditation.
How about visualizing your future self? Combining that with powerful emotion. See, if you do that every day, then you get to have a spring in your day. Because when you come out of that meditation, all of a sudden that news program that got you stressed out doesn't have you stressed out quite so much.
Maybe that appliance or that thing in the garage that still isn't fixed. It's not bothering you near as bad. Because in your meditation, some things came to you that maybe you had not been aware of, or you'd been overlooking. And these are real important things for you to be aware of. But you'd lost awareness of it in the summer of your day.
But this introspection time got you to see it. Got you to find new hope, new motivation. So as you come out of your daily introspective time, your meditation, your journaling, your visualizations, whatever it is,
you develop a new hope for tomorrow.
Then as you wake up the next day, The sun's rising, and you're rising with it. You got a yang mindset. You're thinking about how today's gonna be a win, and all the things it's gonna take for today to be a win, and how you're excited to get them done.
That's how you get flow in your day. That's how you get health in your day. That's how you put a legitimate, genuine smile on your face. That's how you speed up your metabolism. That's how you optimize your hormone profile.
Hormone dysregulation is just a lack of seasons in your body. Too much summer. Too much winter. Never a spring. We don't allow fall.
So specifically, what are some things that we can do? If you say, hey, this is me. This is me. I'm not taking advantage of the seasons in my day. I'm not really tied into my physiology and how it responds to the Earth's seasons. What do I do? Specifically, first thing you can do is you can get my new app, get my new app.
It's free. Seriously, you go through that first workshop. It's going to, it's going to show you how to use your personality type to know your pattern. It's going to show you how to find your find your beliefs, find your identity
and how those are leading you what it's like to live in alignment or live out of alignment. Get your core values down around your health. In your purpose, in your meaning in life. This really is the foundational aspect of anybody achieving anything they want in life. You gotta know where you're headed, and you gotta know who's headed there.
So you can get that Euphoric HealthWorks app, like I said, it's available on the Google Play Store or on the Apple App Store. Get that the very first, in my opinion, it's the most valuable workshop on that whole app. It's free. And then there's other workshops on there as well that will definitely benefit you.
📍 We got guided meditations. We got calming, moving exercise routines that are like moving meditations. We've got inner work journals 📍 specifically towards your personality type, and we introduce you to the false core, the false self, and how that influences you and the things you do in your life. That would be the first thing I would do for you, honestly, because people have paid 5, for the information that you get for free on that.
Now actually they're paying for the coaching that goes with it, which obviously you don't get for free, but you're getting all that information. It's the best deal on the interweb. But now, okay, so you got the app. What are some things you can do in your day? You gotta have a morning and evening routine, and I don't care what season it is.
That's a good idea
to get a morning routine. Wake up, set your intentions for the day. Be grateful that you woke up today. Ask yourself, what would make today a win?
Who is it? I want to be in life. And what does that look like today? How am I going to show up today?
The ideal me, the actualized me, the best me possible. What does that version of me? Where to work today. What does that version of me say when they get stressed? What do they do when they get stressed? What do they do when they feel like they haven't done anything that makes them happy today? What is that person gonna do?
Set your intention for the day. How are you gonna work out? What's your workout gonna look like? What are you gonna eat today? Get that all planned out. Have some affirmations. Have some things that you can have in your pocket that you can pull out anytime that you're losing sight of the true nature of reality.
Which is that you can manifest anything you want. All you got to do is get out of the way Or stop attracting things you don't want. Let what you want come to you, because it's seeking you. Have some daily affirmations. I am who I am, and that's enough.
With my soul's help, I have the ability to fill my cup at any time. I do not need anybody else to fill my cup.
Something along those lines, but something that is specific to you. Again, you'll find a lot of those affirmations on my app, but you'll find affirmations that are specific to you that really help you that speak to your false core, that speak to your pattern and don't overlook the power of those things.
You want to get an evening ritual.
So you've set a good mindset for the day. You've set your intentions. You've honored your core values. You've moved. Now your evening ritual, let's get the lights off at a decent time. Let's spend some time in some in winter. If I'm sittin up watchin Netflix and it's a real exciting show and I turn it off and try to go to sleep I'm tryin to go to sleep in the middle of summer, right?
So I gotta get winter in my body before I go down to the ultimate yin, which is sleep. A stretching routine. A journaling routine. That's a great time to get your meditation and journaling in. It's a great time to visualize your future self again. Visualize your day for tomorrow.
But some kind of routine that involves settin a good mindset, exercising, eating real food, staying hydrated... Getting proper rest time. Those are the things that if you have in your day, every single day, you will create a flow. When you create a flow, you create contentment, fulfillment. When you create contentment, fulfillment, your day can end well.
When we have loose ends, when we feel unfulfilled, our day never really feels like it ends. So make sure you put a ribbon on your day. Wrap a bow on your day. Know what the day looks like to be a win. If you say, I've got to do this one thing today for it to be a win. If you get that thing done when it's bedtime, you'll know you got your day done.
If you give yourself a list of 10 15 things, and you only get to 9 of them, you're going to be thinking about those 6 things as you're trying to go to sleep. So set yourself up with a flow.
When you have that flow, when you have fulfillment, when you've burned up your body's excess energy, and you are content that you did everything you could, today, to manifest your best self,
then there's very little to keep you sad, there's very little to keep you from sleeping.
Now you might find there's a couple things in your life that you really need to address. Maybe there's a conversation that needs to take place. Maybe there's a career move that needs to happen. Maybe you want to get out of the house you're living in, but you've been putting off facing that, confronting that, taking action on that.
It's time to go into your winter and introspect. Think, feel, and intuit deeply on what exactly is keeping you from taking action on that
and find the self love The inner fortitude and the strength to make it happen.
Alright guys, I hope you appreciated the content there. This is something that comes up every year for me and my clients and prospects that I talk to online. And really, I think we're really missing the boat on this. I haven't had bad luck with people that experience Seasonal Affect Disorder with unrolling this approach and this new way of looking at it with them.
In fact, it's been really effective.
It is my opinion, based on observation and experience, that this seasonal effect disorder is really just, it's a physiological and spiritual dilemma in people. We get forced into a time where we have to introspect, we gotta go inward, we don't like what we see when we go in there. We're resisting that, and that's what's creating the sadness, the mood changes, the shifts.
All right, guys, thank you again for joining me once again. Head on over to Apple podcast or the Google Play Store. Download the Euphorics HealthWorks app for free today. You don't have to get started on right away, but get it on your phone, get it downloaded on your device so you have it,
get that next step taken care of. Again, that's Euphoric HealthWorks app. Y O U P H O R I C HealthWorks. H E A L T H W O R K S. That's all one word. Euphoric HealthWorks. On the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. And as always, if you're looking for one on one opportunities to work with me, I've got a couple spots left.
Don't wait to at least reach out, get a consultation.
Worst case scenario, you're called, those two spots have been filled, but I can get you on the waiting list with my current rates now. Anytime I have a waiting list, the rates always go up. So get the, take advantage of the current rates now. Take advantage of any package deals that I have going on while I still have two spots open.
As of today, November 8, 2023. Alright guys, thank you for tuning in. And as always, I'm here for you, whatever you need. Coach Jerry, Holistic Health Practitioner, Enneagram Coach,
Anxiety, Anger, and Trigger Specialist. At your service. Peace, much love, and live well.
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Seasonal Mood and Energy Swings