How to Cope Psychologically With the Mid-Winter Blues

This is the time of year when the long, cold, dark days of winter become tiresome. Here's how to cope.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• The right attitude

1. When I got up this morning, it was 23-below-zero Fahrenheit here in northern Minnesota, and it's been that cold every day for a couple of weeks now. It really sucks, man, and when I say, "It really sucks" I am displaying the proper attitude for coping with the winter blues. Read on to understand why.

2. A lot of people might think -- "Wow, dude, you have a negative attitude!" But I say that admitting that you think the cold weather sucks is better than denial. When it is frigid cold outside, there are all kinds of problems, like your car not wanting to start, and the pipes in your house freezing up -- not to mention how painfully cold it feels outside. So the first thing you should do is acknowledge all these negative things, and not live in a world of denial.

3. For example, I used to have this friend whom I'll call Bob. Well, Bob was one of these ying-yangs who was always reading all of these positive thinking books and self-help junk. Whenever I would say something like, "God, I'm so sick of winter!" Bob would give me a mini-lecture. He would say, "You need to start embracing the cold and finding the good in the cold winter weather."

4. And Bob always tried to do that. He took up winter hobbies like cross-country skiing and ice fishing, and he was always lecturing everyone about how he just loved the crisp snapping bitter cold weather. Well, guess what? Where is Bob now? I'll tell you -- Bob blew his own head off with a shotgun. They found him in his ice-fishing house out on a cold, frozen lake.

5. So much for Bob, "Mr. Happy Clappy I Love the Cold." Bob's ridiculous denials finally caught up with him. He choose the path of "serenity now, insanity later." Rest in peace, Bob!

6. I've lived in frigid northern Minnesota most of my life, and one thing you'll soon notice around here is that most people grumble all the time about the long cold winters. That's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. All this grumbling is a basic psychological survival skill. So if you want to learn about how to deal with the winter blues, just spend some time with the people who live with it 9 months out of every year. They know how to cope -- they do a lot of bitching.

7. Some psychologists have identified a disease they call SAD. This stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder. The theory is that lack of sunshine in the winter creates hormone changes in the human body which cause people to become moody or depressed in the winter. One treatment is to get a sun lamp of the same wavelength as natural sunlight and shine it in your face every day. However, I think this is nonsense.

8. The reason I think the sunlamp treatment is nonsense is that I have known dozens of people who tried it, and it didn't seem to do them a lick of good. I knew this one woman, I'll call her Barbara, who tried using a sunlamp in the winter to lift her mood. She said it worked for her, yet she was the most horrible person to be around that you can imagine. She was always carping and whining about everything. Everyone wished her sunlamp would fall into her bathtub while she was in the bathtub. That would have been justice, in a way.

9. Some people try to battle the winter blues with vitamins, such as taking mega-doses of vitamin C and D and the various B-range of vitamins. Ha! ha! What a total joke, man! It's like, I pop a vitamin C tablet and walk out the door -- it's 25-below outside with a stiff wind. The bitter wind hits you in the face like an anvil. The windchill factor is 63-below. But -- hey! -- at least I have some vitamin C in my tummy! Everything is great now! Yeah, right.

10. Still other people take what some people call "liquid sunshine" which is the drug Prozac. It's amazing how many people think an expensive pill manufactured in some chem lab somewhere can solve all their problems. Let me tell you something, if you believe this, then you need more than just a Prozac pill every day to get in touch with reality. You probably need electro-shock therapy. You could eat Prozac out of a cereal bowl with a spoon and you'd still feel gloomy in the winter, so let's just face it.

11. Some people cope with the long winters by counting the days on the calander. They say, "Hey, it's only 53 days till spring!" The trouble is, the first day of spring comes in March, and here in northern Minnesita, we usually have a ton of snow on the ground, and more often than not, the first day of spring is cold and windy. So this is a big let down. You've been waiting for that blissful first day of spring since that first dreary cold day on Nov. 1, and when it gets here, it's a cold snowy hell.

12. So my advice to all of you is to forget all the airy-fairy positive thinking crap and sunlamps and vitamins and prescription mood lifters. It's all basically a form of denial. You'll never be happier by lying to yourself about the obvious reality that winter is long, cold and dark, and never seems to end. If you can't stand winter, then move to Costa Rica or New Zealand, or somewhere.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember, everyone is trying to sell you a load of crap so that they can make money. They think: "If you solve a problem, people will pay you for it." But solving the problem of having the winter blues is like trying to gargle peanut butter. Remember that.
• Stop buying positive thinking books and self-help books. They don't work.