The Ultimate Blog Challenge: Winter Blues Edition

For 365 days, you get to write a new story!! Which one do you want your life to tell this year? I hope that today, you can sense the possibilities and feel the power of the intentions you set.

If you haven't set your intentions yet or said goodbye fully to 2017, click here for a letting go ritual that will help you do both.

So we begin a brand new year!

But some of us are still surviving winter. If you regularly suffer from winter blues, seasonal depression, seasonal anxiety or seasonal affective disorder, stay tuned this month because I'll be writing for you.

I have experienced some degree of winter blues or seasonal affective disorder for as long as I can remember, but certainly at least since college when I remember being the most depressed I ever had been during the winter & then, feeling a cloud lift, for no particular reason at all, while I was walking across the courtyard to class one afternoon in May.

A few years later, a friend of mine from grad school read an article about seasonal affective disorder & passed it on to me.  It helped me understand what I was going through at the time, but years went by before I looked back on all the previous years and began to rewrite my memories of them in light of this new information.

Decades have passed, and after thinking I had tried everything, I had long surrendered to living well for 6 months of the year and hibernating for the other half. Finally, something happened that gave me hope & I intend to pass that hope onto you, and anyone else who needs it.

"Studies have shown that as sunlight lessens, so to do our levels of serotonin, yet Denmark – a small sub-arctic country where the sun often sets before 4pm – is one of the world’s top three happiest countries. So could the arcane concept be a contributing factor to the country’s happiness?

'Hygge is definitely important in fighting the winter blues. Candlelight is such an integral part. The winters can be long and dark so to fight that we use hygge and millions and millions of candles that go with that atmosphere. It helps to brighten things up and make the most of those dark nights,'” says Lind Gustavussen. ~ Quote Source

When I found out that the happiest people in the world have a name for what keeps them sane through long, cold, dark winters & that I could learn all about it, I felt hope that it might work for me. Maybe I could hygge winter & not lose six months of my life anymore.

It is a perfect match for the kind of experience I want to have in life anyway! But until I connected it to my own winter experience, I didn't understand how it could help.

Now that I do, I want to devote a month to sharing it with you during the January edition of The Ultimate Blog Challenge. Waving enthusiastically at my UBC blog buddies. :)

You can also read more about using hygge to conquer winter blues it in my new book, The Happy Winter Guide.

See you tomorrow!

Love, Jeanine

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