Suppose you could reset the inner clocks that run your life--programming yourself, for example, to wake up fresh and alert at 5:30 a.m. if you had to make a crucial breakfast meeting, or shutting off the hunger that drives you to scarf a bag of tortilla chips every afternoon.
If the prospect of controlling your body's chronometers seems a pleasing luxury, consider the case of Jason K., a New Jersey attorney. Jason suffers from a debilitating malfunction of his biological clock called seasonal affective disorder, or sad. It may seem a remote or even a fanciful ailment,especially during the summer, when its effects ebb, but it can throw the entire year, not to mention a whole life, into terrible turmoil.
"It came up on me gradually, over time," Jason says. As the days got darker and darker going into fall and then winter, "My mood got darker. By winter I'd feel an overall sluggishness that made the work difficult; it took dramatically more effort to get anything done. Sleep wasn't restful; I found myself waking up 15 times every night just to see what time it was. And I developed an excessive craving for sweets."
Jason's experience is not uncommon. In a recent New York City survey, more than one-third of responding adults reported at least mild winter malaise; 6 out of 100 reported severe depression. Michael Terman, a clinical psychologist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center's New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City, and a leading SAD researcher, notes that the degree of suffering goes well beyond typical holiday blues.
"When it hits," Terman says, "it's not just a matter of mood. It can be truly disabling for five months of the year, and it can cause an active social withdrawal--mothers who can't mother, a loss of interest in work, a total loss of libido." Although the pall usually lifts during the spring, he says, SAD can throw life permanently off course: "It's no small thing if you can't maintain a nine-to-five work schedule in winter." Some SAD sufferers, he says, simply gravitate toward a lifestyle that accommodates the disease. "They tend to drift into work subcultures. They become freelancers, theater people, perennial graduate students--and many end up feeling their early goals in life are unachievable." [See "Are You SAD?" below.]
