I have this place I go in my mind when I am trying to understand people's struggles today. It is a village, or perhaps a tribe, several hundred years ago before electricity. Before large scale farming. During a time of hunting and simple cultivation of the land. And I wonder how would this issue, the specific problem I am contending with, manifest and be managed in that place?
Often, the answer is that the issue wouldn't have happened in that village long ago. Not that there weren't troubles in extended family groups of the past. Of course, there were lots of problems. Many difficulties, which were solved through agriculture, industry, medicine, and technology. So, I'm not suggesting going back to some idealized notion of the past, but simply saying that I use this imaginary crucible of a tribal unit to work through contemporary conundrums in my head. I also think about animals in the wild--rabbits and gazelles, monkeys, wolves, and lions.
One such conundrum is seasonal affective disorder. The phenomenon that occurs each winter where people get depressed, fatigued, and amotivated. When did this start? Do animals struggle with this? What was this issue like in my imaginary village?
And this is where I have arrived with my musings. I think seasonal affective disorder (SAD) began with electricity. My parents, who grew up in a little village on an island, off an island, off the island of Sri Lanka, were children before the introduction of electricity to their village. They tell stories of reading by candlelight, their eyes getting tired, and falling asleep quickly. Pre-electricity, families slept all in one room to keep from getting cold and make it easier for parents to keep an eye on children at night. My husband, who grew up in Russia and spent school breaks with his uncle's family in a rural village, recalls everyone sleeping in the main room around, and in shelves built above, a roaring fire in the hearth.
For these two reasons, a lack of reliable bright light and a lack of heating, I feel quite certain that people simply went to sleep once it got dark. Not only that, but to keep warm, they probably went to sleep all in the same room, probably close together. Even the simple act of staying up to read by candlelight meant either keeping other people awake or shivering alone in a separate room.
We associate hibernation with bears, but when I think of mammals in general, many of them tend to sleep all together in a pile with their pack and many animals function in a sort of hibernation-lite during the winter. Sleeping much, if not all, of the time. Sleeping is also a good way to conserve heat and energy when it is cold.
So here is my conclusion, we struggle with seasonal affective disorder these days because we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we can keep a summer schedule in the winter. Through electricity, centralized heating, and electric lighting; we can flip a switch, program a temperature setting, jump in a car and continue on according to the reading of a clock as opposed to the natural rhythms of the Earth and our bodies.
It is this behavior and pressure to perform out of sync with the seasons, which causes winter depression. Which isn't depression really, but extreme fatigue because we are supposed to be in a sort of semi-hibernation during the cold, dark months of the year. I think that we actually need much, much more sleep in the winter than the summer. And the vast majority of us aren't getting it.
So this season, when you flip on the lights and start to put your makeup on for another holiday party or pick up your phone to scroll through your Instagram feed long after the sun has already gone to bed, ask yourself what would my village and cavepeople ancestors be doing right now?
I think they would be going to sleep.