From Sleep to Hibernation

Mid-November has been the worst time of the year for me, I think. When October comes around I can feel the change in seasons but when November arrives I'll wake up one morning and feel completely disconnected; it's like I ought to be hibernating in a cave somewhere.

Last week was pretty bad: tired, unmotivated, irregular sleep, diminished appetite, trouble focusing. Pretty much textbook depression. I need to get back to work on my paper. I wonder if I can use myself as a primary source?

This is a research paper I'm doing on hibernation in mammals and how it relates to seasonal affective disorder in humans. Essentially my premise is that depression is the body's physiological mechanism for decreasing energy requirements in response to environmental cues; a kind of "fight-or-flight" response that helps an animal conserve food and water when they may be scarce (or it thinks they will be scarce).

Circannual patterns like the length of day, the environmental temperature, and the availability of water seem to be important factors in influencing sleep (torpor and hibernation being "evolutionary" extensions of regular sleep) and metabolic functions. Anyway this is still all just an academic theory that I need to finish researching and put on paper. Outside of the specific topic of seasonal affective disorder there may be difficulty applying such hypothesis. The exact mechanisms that trigger other instances of clinical depression are pretty much a matter of conjecture since individual cases respond differently to varying treatments or combinations of treatment (psychotherapy being a more-or-less non-pharmacological form of care).

So hopefully this coming week will be better than last...