Controversial Take: Embracing Winter Blues is Healthy As Long As You Don’t Fall into Deep State of Depression

Winter blues is a term described when having mild feeling of sadness or low energy during colder, darker months.

It’s a combination of low energy, a lack of interest in activities, being reclusive, and feeling sad most of the time. 

We all experience it during the winter season, and despite numerous solutions offered to overcome the winter blues, sometimes, but not always, it’s better to embrace sadness, even for a short while.

 

Before getting offended or claiming that this article encourages mental health neglect and romanticises depression, that’s not what the article’s goal is. 

But instead of dismissing those feelings with false and toxic positivity, maybe it’s time to allow ourselves to be sad.

 

Ignoring those negative feelings, sad thoughts, and reclusive tendencies will only lead to more unpredictable outbursts, unregulated behaviour, and become more regressed instead of progressed.

 

We should allow ourselves to express thoughts and emotions that make us uncomfortable and question our ideas, behaviours and past mistakes. Bottling every thought or dismissing depressive episodes are not the right answer to living a healthy life, for each wound and scar we have, the road to its treatment is tough, tedious, and takes a long time to achieve. 

 

We know that progress isn’t linear, in work, relationships, body weight, etc, so why do we allow that logic to work in all these aspects but not when it comes to mental health? Seems a bit hypocritical thing for us to do, doesn’t it?

 

Embracing winter blues isn’t about giving up on life or becoming depressed, it’s about letting out all those feelings of frustrations, allowing our exhausted bodies to rest instead of pushing our boundries and forcing ourselves to do things while we are zero energy left in us, it’s about recapping and analyzing those bad situations that has happened to us and pinpoint the moments when things we went wrong and preventing them from every happening again. 

It’s about listening to those sad songs over and over again, crying our eyes out and screaming at the top of our lungs to release ourselves from any pain or hurt.

 

It’s about processing, acting up when we were tied up at the moment, to vent, scream, shout, curse into the void to let peace come inside. 

 

Because in the end, it will be worth it. It will be the moment when the calm after the storm has arrived, and our minds will be clear.

We can finally rest, we can let a sigh of relief, knowing that whatever comes next, we are prepared, we have no grudges or pet peeves left, only clarity and determination.