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Meditation for SAD
Meditation helps people with Seasonal Affective Disorder syndrome by rebalancing the body’s system, helping us to regain normalise circadian rhythms and enjoy a reduction in stress and negative moods. Meditation students find that the practice helps to rebalance the body’s hormone production and lead to increases in melatonin.
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The problem
Seasonal Affective Disorder – or SAD – is a debilitating seasonal depression that sufferers come to dread as summer fades and the nights draw in.
‘Affective’ is the psychiatric term for our emotional responses, and these get hijacked over the winter months by the lack of light hitting our retina. It prevents the cascade of neurotransmitters that otherwise keep us in a balanced and engaged mood.
Depression is the outcome – a biological phenomenon that can be as overwhelming as a major injury or disease.
This condition appears to be independent of both external events and internal strength. It is simply symptomatic of an imbalanced biological clock that responds inappropriately whenever light levels are low.
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How it affects you
Within the eye, are a class of retinal cells that respond to light intensity by sending signals directly to the limbic system, home to much of our emotional content in the brain. Without these signals, the emotional content of the limbic system is allowed to run amok.
This is greatly aggravated by stress, which makes us more sensitive to feelings of fear and anxiety, decreases our energy levels, inhibits our cognitive function and produces masses of steroid hormones which inhibit the functionality of serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline.
The ‘fight or flight’ branch of our nervous system also filters our thoughts through the lens of despair and on all levels our ability to engage normally becomes compromised.
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How can Beeja help?
If we can increase our resistance to stress in the run-up to winter, and then through it, we will go a long way to limiting SAD.
Beeja meditation offsets the aggravating effects of stress by not only calming down the amygdala, the cause of our stress response, but by also bringing balance to the nervous system and activating the vagus nerve.
The result is a more natural level of parasympathetic tone in our central nervous system that prevents our thoughts from becoming irrationally negative.
We also avoid the rush of steroid hormones that otherwise disrupt our hormonal balance.
Meditation awakens the memory of our natural production of hormones and neurotransmitters, and works deeply to reset every system in the mind and body, so that every element is operating at its best.
We increase the amount of melatonin which can fall during SAD and is why we tend to feel very tired.
When we meditate, our optic nerve becomes much stronger, and our retinal cells become much more sensitive, meaning we are likely to squeeze more neurochemical juice out of the available light signals.
Best of all, we create our own internal sunshine, so have less need for external input.
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Upcoming courses
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Reviews
“Beeja meditation has changed my life. It has given me a wonderfully positive outlook on everything. I have become even more obsessed with nature. I now pick and choose my battles (if any!), am more calm and I need less sleep”
Find out how Beeja can help to treat SAD
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“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus, The Stranger
"..I managed to switch off for long enough to get that floaty feeling people from Brighton swear by."
"I have a lifelong tool that has brought me calm, clarity and increased creativity"
"I've noticed that I’m no longer ruled by emotions – I can see when I’m angry or frustrated without being in that feeling.”
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