Books : The Hibernation Response
Bears hibernate; insects do it — and so do we. As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, the natural human response is to withdraw by sleeping longer, gaining weight, and slowing down all mental and physical activity. For some of us the cold brings depression, irritability, and intense craving for carbohydrates, chronic fatigue, and a loss of interest in work and sex.
The Hibernation Response is a book about how our minds and bodies adapt, and sometimes don’t, to the changing seasons. It grew out my experience of running a small farm with my family in rural New England, when I was teaching at Dartmouth College. We learned how to increase our egg supply in winter by keeping the chicken house lights on with the aid of a timer, creating eternal springtime. We watch the coats of the cows and horses fall out in the spring and grow back thickly in the fall. And the newborn lambs always appeared in March and April. I noted, too, the folklore of the place: the winter blahs; the cabin fever; the New England soul in winter. It was on this latter topic that one spring I was asked to speak to the Dartmouth alumni, together with a professor of English. I provided the physiology, he the poetry and it worked well. In the audience was the editor of Yankee Magazine. He asked me to write a small piece for him on adapting to winter, and “Where There Is Mud There Is Momentum” appeared the following spring. To my surprise there was considerable public interest and subsequently I undertook a two-year study in a New England population of normal behavior through the seasons. It was that study, plus a year spent at the National Institutes of Health, which was the immediate stimulus to writing The Hibernation Response.
Everyone living in a cold, dark climate suffers from the hibernation response to some degree, and at least one quarter of the population is afflicted with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), an acute form of winter depression first described by Norman Rosenthal and others at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1980. The Hibernation Response, which was written in collaboration with the science writer Robert Bahr, explains the reasons for our changing behavior in a seasonal climate. It offers specific advice on how to combat the downturn in mood, decreased energy and a desire to sleep that is characteristic of winter depression. Various chapters describe how to keep weight down during the winter months, build a stronger tolerance for cold, and how to design an eternal spring room in the home to ensure a sunny environment, even in the dead of winter. And, perhaps most important of all, we offer advice on how to plan a winter vacation and to time it to one’s best advantage.
Published in 1988, the stocks of The Hibernation Response are dwindling. However, it is still available on the web in English and in German.