A trip to one of the world’s northernmost cities brings some surprising findings for health psychologist Dr Kari Leibowitz in this prelude from her book, How to Winter

My Journey to the Land of Winter

Located more than two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, Tromsø, Norway, is home to an extreme and special winter, when the world often appears blue-tinted, snow cloaks the city in quiet, and the northern lights dance in the sky. During the Polar Night, which lasts from late November to late January, the sun doesn’t rise at all. At this time of year, Tromsø gets, at most, about six hours of diffuse twilight light each day as the sun skirts below the horizon. On the shortest day of the year, full darkness lasts for almost nineteen hours: the light at four p.m. looks no different than the light at two a.m.

It was the Polar Night that drew me to Tromsø in the first place. In 2013, I was a recent college graduate looking for research experience before applying to PhD programs in psychology. In search of an opportunity to explore my interests in positive psychology and mental health – and to satisfy my sense of adventure – I was drawn to the work of Joar Vittersø. Joar, a professor of psychology at the University of Tromsø, is one of the world’s leading experts on human happiness. His research distinguishes between hedonic well-being, things that feel pleasurable and enjoyable, and eudaimonic well-being, things in life that give us meaning and purpose. Joar has studied life satisfaction and personal growth, researching what it means to live a fulfilling life.

Fascinated by his work and with daydreams of fjord adventures, I contacted Joar to ask if he might collaborate with me on a study and mentor me should I be awarded funding. Joar generously agreed and mentioned, somewhat offhandedly, that his university, also known as The Arctic University of Norway, is the northernmost in the world. Tromsø is so far north that it’s home to many of the world’s northernmosts: the northernmost botanical garden, the northernmost outdoor swimming pool, the northernmost mosque, the northernmost traffic light, the northernmost aquarium, and the northernmost Burger King and 7- Eleven, to name just a few.

I also learned about Tromsø’s extreme winter and the Polar Night. It struck me as interesting that Joar, one of the world’s foremost scholars of well-being, lives in a place where the sun doesn’t rise for two months each year. I suggested that Joar and I study seasonal variation in well-being to understand how Tromsø’s winter affects people’s mental health – negatively, I presumed. Joar responded by saying something along the lines of: “You could certainly try that, but research hasn’t found much difference in mental well-being between seasons in Tromsø.”

As an American I assumed that Tromsø’s long, dark winters would be harmful to mental health. Growing up on the Jersey Shore, I was steeped in a culture that believed – that knew – that summer was unequivocally the best season. So much of what makes my hometown special – going to the beach, getting ice cream on the boardwalk, attending outdoor concerts– are things we did only in summer. Winter was the season of limitations: the time of year we were stuck inside, when I shivered in my jeans, when going to school required defrosting my windshield, and when the liveliest hangouts were abandoned until Memorial Day. I went to university in Atlanta, Georgia, partly to escape northeastern US winters.

In fact, I assumed that rates of seasonal affective disorder, or wintertime depression, would be high in Tromsø. Seasonal affective disorder is a pattern of clinical depression that manifests seasonally, most often in winter. Because light therapy is an effective treatment for the disorder, psychologists reverse engineered a theory: the cause of wintertime depression must be the lack of daylight in winter. The “latitude hypothesis” of seasonal affective disorder states that as latitude increases and wintertime daylight correspondingly decreases, rates of seasonal affective disorder should rise. Based on this, it would be reasonable to assume that people living through Tromsø’s two-month Polar Night– and six- to-eight-month winter – must suffer from high rates of wintertime depression.

But the research I found supported Joar’s claim and calls the latitude hypothesis of seasonal affective disorder into question.

Despite the city’s high latitude and winter darkness, research has shown that residents of Tromsø have surprisingly low rates of seasonal depression. This doesn’t mean that they don’t experience winter depression in Tromsø; they just don’t experience it at the rates we would expect considering how extreme their winters are. One analysis of almost nine thousand residents of Tromsø found no meaningful seasonal variation in mental distress – meaning that people in Tromsø didn’t seem to be more tense, depressed, or hopeless in winter than during the rest of the year. The authors of this study concluded that the negative impact of winter on mental health is more of a popular myth than a scientific fact…  The research suggests that residents of northern Norway don’t experience much of the wintertime suffering experienced elsewhere –including, paradoxically, in warmer, brighter, more southern locations.

After speaking with Joar and looking at the research, I realized my study should focus not on winter depression but the lack thereof. I wanted to know: How do the residents of northern Norway protect themselves from wintertime woes? Why aren’t they more depressed during such intense winters? And could I identify strategies that people use to cope with winter in Tromsø that might be applicable elsewhere, to the same beneficial effects?

This is an extract from How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive in Difficult Times (Bluebird £9.99) by Kari Leibowitz. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy from Blackwell’s here.

Join health psychologist Dr Kari Leibowitz  on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday, 15 January at 6pm, when she’ll be revealing her secrets to finding joy in the darker months. Book here.
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