As you sit in front of your computer screen, you try to tackle the mountain of emails that have piled up since the Christmas holidays. Frantically searching in the depths of your mind for the right word, but never quite finding it. Maybe even put things in the refrigerator that definitely don’t belong there.
Welcome to the doldrums of January, where exactly no one, not even the kind of scammers who volunteer to listen to the Diary of a CEO podcast, seems to be on their A game. As we head back to work after that strange, glorious period after Christmas, many of us are struggling to adjust. Our brains may feel foggy, our motivation may be lacking, and we’ll likely have serious difficulty matching our usual productivity.
Let’s call that confused feeling “January Brain”: a general feeling of mental sluggishness, as if we are working with a slight delay or in slow motion. These feelings aren’t necessarily limited to our 9 to 5s, either. Recently I was really having trouble processing a participant’s (admittedly quite complicated) logic The traitors and had to rewind their explanation about three times to figure out what he was talking about. And socializing? It’s hardly worth thinking about when stringing together a coherent sentence feels like hard labor.
Of course, all of this comes at a time when we’re meant to emerge from our festive cocoons to become the best, healthiest versions of ourselves—and there’s a disconnect between what we want to achieve and what we can actually manage now can be seriously daunting. No wonder one in five people abandon their New Year’s resolutions after less than a month, according to recent research from Forbes Advisor. But why do so many of us feel so sluggish and stagnant this time of year?
It has long been accepted that animals adapt to the seasons: they can migrate during winter or change the color of their fur. Some mammals even undergo changes in the brain. “In animals such as squirrels that hibernate, part of their brain develops Alzheimer’s-like pathology during hibernation,” said Professor Tara Spires-Jones, deputy director of the Center for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the British Neuroscience Association. . “But that goes away when they wake up.” And to save energy when it’s cold, shrews’ brains shrink, making them less able to navigate. (You could say they’re less smart in the winter…can I blame ‘January Brain’ for dad jokes too?)
The impact of the seasons on human brain power hasn’t been studied extensively, but there are a handful of studies that have delved into this phenomenon. In 2016, researchers from the University of Liège in Belgium assessed the year-round brain function of 28 participants. Each of the volunteers spent four and a half days in a laboratory and at the end of that period took part in two tasks designed to test attention span and memory. Their brains were scanned with an fMRI machine to detect changes in blood flow due to brain activity.
The researchers ultimately found that attention-related activity peaked in June, around the summer solstice, and was lowest around the winter solstice in late December. So our brains essentially work differently depending on the time of year. In particular, they found “significant annual variations” in the thalamus and amygdala, the parts of the brain involved in alertness, and in the hippocampus and frontal areas. Both help with self-control, problem solving and reasoning. Basically all the things you pretended you were good at during your job interview. Memory-related activity, meanwhile, peaked in the fall and declined around the spring equinox in late March.
What’s interesting is that test scores didn’t vary much throughout the year. The outcome was similar, but the process to get there was different. “Because the resources are gone [our] The ability to complete cognitive processes is lower in winter, and it may seem more difficult to complete them,” said study co-author Dr. Gilles Vandewall. The Daily Telegraph. So maybe just seems harder to get things done in January, but we’re actually doing okay? These variations, Vandewall also suggested, could be a throwback to a time long before electric light and central heating – when we were much more attuned to the seasons.
However, you don’t have to dig through academic studies to agree that mornings are dull and dreary at the moment: throw open your curtains at 7:30 am, for example, and you’ll still be greeted by near-darkness. Light (or the lack thereof) can affect our brains and our well-being. “Every cell in your body has a molecular clock,” says Professor Spires-Jones. “The master regulator of these clocks is located in the brain and is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.” When it receives information about light through the retina of the eye, it tells the body that it is time to get up. “And that regulates things like sleeping and waking, activity, nutrition and reproduction,” says Spires-Jones. If we don’t get enough light, this can all go haywire, affecting our mood and sleep schedules.
Exposure to sunlight is known to trigger the release of serotonin in the brain
Professor Zoltan Sarnyai
Those dark mornings are especially difficult to shake off: they can even set the tone for the rest of the day. “Waking up is the most stressful and taxing part of the entire day,” explains Dr James Jackson, professor of psychology at Leeds Trinity University. “You release stress hormones and sugar goes into the blood, which gives you strength. The amount excreted at that moment, perhaps 30 to 40 minutes after you wake up, actually determines how much energy you have to deal with things for the rest of the day. But if we get up when it’s pitch dark outside, we miss stimuli. “We don’t have the same responses and we don’t see the same resources – it’s hard to get going.” I always knew that starting the day lying in bed in near darkness scrolling through Instagram (mostly looking at effortlessly radiant women showing off their morning routines) wasn’t the healthiest start. But I never joined the dots to connect it to my lethargy later.
Light also affects our hormones. “Exposure to sunlight is known to trigger the release of serotonin in the brain,” says Professor Zoltan Sarnyai, a Harvard-educated neuroscientist and chief scientist at nutraceuticals company Ally Sciences. “Serotonin is often referred to as the ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter because it contributes to feelings of well-being and a better mood.” Less exposure to sunlight, he notes, could lower serotonin levels, “which in turn may affect mood and contribute to depressive symptoms” (it could also play a role in seasonal affective disorder). At the same time, “the longer periods of darkness in winter can increase the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep,” says Ivo Vlaev, professor of behavioral sciences at the University of Warwick. Hence those feelings of lethargy.
The sudden return to routine can be anticlimactic
Professor Ivo Vlaev
But beyond these factors, “we are also regulated by social cues – meal times, work schedules,” says Spires-Jones. So when we laze in a cozy, festive limbo for a week or more, “it changes the regulation of these sleep-wake cycles and body clocks. And that not only affects when we wake up and are active, but also our activity level and our mood.” Likewise, “the sudden return to routine,” plus fewer social gatherings as everyone tries to stop drinking and save money, “can feel anticlimatic” after Christmas, says Vlaev, “contributing to a sense of sluggishness.”
It’s also a time of year when we’re bombarded with made-up concepts like ‘Blue Monday’ (labeled the most depressing day of the year 20 years ago as a marketing ploy by Sky Travel to foist winter holidays on consumers). Could our perception of our own ‘January brain’ be influenced by these messages? People can be sensitive to misattribution. “If we feel a certain way, we don’t know why, we just guess it,” says Dr. Jackson. “It’s all about mental shortcuts to see the world in a way that works most of the time.”
Beyond recognizing the power of these cultural cues, how can we alleviate a case of “January Brain”? The answers are probably all things that you know deep down will get you out of trouble. More natural light (to boost those serotonin levels). Exercise more, especially outdoors. Vitamin D. A regular sleep schedule. Don’t immediately reach for your phone in the morning (sigh). Even just making sure you don’t slip into hermit mode, no matter how tempting the couch seems, is a good step (positive social interactions can promote the production of oxytocin, another “feel good” hormone). And maybe we should just give ourselves a little compassion and see the funny side as we put the milk back in the cupboard and the mug in the refrigerator for the seventh time this month.