Dunedin winters are harsh on bills, the body and the brain. The days shorten, showers lengthen, limbs stiffen, and – in the worst cases – eyes deaden. For freshers cosied up in residential halls, it’s not so bad with free heating and regular hot meals. The bitter bite of winter you most experience is in the rush between lecture theatres. But then: second-year hits, and so do the winter blues.
Winter blues describes the low mood that numbs the student population in the colder months. Critic Te Ārohi spoke to students Alex*, Charlotte, and Jordan about their personal experiences with the winter blues and how student life contributes to it, the difference between Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and a case of the blues; as well as Student Health’s advice on getting through it (the SparkNotes version: put face in sun).
Charlotte
Charlotte is a postgrad student from England who has felt what she called “seasonal sadness”. Speaking to Critic in August of last year, she said she’d felt “half of her full self” during winter. Charlotte said, “At the moment, I'm in a really good place. I love my course, I love my flatmates, I love my friends. I’m at a really good part of my life. But I feel like for the past few weeks I've been feeling down for no reason. Like when I wake up I just feel sad. I don’t know. Nothing is triggering my sadness, the only thing I could think of is the fact that it is cold and miserable.”
It was a pattern she’d recognised: “Every year I kind of hope, ‘Oh, maybe this one I won’t experience this seasonal sadness.’ But every year I’m proven wrong, and I do. Obviously I’ve moved halfway across the world and I thought it might be different, but winter is winter.”
And winter in Dunedin is another beast entirely, it seems. Charlotte reflected on the warnings she’d been given prior to moving to Dunedin – warnings she’d dismissed. “I was like, ‘I’m English. I can deal with that. It’s fine. I know what cold is like.’ But in Dunedin it seems like people do not believe in insulation or radiators, so there is no escape from the cold. So I just lie in bed with my electric blanket on. I’m like tied to it and I can’t get out of bed because I’m fucking freezing.”
Flatting on Hyde Street at the time, Charlotte described one instance where she’d been annoyed to come home to find her flatmates had left the front door wide open, only to discover that, if anything, the inside of her flat was colder than outside. The cold, combined with the fact that her room got “like no light at all”, meant that she’d found it difficult to make the five minute walk to campus some days. Even her succulent plant died because of the lack of sunlight. “And also because I probably overwatered it,” she sheepishly admitted.
Alex
Winter used to be Alex’s favourite season. That was before she moved from her home in Taranaki (crowned the sunniest region in New Zealand in 2022) to study at Otago Uni, where she lived in North Dunedin for six years. “I used to think winter was my favourite season, which seems silly now looking back at it,” Alex laughs.
Alex puts her change in attitude mainly down to the lifestyle of student flats. “I kind of realised that at home you have like winter perks of having a fire to snuggle up to, you get the hearty meals – you’re warm the moment you’re inside. And so it’s, like, snuggly. You get all those nice things […] but then in Dunedin, all of that’s kind of taken away. When you come home, it’s not warm. It’s cold until the hour of power hits at 9pm when you get to snuggle up to a 30 degree full blast heat pump that just kills your skin. And you’ve had green curry for the fourth time that week, and there are no pets.”
The hour of power rule that so many of us abide by is one that Alex has come to dislike. “I hated it. I think there’s no worth in having a heat pump on at 9pm at 30 degrees at full blast for an hour. You’re basically turning [the flat] from freezing cold and uninhabitable, to super hot and dry and uninhabitable. Some people love that blast of dry air, but I just think it’s awful. I actually couldn’t be in the room when it was on.”
In Alex’s view, if you feel like you do suffer from a case of the winter blues, “it’s worth investing those few extra dollars – especially when you disperse it amongst your flatmates – to actually have a warm environment. Like, even if it’s just warm enough that it’s manageable when you’ve got a hoodie on, you know, rather than having to walk around in a puffer jacket.”
Having left Dunedin, Alex muses that flats now might have a little more heat retention than when she was studying here because “technically they aren’t supposed to be draughty anymore […] but that could just be wishful thinking.” She’s referencing the Healthy Homes Standards that came into effect in 2022 with baseline requirements for heating, insulation, ventilation, moisture and drainage, and draught stopping in rentals. Basically, your landlord has to ensure your flat is liveable. However, considering reports that only 58% of homes passed compliance checks between May 2022 and 2023, Alex might be dreaming after all.
As with most other negative aspects of student life, the winter blues are “generally accepted in Dunedin,” says Alex. “It’s seen as part of the student experience, you know, like the [poor state of] flats are accepted [...] It’s [considered] a completely normal process. It kind of sucks.”
The winter blues or SAD?
If you’re feeling down in the frigid trenches of North D, more often than not it’ll simply be a case of the winter blues. However, it’s important to distinguish between the winter blues and Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression associated with changing seasons.
Jordan (they/them), a third-year student at Otago, was diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder in their final year of high school. After successive healthcare referrals – bouncing from a school counsellor, to a doctor, and finally to a psychiatrist – Jordan was told, “This is more than winter blues.” They describe SAD as a weight that settles on top of pre-existing mental health conditions and circumstances: “It is just its own separate thing that makes life that little 10% harder.”
A common misconception about SAD – and depression in general – according to Jordan is that it’s about sadness (which the acronym only reinforces). “It’s not feeling sad,” says Jordan. “It’s about not wanting to feel sad. So when you shut down one emotion, you’re shutting down every emotion – and that’s what depression is and that’s similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder. Rather than, ‘Oh, I’m sad ‘cause it’s cold,’ you just don’t feel anything. It’s a very numbing kind of thing.”
However, Jordan can find humour in the irony of the acronym. “I just think that it’s hilarious that it’s called SAD. They nailed it with that one,” laughs Jordan. They compare it to ACHOO, a syndrome characterised by uncontrollable sneezing when exposed to sudden sunlight. Jordan says, “I think that’s just fun, and even thinking about that will make you feel better.”
Scientists have been unable to pinpoint the exact cause of SAD. However, all signs point to a lack of sunlight as being the biggest culprit – making Dunedin the perfect environment for the disorder to flourish. On the shortest day of the year, Dunedin sees an entire hour less sunlight than Auckland. Students likely receive even less sunlight, and not only due to nocturnal habits. North Dunedin – the heart of Studentville – sits in a shadowed bowl, surrounded on either side by Mt Cargill, Signal Hill, and Māori Hill. This, coupled with the general greyness of Dunedin winters, doesn’t make things easier for those with SAD. Jordan explains, “The sun is so important to me ‘cause waking up is hard enough a lot of the time. When you just see grey, it does take a toll on you. So the few days in winter or even autumn when you can see the sun, you immediately feel a lot better.”
Winter blues will often be rooted in the poor flat conditions of the average student. But for Jordan, who has lived in Dunedin their entire life both at home and in a student flat, it makes little difference. “No matter the quality of housing, that doesn’t really have an effect. I’ve lived in warm houses, I’ve lived in cold houses. It’s still all the same kind of thing.” However, Jordan can see how it would be a shock to the system moving here. “I do think Dunedin is kind of like a culture shock when it comes to weather and just general location. Everything here is very grey in terms of colouring as well. All the buildings are very old and nothing’s really that bright [...] and it’s quite small but isolated at the same time. It’s kind of a weird city,” says Jordan.
Not only is the environment different, but the academic pressures of university puts an additional burden on students’ shoulders, with Jordan pointing out that they didn’t notice winter blues to be as much of an issue during high school. “In terms of Dunedin and student culture, there is a tendency to trap yourself inside because there’s pressure of studies and all these other kinds of things,” says Jordan. They explain that the cold will make students feel even more inclined to “hibernate”, creating a vicious cycle of isolation from things that’ll help – such as putting your face in the sun.
Student Health’s Two Cents
Student Health sees an “ebb and flow” of student traffic, the busyness matching the rhythm of the academic year, according to mental health nurse Phil Newman. Outside of the obvious peak in students going to Student Health during the annual post-O-Week fresher flu epidemic, Student Health’s upstairs Mental Health and Wellbeing Clinic are no strangers to cases of the winter blues. Phil says the clinic becomes a lot busier as winter begins, tending to see a “lot more miserable, unmotivated students.”
Phil’s professional background is in adult mental health. He finds working with students in his current role refreshing, explaining that young people are more willing to talk openly about mental health. “[Students] are people who actually want to work with you, listen to what you’re saying and go away and try things,” says Phil.
But while Phil appreciates the comparative openness of students to talk about mental health compared to adult clients who are often forced into counselling, he says that there’s also a downside. Both Phil and his professional peers have noticed a growing tendency for “normal experiences” to be pathologized, where a preference for tidiness is OCD, energeticness is ADHD, and the winter blues is SAD. “So they'll have something bad happening in their life and they'll talk about being depressed, but actually they're not necessarily depressed. They're just miserable because something shit's happened in their life,” says Phil.
In winter, the shit thing that’s happening in students’ lives is just that: winter. “[Winter is] a time when naturally we are programmed to hibernate, so it’s always going to be a struggle for us. It’s a time when we’re supposed to be just curled up in a cave under our fur blankets with the fire going, not going out much [...] That’s why we want to eat more in winter and why we just want to hide in bed all the time, but we can’t do it,” Phil says. As tough as it is, the unfortunate reality is that we still have to get on with our lives despite having those urges. This is especially true for students, whose end of semester exams coincide neatly with the beginning of winter.
Phil says that Student Health will not necessarily diagnose SAD specifically since they’ll “see a lot more students at this time of year that feel pretty down [...] They just feel more bogged down. The weather’s crap, there’s just less energy, less motivation to do things, and they maybe get into a downward spiral.” Speaking to the experiences Charlotte and Alex described of student living situations, Phil says, “It’s notorious in Dunedin that most of the flats are pretty crap. You’re living in a cold, wet flat in the winter, there’s mould on the windows, you can’t get warm; it’s gonna make you feel pretty shit […] It definitely is an issue, but realistically we can’t change the weather. It’s something you have to kind of learn to live with.”
What can you do?
We can’t change the weather, nor the sun’s orbit. While the battle against the cost of living crisis and Dunedin’s poor standards of housing continues to wage, what can you do if you’ve found yourself with a case of the blues this winter?
Phil tells Critic Te Ārohi, “When we’re talking about [SAD], it is not really too dissimilar to depression – it’s just that it’s depression that’s triggered by a particular time of year.” In terms of how to combat it, then, he recommends thinking about common ways to alleviate low mood: “Those basic building blocks.” Things we all know we should be doing, but can find it harder to dredge up the motivation for. “When it’s cold, wet and damp, you might not want to go to your gym class, you might not want to go to your class, you might not want to go hang out with your mates because they live down the road and you’ve got to go out in the rain to do it [...] But those things are really important because you’re connecting with other people, which helps to keep your mood in a good place.”
Popping (vitamin D) pills
Seasonally specific, vitamin D supplements (AKA the “sunshine pill”) can be a big help. Student Health doctors will regularly prescribe vitamin D for someone presenting with depression, according to Phil: “If they start on antidepressants, they’ll also start on a vitamin D supplement.” The prescription stuff is a bit stronger, taken monthly, but a daily version of vitamin D is available at most supermarkets and pharmacies as well. “So in addition to the usual stuff you do for depression, that probably for a student is the most cost effective additional thing you can do,” says Phil.
Both Alex and Charlotte vouch for the benefits of vitamin D supplements. Alex was on the prescription stuff for a bit, and found herself surprised at how much it helped: “It’s weird, ‘cause I don’t trust vitamins. But just generally, the next day I would feel happier. It’s hard to explain it in any other way, but just a little more vibrant.”
Charlotte agreed. She said she picked up a bottle in New World a few days before speaking to Critic, recalling what a classmate had said about the importance of taking vitamin D – especially in Dunedin given the diminished sunlight hours. “I was like, ‘$13 for happiness sounds okay,’ so [I] chucked [it] in the basket. I’m on day two of vitamin D supplements and, to be fair, I am actually feeling better,” she laughed. “It’s definitely nothing to do with vitamin D, I don't think. I feel like that’s too soon. But it’s a promising start.”
Become a sunflower
Since the underlying cause of SAD is lack of daylight hours, those who are diagnosed with SAD are recommended to invest in what is called a lightbox. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: a light-emitting box you sit in front of for maybe half an hour a day to make up for the lack of sunlight. But they’re like $400 and, as Phil pointed out, that’s “not necessarily as much of an option for students on a tight budget.” Jordan isn’t a fan, either, explaining, “No, it’s not nice. I don’t think it would ever be a replacement for the sun, ‘cause the sun is about warmth and colour as well. It’s not just light.”
On the rare occasion that the winter sun shows its face, everyone Critic spoke to recommends making the most of it. “That’s kind of the budget version of a lightbox,” says Phil. Jordan’s therapist advised them to wake up at sunrise, letting their day be structured around absorbing as much sunlight as possible – like a sunflower. Alex seconds this, saying, “If it’s sunny, definitely go outside.” Perhaps that’s why all of your friends in Europe look so happy, with smiles and sun-kissed faces. And maybe you should block them. That’s what Charlotte did, anyway: “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be seeing that.’”
Seek Support
Beyond Student Health, there’s plenty of support available on campus for everything winter throws at you. OUSA Student Support is also well aware of the trials and tribulations of the winter blues, telling Critic: “In everything we do we are conscious of student wellbeing and offer wellbeing support and advocacy for students. Particularly at this time of year we are mindful it could be present for any student we are working with.”
Jordan encourages anyone who relates to their experiences to look into it. While Phil says there’s a tendency for young people to pathologize common experiences – which the winter blues inescapably seems to be in Dunedin – Jordan says, “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to inquire about it.” They explain that those with mental health disorders will often second-guess themselves. “There is no harm in thinking like, ‘Oh, I might have this thing.’’ There’s probably a reason why you thought you have this thing, and that’s something to try and solve. So I don’t really see that big of an issue with it necessarily.”
Planning ahead
Thinking ahead, long-term, Phil advises students to plan ahead for next winter in your flat if you can. “We know winter happens. It’s a predictable thing, you know it’s going to occur at a certain time every year, so pre-planning is probably a good thing.”
A warm, healthy home makes a world of a difference, but it can also be a sticky subject because of the price tag attached. Phil's advice is, rather than having that discussion when the big power bills begin to roll in (and speculating who’s to blame), have a flat chat as soon as your flatting group is locked in. He points out this is preferable to trying to hash it out “when everyone is feeling a bit shitty and miserable and getting stressed about other things in their life as well.” No one wants to be spoiling friendships over using the dryer or enjoying a long shower.
As for prepping for winter in general, Phil’s advice is to ask yourself this: “What am I going to do to keep myself going through this if I notice my mood drops a bit in winter? How am I going to manage that? Who am I going to talk to? What friends can support me through this?” Or rob a bank, abandon ship and escape to Europe. As a treat.
*Name changed.