Is there really a ‘January brain’?

Zone out at your computer screen as you try to tackle the mountain of e-mails that have piled up since the Christmas break. Keep searching in the depths of your mind for the right word but you will never find it. Maybe even put things in the fridge that are definitely not there.

Welcome to the claws of January, when there is precisely no one, not even the kind of rise-and-grind hustlers who volunteer to listen to the CEO diary podcast, like being on their A game. When we get back to work after that weird, glorious post-Christmas hinterland, many of us struggle to adjust. Our brains may feel foggy, our motivation lacking, and we’ll likely struggle to match our usual productivity.

Let’s call that heavy feeling “January brain”: a general feeling of mental laziness, as if we’re operating on a slight time lag or moving slowly. These feelings are not necessarily limited to us 9 to 5 kids either. The other day I was really struggling to process the logic of a competitor (admittedly a lot). The Traitors and they had to rewind his explanation about three times to work out what he was doing. And socializing? It’s hardly worth thinking about when you feel like putting together a coherent sentence would be hard work.

All of this, of course, comes at a time when we’re meant to be breaking out of our festive cocoons to become the best, healthiest versions of ourselves – and disconnect from what we are. wanting to achieve and what we are currently able to manage can be overwhelming. It’s no wonder that one in five people break their new year’s resolutions after less than a month, according to recent research by Councilor Forbes. But why exactly do so many of us feel so dull and stagnant at this time of year?

It has long been accepted that animals adapt to the seasons: they might migrate during the winter, or change the color of their fur. Some mammals even undergo changes in the brain. “When animals like squirrels are isolated, some of their brains get Alzheimer’s-like pathology in them during winter,” says Professor Tara Spires-Jones, deputy director of the Center for Brain Sciences Discovery at the University Edinburgh and president of the British Neurological Association. . “But that goes away when they wake up.” And to conserve energy when it’s cold, the brains of the blind shrink, which makes them worse at navigation. (You could say they’re not as quick in the winter…can I blame “January brain” for dad jokes, too?)

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The impact of the seasons on the power of the human brain is not yet being explored as extensively but there are a handful of studies that have researched this phenomenon. In 2016, researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium assessed the brain function of 28 participants over the course of a year. Each of the volunteers would spend four and a half days inside a laboratory, at the end of which they would take part in two tasks designed to test a range of attention and memory. Their brains were scanned with an fMRI machine, to detect changes in blood flow caused by brain activity.

The researchers eventually found that attention-related activity peaked in June, around the summer solstice, and was lowest near the winter solstice in late December. So basically, our brain works differently depending on this time of year. In particular, they found “significant annual variations” in the thalamus and amygdala, the parts of the brain associated with alertness, and in the hippocampus and frontal areas. These two help with self-control, problem-solving and reasoning. Basically, you pretended to be good at a job interview. Meanwhile, memory-related peak activity occurred in autumn and fell around the spring meridian in late March.

What is interesting is that the test scores did not vary much during the year. The result was similar but the process of getting there was different. “Because of the capacity at [our] the disposition to complete cognitive processes is lower in winter, it may be more difficult to complete them,” said co-author of the study, Dr. Gilles Vandewall The Daily Telegraph. So maybe just like harder to do things in January but we are doing ok? These variations, Vandewall also suggested, could be a throwback to a time long before electric light and central heating – when we were much more in tune with the seasons.

You do not need to comb through academic studies, however, to agree that the mornings are dull and gloomy at the moment: open your curtains at, say, 7.30am and you will still be greeted by almost darkness. Light (or the lack of it) can affect our brains and our well-being. “Every cell in your body has a molecular clock,” says Professor Spiers-Jones. “The master controller of these clocks is 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 wake up. “And that controls things like sleep and wakefulness, activity, feeding and reproduction”, says Spiers-Jones. If you don’t get enough light, then, all of this can throw off the treatment, affecting our moods and sleep schedules.

Professor Zoltan Sarnyai

Those dark mornings are hard to turn off: in fact, they might even set the tone for the rest of the day. “Waking up is the most stressful part of the whole day,” explains Dr James Jackson, reader in psychology at Leeds Trinity University. “You release stress hormones and sugar goes into the blood, which gives you energy. What’s released at that time, maybe 30, 40 minutes after you wake up, basically determines how much energy you have to deal with things for the rest of the day.” But if we are getting up when the field is black out, we are not motivated. “We don’t have the same reactions and we don’t see the same resources – it’s hard to move forward.” I’ve always known that starting my day lying in bed in near-darkness scrolling through Instagram (usually looking at effortlessly radiant women showing off their morning routines) wasn’t the healthiest. But I never connected the dots to connect it to my later lethargy.

Light also affects our hormones. “Exposure to sunlight is known to stimulate 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 improved mood.” He notes that less exposure to sunlight may lower serotonin levels, “which can affect mood and contribute to depressive symptoms” (it may also play a role in seasonal affective disorder). At the same time, “longer periods of darkness in winter can increase the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep,” says Ivo Vlaev, professor of behavioral science at the University of Warwick. Hence the feelings of inertia.

Professor Ivo Vlaev

Beyond these factors, however, “we are also controlled by social cues – meal times, work schedules”, says Spiers-Jones. So if we spend a week or more wandering around in a cozy festive limbo, “that changes the regulation of these sleep cycles and body clocks. And so that affects not only when we wake up and when we’re active but our activity levels and our mood.” Similarly, “a sudden return to routine”, as well as fewer social gatherings and everyone trying to quit drinking and save money, “it can feel anti-climatic” after Christmas, according to Vlaev, “adding to a sense of laziness”.

It’s also the time of year when we’re inundated with idiosyncratic concepts such as “Blue Monday” (branded as the worst day of the year as a marketing ploy by Sky Travel to push the winter holidays onto consumers 20 years ago ). Could these messages affect our perceptions of our “January brain”? People can be addicted to misallocation. “When we feel a certain way, we don’t know why, we just guess,” says Dr. Jackson. “It’s about mental shortcuts to seeing the world in a way that usually works.”

Besides recognizing the power of these cultural cues, how can we mitigate the “January brain” situation? The answers are probably all you know, deep down, that will lift you out of a funk. More natural light (to boost those serotonin levels). More exercise, especially outdoors. Vitamin D. regular sleep schedule. Not touching your phone first thing in the morning (sigh). Even making sure you don’t go into complete hermit mode, despite how tempting the couch may look, is a good step (positive social interactions can promote the production of oxytocin, another “feel good” hormone good”). And maybe we just need to show ourselves a little compassion and see the funny side when we put the milk back in the cupboard and the mug back in the fridge for the seventh time this month.