I NEED SUN!

 

            I try my best to not push time forward. You know what I mean? Like doing the “can hardly waits” as in “I can hardly wait for the baby to crawl, or I can hardly wait until Christmas is here or for school to be out or for the winter vacation to be here”; that kind of thing.

As a general rule time flies by too fast anyway and the baby will be crawling before you know it and in no time at all you’re going “how did he/she grow up so darn fast??” However, this time around I cannot help myself from thinking that I can hardly wait until this gloomy October is done! Man, what a miserable month that was, wasn’t it? And, like some people I know around here, I don’t even have eight or nine hundred acres of crop still in the field. Yuck! Talk about gloom ‘n doom.

According to the statistical weather data we received precipitation on 16 of the 31 days in October and I think the other 15 days were all mostly cloudy. Or so it seemed. I was looking into the statistical data to see how many sunshine hours we normally would get in October and my source claims that we average around 171 hours in the month or, percentage wise, it’s 51% of the daylight time. Not 2016’s version, though. Oh no, it was more like 171 minutes, I’d say.

I have heard more than a few people mention how miserable and cranky everyone seems to be lately and I am convinced that it is mostly due to the overall lack of sunshine in the past few weeks. It really is. I’m thinking that humans really need sunshine to operate properly. Or “happily” at any rate.

In fact, I did a little research on the subject and I found that there are several reasons why the lack of sunshine can be detrimental to a human’s well being, both mentally and physically.

If you’re not careful, a lack of sunlight can actually lead to a form of clinical depression. The less sunlight we see in the winter months, the more likely we are to develop Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Symptoms of SAD can be extreme: mood swings, anxiety, sleep problems, or even suicidal thoughts. I’m thinking that some people are just experiencing an earlier version of SAD because of the recent lack o’ sunshine.

90% of humans’ Vitamin D comes from direct sunlight but everyone knows that unprotected overexposure to the sun’s rays may increase the chances of developing skin cancer. Then again, on the flip side of that is that a Vitamin D deficiency may be just as dangerous to humans. Vitamin D deficiencies may lead to the development of prostate and breast cancer, memory loss, and an increased risk for developing dementia and schizophrenia.

Also, for your information, and I’m not making a personal statement here or anything,  just reporting the facts, people, and the facts say that women are 200% more likely to develop SAD than men. Hmmmm….I’m not saying who’s crankier than who but…you know…statistics and all that.

I realize that you’d have to miss a bit more than the “normal” amount of sunshine in one month to create any ill effects on your system, but still, this past forty days or so have been pretty darn depressing and it’s starting to show. I’m hoping that in the next month we can make up for the sunlight we lost in October or this coming winter is going to be really, really SAD.

“A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.”- Joseph Addison (1672-1719).