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Feeling Blue? These things might help…

Steph Sisson | 29 June, 2020

Feeling Blue? These things might help…

As winter sets in, the sun’s missing in action and it’s easy to feel a bit down with a world gone mad and gloomy days. But there are some things you can try which may help alleviate the blues:

  • Pay attention to your circadian rhythm, including eating and drinking within a 10-12 hour period
  • Eliminate fructose and sorbitol to see if it makes a difference
  • Ensure you are getting enough:
    • Vitamin B6 and B12
    • Folate
    • Vitamin D in the form of D3
    • Omega-3

The circadian rhythm is our own 24 hour internal clock. Some people are larks, they wake up early and go to bed early, while others are owls, going to bed late and sleeping later. But why should we pay attention to our own personal circadian rhythm? Because it has such a large effect on our health and well being including mood and emotional regulation 1

Importantly, our circadian rhythm can be retrained, which is what happens when you travel across time zones. Jet lag is a retraining process, which ends with syncing with the new time zone. Once set, the rhythm ensures clear patterns with hormone regulation of cortisol and melatonin, our wakening and sleeping hormones, as well as leptin and ghrelin, our appetite decrease and increase hormones. So pretty important.

Eating to promote the optimal circadian rhythm should be done within a 10 to 12 hour period. So if your first food or drink is at 8am then the last food or drink should be at 6-8pm. 2

A high fat diet has a negative impact on the circadian rhythm, but conversely, restricting this high fat food to 8-12 hours a day has a positive impact. As for eating from the fridge in the middle of the night? You may have a circadian rhythm disorder that needs addressing. 2 Try talking to the sleep well clinic.

Cortisol hormone is produced by the adrenal cortex and is one of the most important hormones in our bodies. Even more importantly, cortisol has been shown to influence our immune function. 3

Cortisol is highest early in the morning which helps us wake up and decreases throughout the day with the lowest level as we go to bed, rising through the night until it peaks at wake time. However, stress makes us release cortisol into our blood stream, so it’s also known as the ‘stress hormone’ and this may cause cortisol to fluctuate throughout the day rather than decrease. This is why there’s a lot of information on ‘adrenal fatigue’, it’s identifying that stress causes an increase of a hormone, which can adjust our circadian rhythm.

Light exposure has a direct effect in reducing cortisol in the morning, which helps if you’re stressed.3 Light can play a part in resetting our internal biological clock. Light therapy also has a role in improving seasonal affective disorder, the aptly named SAD and many studies have shown that using bright, artificial light has an antidepressant effect. 4

Fortunately, if you think your blues are related to the weather or you think your cortisol stress hormone is too high in the morning as this is when you feel most anxious, you can purchase a 10000 lux lamp either locally on trade me, to use in the morning: Trade me

Support local: Sunbox

Or on: Amazon

Melatonin is another hormone affected by lightness and darkness. It’s produced in the intestines, retina, lens and in our brains. While it regulates the sleep/wake cycle, it also regulates other hormones in the body as well. While light can have a positive effect on cortisol, it’s important to note the problems using LED technology at bedtime can have on Melatonin.

As Melatonin is enhanced or suppressed by information taken in by retina in your eyes, blue light, such as that emitted by computer screens and mobile phones, significantly suppress melatonin production. 5 So reading your phone at bedtime can have a big impact on getting to sleep and staying asleep. 6

If you’ve tried everything and are still having trouble getting to sleep, you can ask the doctor for Melatonin tablets. It’s sold elsewhere in the world without a prescription, but in NZ you need to see your GP for it.

So if you think your circadian rhythm is out of sync, record waking, eating and sleeping over a week, including your natural wake up times at the weekend, and see if you can tweak your waking time in the week to be closer to your natural wake-up time and try eating and drinking within a 10-12 hour window.

As for that pesky fructose, if you have irritable bowel, bloating, cramps or diarrhea then fructose and sorbitol malabsorption may be your problem. Fructose and sorbitol malabsorption can cause depression as well as low tryptophan, which is an important amino acid for mood and sleep. 7

Fructose is the sugar mainly present in fruits but is also high in fruit juices, apples, asparagus, peas, grapes and watermelon as well as honey, maple syrup, palm sugar and agave, while sorghum, which is now in a lot of sausages, can cause problems for people with fructose digestion problems. Sorbitol is a sugar alcohol and can be found in a lot of baked goods and can be hiding under the number 420 on the ingredients listing. It’s also found naturally in apples, pears, peaches, apricots and dried fruit.

If you think you have a fructose and sorbitol problem, a nutritionist or dietician can help you work this out through an elimination diet.

Deficiencies in certain micronutrients can alter our moods as well. There is currently a study at Canterbury University around micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and mental health. 8

There’s plenty of scientific proof that either daily supplementation with vitamin D can improve mood or a broad spectrum supplement can do this.9 The one’s that have been well researched are Daily Essential Nutrients .

A bit hard to get hold of in NZ due to some of the ingredients (you need a letter from your doctor before Hardy’s will sell it to you) or try a broad spectrum supplement such as Centrum.

Whatever you take, make sure it has Vitamin D, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12 and folate (methylfolate) in it, as these have clearly been shown to been low in people with depression. 10 11

And I always talk about Omega-3’s as this is so important for everything from healthy cells to immune function to brain health. If you don’t eat a lot of oily fish on a regular basis, there are plenty of supplements that you could take.

If you find yourself feeling more down then up, support is available and a there’s a useful quiz on the depression.org website to do a quick assessment with lots of great resources.

Hopefully the sun will be out again soon and these small tips and tricks will help you beat the gloomy days.

  1. Germain A, Kupfer DJ. Circadian rhythm disturbances in depression. Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental. 2008;23(7):571-85.

  2. Circadian Rhythms, and Time-Restricted Feeding in Healthy Lifespan. Cell Metabolism. 2016;23(6):1048-59.

  3. Jung CM, Khalsa SB, Scheer FA, et al. Acute effects of bright light exposure on cortisol levels. J Biol Rhythms. 2010;25(3):208-216. doi:10.1177/0748730410368413

  4. Rosenthal NE, Sack DA, Gillin JC, Lewy AJ, Goodwin FK, Davenport Y, et al. Seasonal Affective Disorder: A Description of the Syndrome and Preliminary Findings With Light Therapy. Archives of General Psychiatry. 1984;41(1):72-80.

  5. Sroykham and Y. Wongsawat, "Effects of LED-backlit computer screen and emotional selfregulation on human melatonin production," 2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), Osaka, 2013, pp. 1704-1707

  6. Cajochen C, Frey S, Anders D, Späti J, Bues M, Pross A, et al. Evening exposure to a light-emitting diodes (LED)-backlit computer screen affects circadian physiology and cognitive performance. Journal of Applied Physiology. 2011;110(5):1432-8

  7. Ledochowski, B. Widner, H. Bair, T. Probst, D. Fuchs (2000) Fructose- and Sorbitol-reduced Diet Improves Mood and Gastrointestinal Disturbances in Fructose Malabsorbers, Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology, 35:10, 1048-1052,

  8. Julia J Rucklidge & Bonnie J Kaplan (2013) Broad-spectrum micronutrient formulas for the treatment of psychiatric symptoms: a systematic review, Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, 13:1, 49-73

  9. Kimball, S.M.; Mirhosseini, N.; Rucklidge, J. Database Analysis of Depression and Anxiety in a Community Sample—Response to a Micronutrient Intervention. Nutrients 2018, 10, 152.

  10. Vitamin B6 Level Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 2004;73(6):340-3.

  11. Sánchez‐Villegas, A., Doreste, J., Schlatter, J., Pla, J., Bes‐Rastrollo, M. and Martínez‐González, M.A. (2009), Association between folate, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12 intake and depression in the SUN cohort study. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, 22: 122-133