Somewhere around now, many people notice a change they could not put a date to. The mornings are dark, the afternoon thins out by four, and a mood that held steady all summer begins to sag. Nothing has gone wrong, exactly. Everything just asks for a little more effort than it did.
The clocks go back at 2am on Sunday 25 October, which gives us an extra hour that morning and darker evenings after it. It is a good moment to say something about what the season can do to mood, and about a way of meeting it that does not depend on waiting to feel better first.
What the season can do
A dip in energy as the light fades is something a great many people recognise. For some, it goes further than a dip. NHS 111 Wales describes seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, as a pattern of low mood that usually begins in autumn or winter and eases in spring. The symptoms it lists include persistent low mood, losing interest in everyday activities, tiredness, sleeping more than usual and difficulty concentrating.
Not everyone who feels flatter in winter has SAD, and only a GP or another qualified clinician can say whether you do. But you do not need a label to take it seriously. If the shorter days are making ordinary things harder, that is reason enough to look after how you meet them.
How the day gets smaller
When mood drops, most of us do something sensible. We conserve energy. We say no to the evening plan, put off the phone call, skip the walk, and tell ourselves we will do it when we feel more like it.
The difficulty is that the feeling rarely arrives first. Motivation tends to follow action rather than precede it, so waiting for it can mean waiting for a long time. Each choice makes sense on its own. Together they narrow a life to the things that are easiest, and a narrower life, with less in it that matters, gives low mood very little to push against.
A different question
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, starts from a different place. It does not ask how you can feel better before you do anything. It asks what matters to you, and what a small version of that could look like today, with the low mood allowed to come along.
That distinction is worth sitting with. You are not being asked to feel cheerful, to argue yourself out of the mood or to push through on willpower. ACT does not aim to remove difficult feelings. It aims to change the relationship you have with them, so that they have less say over what you do with your day.
Start with what you value rather than what you want to feel. Being someone who sees their friends. Being someone who is outside, however briefly. Being someone who looks after the people they love. Values are a direction, not a goal to be completed, and there is almost always a small step in that direction available, even on a flat afternoon.
Three small things to try this week
None of these is a cure, and none needs a clinician to begin. They are small ways of staying in your own life as the evenings close in.
First, get outside in daylight. The advice from NHS 111 Wales is to get as much natural daylight as you can, and it points out that even a short lunchtime walk counts. If your working day keeps you indoors, sitting near a window is a start.
Second, choose one thing that matters to you and make it smaller. If you would normally see a friend for dinner, perhaps it is a coffee. If you would normally run, perhaps it is ten minutes round the block. The aim is not to prove that you can cope. It is to show yourself that a low day is still yours to live.
Third, tell someone. The same guidance suggests letting family and friends know how the darker months affect you, so that they can support you. Many people find that saying it out loud, in one plain sentence, takes some of the weight off.
When to look further
If low mood has stayed with you for weeks, and you are finding it difficult to cope, please speak to your GP. They can talk through the options NHS 111 Wales lists, which include talking therapies, antidepressants and light therapy.
If you would like to talk it through with us, we offer a complimentary 15-minute chat, with no obligation, to hear what has been going on and whether we are the right people to help. Our clinicians work online across the UK and in person in Horsham, using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Eunoia is not a crisis service. If things feel much worse than low, or you are having thoughts of ending your life, please do not wait: call 999, NHS 111, or Samaritans on 116 123, any time, day or night.
Sources: NHS 111 Wales, Seasonal affective disorder (nhs.wales, accessed 22 October 2026).
