This Time of Year, Dark Side Fills Life in Alaska

Lloyd Leavitt shrugs off the subzero freeze that blankets the Arctic town of Barrow each winter. It’s the weeks of endless night that get to him, filling him with insatiable cravings for carbs, sleep and natural light.

“There comes a time when you don’t know if it’s morning or evening. You get confused,” said Leavitt, who has lived all his 49 years in the nation’s highest-latitude community.

Leavitt has plenty of company when it comes to dealing with Alaska’s dark side. No matter how far south you go, the state is still way north of the rest of the country. That means abbreviated days that get increasingly short as you travel farther north -- the flip side of the state’s famous midnight sun.Alaskans eagerly anticipate the passing of winter solstice, the psychological turning point toward spring. It’s not the cold, but the darkness that makes winter so hard for many.

The sun won’t rise again in Barrow for another month after the solstice, which falls on Wednesday. But for Leavitt and others in the largely Inupiat Eskimo town of 4,500, it marks the countdown to daylight.

In the meantime, Leavitt floods his home with rainbow-colored Christmas lights. “They keep the spirits up,” he said.

Winter is a drag to some extent for one out of five Americans, studies suggest. A smaller fraction -- mostly women and young adults -- suffer from seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression stemming from decreased daylight.

SAD symptoms include lethargy, a heightened desire for sleep, cravings for carbohydrates, feelings of melancholy, fuzzy thinking and loss of libido or sociability, said Suzanne Womack Strisik, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“There’s a feeling like you should be hibernating, and carbs are very appealing,” Strisik said. “It can be really hard to get up even after eight hours of sleep.”

Of course, the majority of Alaskans don’t feel any different, no matter what time of year.

Barbara Bowden, a real estate broker who has lived in Anchorage 50 years, says she never gets the winter blahs other than complaining about the cold.

Her remedy now for coping with winter: Stay active rather than merging with the sofa. There’s no shortage of activities: skiing, snowmobiling, ice skating, dog mushing, snowshoe hikes, even power-walking.

Sometimes it’s not that simple. Severe cases of SAD can be debilitating, even prompting thoughts of suicide. According to experts, however, suicide rates actually peak with increasing spring light. “You don’t have enough energy to make a plan before then,” Strisik said.”Once the light starts coming back, there’s more energy, but reasoning is still off. There’s just enough light to make false conclusions.”

Many experts believe the disorder results from prolonged secretion of melatonin, a hormone that affects the biological rhythms in mammals such as sleep and reproduction. According to a leading theory, the extended melatonin secretion reflects the longer duration of darkness, said Teodor Postolache, director of the mood and anxiety program at the University of Maryland.

“As the night becomes longer, the duration of melatonin becomes longer in SAD patients and that produces depression and behavioral changes,” Postolache said. “They are less active, and the appetite and weight increase. As the interest in sex decreases, the interest in cookies increases.”

Although some Alaskans defy winter by embracing it, others cope by using bright-light therapy, which doctors say can be highly effective. Some people frequent tanning booths. Some take antidepressants. Some self-medicate with drugs or alcohol.

Then there are those who flee the state. Hawaii is the top choice, followed by Mexico and Las Vegas, said Brenda La Sane, owner of a travel agency in Fairbanks, where the sun will scrape the horizon for 3 hours and 42 minutes on Wednesday.

“I try to get away as much as possible,” she said. “The darkness gets to me terribly. I just got back from Anaheim, and it made a huge difference.... I felt so much more energetic.

“Two days after I got back, I was pushing myself to get out of bed.”