Spring Resolutions

I think New Year’s resolutions are stupid. In fact, I dislike New Year’s Eve in it’s entirety. Why? Well.

First of all no one ever keeps New Year’s resolutions, be it as a result of too much Orange Juice (read Champagne) or just because no one really wants to change the way they do things. Maybe it’s because the beginning of a New Year is always so fraught with *sigh* feelings. It’s almost the end of your holiday, Christmas has come and gone, and you somehow have to summon the energy to face yet another year of work. For these reasons above I move to introduce a new concept: Spring Resolutions!

Spring has sprung in Cape Town, South Africa (I’m told we’re a bit behind the Vernal Equinox due to our longitude and/or latitude) and what better time to set new goals for the year ahead! Psychologists studying Seasonal Affective Disorder (with the ironic acronym SAD) have found that depression and happiness cycles can be triggered by the different seasons of the year. It was first proposed by Norman E. Rosenthal, MD in 1984. He moved from sunny South Africa to New York City and found that he become lethargic and depressed during the cold Winter months. The treatment of this disorder is fairly simple: Dawn simulations (that is, programming one’s bedroom lights to simulate sunrise by slowly getting brighter over a period of 1 or 2 hours prior to waking) have been highly successful… and the usual plethora of Anti-depressant SSRI drugs have also been shown to be an effective remedy.

This means is that Spring - a time when everything is pure, crisp, and new - is the perfect time to start thinking about one’s future plans. Think about how you’ve felt this week, and compare that to how you felt 2 months ago, in the middle of winter. I bet you’ve had a better week this week. That’s because Spring has a major influence on our emotional well-being.

Consider Matthew C. Keller’s research (I’m afraid there is no direct relation between the two of us, to my knowledge anyway)

Happiness is a beach, sometimes.

Matthew C. Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, decided that researchers weren’t asking the right questions. His study, published in Psychological Science, has found that moods do generally rise with temperature—with or without the beach—but only in the spring. That’s probably because people savor the sun after months of deprivation, Keller says.

Even during the spring thaw, only people who spend time outside in the sunshine are likely to find themselves measurably happier. The optimal daily dose: one half hour.

So, here’s what I’m going to do this Spring and hopefully maintain for the next 365 days. These are my Spring Resolutions:

• Spend 30 minutes a day in the Sun. No, the computer screen does not count as the Sun.
• Try to get less frustrated by the annoyances of daily life.
• Understand that Renault are just a terrible car manufacturer and accept that things are going to go wrong with my Modus. No use fighting with them.
• Say Sorry and Thank You more often.
• Only write websites in CSS and XHTML. No more tables.
• Limit Coffee intake.
• Limit SouperSandwhich (the greatest UCT Food place ever) intake.
• Limit Facebooking, Flickr.com’ing, Forum-reading, and Computer Gaming while I’m meant to be working.
• Read the parts of the Bible I’ve never read before.

Hope you’ll take my Spring message to heart and do the same. It’s a great time of the year to set new goals. Apologies to those Northern Hemisphere guys who are in Autumn. I suggest you start programming your lights for Dawn Simulation

-Tim