It’s just been Halloween.

The start of the first darker season. Also the beginning of the scary time of year.

Not because the dead will rise of out their graves to haunt you. But because old beliefs rise from their hidden rest in your head to affect your reason about yourself and life.

When the weather gets darker, it’s easy to lapse into a darker mindset.

Life feels like it’s closed in, you close the curtains early in the evening, and you are left alone with your thoughts. And they generally won’t be the best ones.

Which is why NOW is the perfect time to take a look at them before the heart of the winter sets in.

So, let’s get to the heart of your reason and create a new one for the coming season.

Losing the sunshine.

This year was hot and sunny and bright.

But now that has begun to fade away to memory, the sunny feeling can fade with it.

Darker days lower the mood. Grey skies, bad weather, shorter days, more gloom than glow takes our mind down. We thrive on the sun so when it’s not around we strongly feel it.

As such medical conditions have developed in response to this.

The obvious we all know about, and plenty of us have experienced, is depression. This is the persistent sadness, lethargy, non enthusiasm for life, and a general lack of energy, desire, and any joy. The mood is a cheerless as the seasonal climate.

In fact in the world today the World Health Organisation estimate some 300 MILLION people are actively living with the affects of depression at any one time.

Added to this has been the even more recent development of SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder. This is when early Autumn arrives a sufferer also experiences a massive drop in optimism, poor sleep, difficulty in concentrating, and sometimes feeling emotional and sensitive due to the lower light.

For both life is all downcast and miserable.

But, having once being clinically depressed myself, it was my reason in my thinking that was the culprit spoiling how I viewed and registered life.

So Iet’s take on those reasons to help have better seasons ahead.

Doing things for personal reasons.

At some time or other we have all decided to do, or not to do, something for personal reasons.

It doesn’t matter how others think or even if the situation demands we see it differently. If we personally have a good reason, nothing will change our minds.

This is the premise of how we operate mentally as the colder months start to arrive.

We find reasons, mostly not good, helpful, or wise, that we personally believe that affects our mindset. We drag ourselves down in effect. The inclement weather simply adds to and confirms the poor reasons we can’t let go of.

The greatest issue is that our personal reasons are personal themselves.

Autumn and winter can feel rather isolating but not helped by our own reasoning that no-one would want to meet up with us anyway. We can stretch that to being sure that we have never been popular and never will be.

The bills might be higher due to energy costs. Again our reasoning states we can’t afford it as we’re not really worth much as a person so we just have to suffer in the cold.

And feeling low we start comfort eating and then the damage really gets done. How? Looking in the mirror we only see an overweight and horrible person.

These are the reasons that ruin the less warmer seasons.

But, where we do we get them from in the first place?

Our old feeds our cold.

At heart we are warm, happy people.

We weren’t born miserable and bitter. We didn’t lose our love of life as soon as we appeared in this world.

Over time events, people, and even developments in society begin to impact our self esteem. This is how we remain afloat or sink somewhat. A strong self esteem where we can see ourselves as unique, full of individual abilities, and as deserving as anyone of happiness, means we grow up balanced and more content.

Go the other way and operate lower on that self esteem scale, then we have a poor self image, consider ourselves a failure, that others are inherently better, and carry great self blame and shame of who we are.

This means that when the darker seasons fall, it’s easier for us to fall into that self esteem trap as we automatically connect to all the reasons that we self label are wrong with us.

We are wrong, the world outside is wrong, and our life is wrong.

Where the longer Summer days shielded us from much of this, now we have nowhere to go. We don’t like what we see and can’t seem to get away from it. We become the winter blues.

Reasons are no longer opinions. They have become cold, unquestionable fact.

Many of us have been in this position. Usually when the clocks change and the long nights draw in. Left with no outer world to view, the inner world speaks the reasons about our awful life and ourselves to match. And boy does it rarely shut up!

So, it’s time we had a good talk with it.

Thinking what’s reasonable.

We all have the power to be reason-able.

The ability to think and act with reason. That is, to live with a sensible view of what’s real and what’s not. In the world and in our own individual world i.e our life.

You just need to employ that more as the doors close in the wintry seasons coming.

You have to have a reason radar. Here’s how –

Identify the times of day or situations when your normal even thinking drops into anti self esteem mode. Say you always feel low after work on a Friday evening because you have few friends to go out with. Then you tend to order pizza or some takeaway and always feel ugly and gross afterwards. You force fed the negative feeling with a food that brings on a even worse end belief.

So, grab your phone and set an alarm to go off every 10 minutes on Fridays from 6pm reminding you of good things about yourself. Have a list list prepared and combine how that includes other people and activities you may do that prove you are not a lonely, unwanted soul. Ramp yourself up!

This is how to break bad reason and kick in a good one. Repeat with other known trigger moments so you can distract the wrong reasons in your head which will gradually reduce their presence until you have formed another set of supportive ones.

This Autumn/Winter season is the new season for a great reason. You have plenty of time and opportunity to win at this. Which provides another reason – that you are worth a mindset that lifts you to where you deserve to be.

Happy in any weather rather than under the weather.

You don’t need any other reason to just enjoy being who you are!

Photo attribution – free to use under Pixabay Content License by JUrban and hugolionnard and Tumisu and Alexas_Fotos.