Why the winter darkness feels heavier than you think.

The moment that sparked this for me was discovering that I myself was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. I noticed I was feeling a little more down during the winter compared to the summer, and I started asking a lot of other people in my environment about it.

What I found was that there were actually a lot of people — especially internationals here at TU Delft — who come from countries with a stable 12-hours-on, 12-hours-off sun cycle. When they move to the Netherlands, the contrast is dramatic: in summer you can have 16-hour sunny days, and then in winter it can be gloomy for only eight hours before the darkness closes in again. They were really suffering as a result.