Every February for twenty years, something broke.
Relationships imploded. Health cratered. Executive function collapsed. I documented all of it in journals — meticulous entries from a systems thinker who could see the pattern but could not find the cause. The pattern was undeniable: late January through mid-February, my entire system would give out. Not gradually. Like a circuit breaker tripping.
I blamed seasonal depression. I blamed bad luck. I blamed myself.
I was wrong on all three counts.
What I didn't understand — what I couldn't understand until I had a diagnosis, a framework, and a decade of data — is that February wasn't when things went wrong. February was when the bill came due. The debt had been accumulating since September. And the currency wasn't emotional. It was neurological.
What Neurotypical Readers Need to Know First
If you are not autistic, I need you to understand something before we go further, because the rest of this piece won't make sense without it.
An autistic nervous system does not idle at the same speed as yours.
I wrote about this in detail in The Open Loop, but here's the short version: your autonomic nervous system — the one that handles threat detection, sensory processing, fight-or-flight — idles at around 800 RPM. Ours idles at 2,500. We are not starting from calm and occasionally spiking into stress. We are starting from a state of moderate activation and spiking into overwhelm.
This means every sensory input, every social interaction, every environmental demand costs us more than it costs you. Not a little more. Dramatically more. The same grocery store trip that drains 5% of your daily battery drains 25% of ours. The same holiday dinner that leaves you pleasantly tired leaves us neurologically depleted for days.
Now multiply that by five months.
The September-to-February Debt Cycle
Here is what autumn and winter actually do to an autistic nervous system, broken down into the load categories that compound over roughly 150 days.
The Tactile Tax
This is the one nobody talks about, and it might be the most relentless.
Starting in October — earlier in northern latitudes — you begin layering clothing. Coats, scarves, boots, thick socks, heavy fabrics. For a neurotypical person, this is mildly annoying at worst. For an autistic person with tactile sensitivity, it is a continuous low-grade sensory assault that never stops during waking hours.
The seam of a sock pressing against a toe. The collar of a coat touching the neck. The weight of layers compressing the torso. The texture of wool against forearms. These are not minor annoyances. They are active sensory inputs being processed by a system that cannot filter them into the background the way yours can.
Research on autistic sensory processing consistently shows differences in habituation — the brain's ability to stop responding to a repeated, non-threatening stimulus. A neurotypical brain puts on a sweater and forgets it within minutes. An autistic brain may continue registering that sweater as novel tactile input for hours. Every day. For five months.
That is not discomfort. That is cumulative neurological load with no off-ramp.
The Light Deficit
This one has the most robust research behind it, and it hits autistic people harder than the general population for specific, documented reasons.
Autistic individuals show atypical melatonin production. Multiple studies — including Tordjman et al. (2005) and Rossignol and Frye (2011) — have documented that autistic people tend to produce less melatonin overall and show irregular circadian patterns compared to neurotypical controls. The pineal gland, which regulates melatonin production in response to light exposure, appears to function differently.
Now reduce the available daylight by 40-60% for five months.
A system that already struggles with circadian regulation loses its primary calibration signal. Sleep quality degrades. Recovery during sleep — already compromised by elevated baseline arousal — degrades further. The nervous system that was idling at 2,500 RPM is now trying to recover at night with a broken coolant system.
This is not Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD operates through serotonin pathways in a system with typical baseline function. This is a melatonin irregularity being amplified by the one environmental condition that makes it worst.
The Thermoregulation Load
Autistic people frequently report significant differences in temperature perception and regulation. Research from Daluwatte et al. (2013) documented measurable differences in autonomic nervous system function in autistic individuals, including atypical pupillary responses that suggest broader autonomic dysregulation — the same system that manages body temperature.
Winter means constant thermal transitions. Heated indoors to freezing outdoors and back again. Multiple times a day. Each transition is an autonomic adjustment — your body redirecting blood flow, adjusting sweat response, recalibrating core temperature.
For a nervous system that is already running hot and has documented differences in autonomic function, each of these transitions is not seamless. It is a system interrupt. A context switch that costs processing cycles. And unlike the sweater you cannot habituate to, the thermal transitions happen abruptly and repeatedly.
The Nature Deficit
This one is personal, but the science backs it up.
Nature exposure is my single most effective nervous system recovery tool. I have written about this before — the oak grove, the thirty-five acres, the absence of social demand in natural environments. For a brain running continuous threat-assessment loops, nature is one of the few inputs that does not trigger the monitoring system. It allows actual neurological downshift.
Kaplan's Attention Restoration Theory provides the framework. Natural environments provide what he called "soft fascination" — sensory input that engages attention without demanding directed focus. For autistic people whose directed attention is perpetually overtaxed by sensory gating and social monitoring, this is not a luxury. It is maintenance.
Winter removes it. Or severely restricts it. The cold, the early darkness, the barren landscape — they reduce both the duration and quality of nature exposure precisely when the nervous system needs it most. Your primary recovery tool gets locked in a cabinet for five months.
The Social Surge, Then Vacuum
The holiday season — roughly Thanksgiving through New Year's — is a six-week period of dramatically elevated social demand. Family gatherings. Work parties. Obligations that cannot be declined without social consequence.
For someone who processes social interaction through the sympathetic threat channel — and I wrote about this mechanism in The Open Loop — each of these events is not a celebration. It is a sustained activation of the fight-or-flight system lasting hours, followed by days of recovery that are never fully completed before the next event.
Then January arrives. The social demands evaporate. And you would think that would help. But the nervous system has been in sustained activation for weeks. It does not simply downshift because the calendar changed. It stays elevated, searching for the next threat, running its open loops on nothing because the monitoring hardware does not have a clean shutdown sequence.
The sudden absence of social demand after weeks of hyperactivation is not rest. It is a system that was braced for impact and cannot unbrace.
The Compound Effect
Here is why this matters: none of these loads operate in isolation. They compound.
An autistic nervous system enters September already running above baseline. Already processing the world at higher resolution than it was designed to sustain permanently. Already carrying the cognitive overhead of masking, sensory gating, and social threat-assessment.
Then, layer by layer, the seasonal loads stack on top:
- October: Clothing layers begin. Daylight drops. The tactile and light loads start their slow accumulation. Individually minor. Collectively, the idle RPM ticks up.
- November: Temperatures drop sharply. Thermoregulation demands kick in. Nature access declines. Thanksgiving introduces the first major social surge. The buffer starts to thin.
- December: Peak social demand. Holiday gatherings, obligatory events, gift-buying in crowded stores. Shortest days. Heaviest clothing. Every load category is running near maximum simultaneously.
- January: The social demands withdraw, but the nervous system cannot downshift. Sleep is disrupted from months of melatonin dysregulation. Recovery tools are still locked away by winter. The buffer is nearly empty, and nothing is refilling it.
- February: The circuit breaker trips.
This is not a mood disorder. This is allostatic overload — a concept from neuroendocrinology that describes what happens when the cumulative burden of chronic stress exceeds the body's ability to adapt. McEwen's research on allostatic load established that it is not the intensity of individual stressors that causes system failure. It is the duration and accumulation of moderate stressors without adequate recovery.
An autistic nervous system in winter is the textbook case. Five months of moderate-to-high load across multiple sensory and autonomic channels, with progressively diminishing access to the recovery mechanisms that could offset it.
The February crash is not a mystery. It is arithmetic.
Why "Get a SAD Lamp" Doesn't Cut It
I say this with no disrespect to the people who genuinely benefit from light therapy. For serotonin-pathway seasonal depression, it works. The research is solid.
But if your February crash is driven by cumulative allostatic load on an autistic nervous system, a SAD lamp is treating one variable in a five-variable equation. It is changing the oil on an engine that has been redlining for 150 days. The oil is not the problem. The RPM is the problem.
The same applies to most standard winter mental health advice:
- "Exercise more" — assumes your body has the autonomic bandwidth to handle exercise as recovery rather than as additional load. For someone deep in allostatic overload, exercise can be another demand on a depleted system, not a remedy.
- "Get outside" — in 28-degree weather, wearing the clothing that is itself a sensory load source, for the twenty minutes of weak daylight remaining? The math does not work.
- "Stay social" — this one might be the worst advice for someone whose nervous system processes social interaction through the threat channel. More social contact in this state is not medicine. It is the disease.
- "Practice gratitude" — I cannot regulate a hardware problem with a software patch. You would not tell someone with a failing transmission to think more positively about their commute.
None of this is wrong for the population it was designed for. It is wrong for this population, because it misidentifies the mechanism. The mechanism is not insufficient serotonin or insufficient willpower. The mechanism is a nervous system that has been spending more than it earns for five consecutive months, and February is when the account hits zero.
What Actually Helps
I am not going to pretend I have this solved. I am 45, I have been tracking this pattern for twenty years, and I am still learning. But here is what has made a measurable difference for me:
Reduce the Tactile Load Aggressively
Invest in clothing that your nervous system can actually tolerate for extended wear. Tagless. Seamless. Soft fabrics. Compression layers instead of loose ones that shift and rub. This sounds trivial. It is not. Eliminating one continuous sensory input channel frees up processing capacity for everything else. I treat winter clothing selection with the same seriousness I would treat choosing hardware specifications. The wrong shirt is not a fashion problem. It is a performance problem.
Protect the Light Window
Not with a SAD lamp — though that can help as one component. Protect your actual daylight exposure. Get outside during the brightest hours, even briefly. Manage your indoor lighting to reduce the contrast between daytime and evening. Minimize blue light exposure after dark — not for the pop-science reasons, but because your circadian system is already miscalibrated and you should not be introducing additional confounding signals.
Build Recovery Into the Holiday Season, Not After It
The conventional approach is to push through November and December and then "recover" in January. For an autistic nervous system, this is catastrophic. By January, the allostatic debt is so deep that passive recovery cannot offset it. The better approach — and this requires boundary-setting that is genuinely difficult — is to build recovery days into the holiday season. One social event, one recovery day. Not as a reward. As maintenance. You would not skip oil changes for three months and then do four in a row in January.
Maintain Nature Access Through Winter
This is the hardest one logistically and the most important one neurologically. Even abbreviated nature exposure — fifteen minutes in the woods, even in cold weather — maintains the recovery channel that winter otherwise shuts down. The research on attention restoration does not require hours in the forest. It requires the quality of input that natural environments uniquely provide. Protect that access like it is medication, because functionally, it is.
Name It
This might be the most important one. When February hits and the crash comes, know what it is. It is not a personal failure. It is not depression — or at least, not primarily depression. It is allostatic overload on a nervous system that was already running above capacity before the first leaf fell. Naming it does not fix it, but it stops you from adding shame and self-blame to a system that is already overloaded. Shame is not a zero-cost emotion. For an autistic nervous system, it is another open loop that will not close.
For the People Who Live With Us
If you are reading this and you are not autistic but you love someone who is: this is what February looks like from the inside.
Your partner, your child, your friend — they did not suddenly become a different person in late January. They have been slowly depleting since September, and you probably did not notice because they are exceptionally good at masking it. Masking is what we do. We have been doing it since childhood. We will keep doing it until the system physically cannot sustain it anymore, and then the crash looks sudden to you even though it has been building for months.
The best thing you can do is not try to fix it. It is to reduce demand. Lower the volume. Cancel the plans. Do not take the withdrawal personally. Do not try to cheer them up. Just lower the load. The system will recover when the inputs drop below the threshold. Not before.
The Protocol: February is not when it breaks. February is when the invoice arrives. The debt started in September — with the first sweater, the first short day, the first family gathering that cost more than it gave. If your nervous system runs at 2,500 RPM idle, you do not have five months of winter buffer. You have to build the recovery into the spending, or the account will hit zero. And it will always hit zero in February.
