Lose Every Winter to the Dark? Your Brain May Be Missing the Vitamin It Uses to Make Serotonin

Jill is 39, a nurse and a mom in Minneapolis. Every year it starts the same week: the clocks fall back and it is dark by 4:30. Within days she stops going to the gym. Then she stops answering texts.

By December she is sleeping ten hours and still waking up tired. By January she is doing the bare minimum, and her friends have stopped inviting her. “My daughter once asked me why I’m only fun in the summer,” she says. “That one stuck.”

Her doctor called it seasonal affective disorder and suggested a light box. She used it every morning. It helped some. February still flattened her.

See what Jill tried →

Everyone gets less light in winter. Not everyone falls apart. Researchers have spent years asking why, and one answer keeps coming up: the raw materials the brain uses to make serotonin.

When daylight drops, your brain has to keep making serotonin with less help from the sun. To do that it depends on L-methylfolate, the active form of folate (vitamin B9). People with low folate are more likely to report low mood, and the gap shows most when serotonin is already under pressure, like in the dark months.

Almost all the folate in fortified bread, cereal and multivitamins is folic acid, a synthetic form your brain cannot use as it is. Your body has to convert it, and the key step depends on one enzyme made by a gene called MTHFR.

Studies estimate that up to 40% of people carry at least one copy of a common MTHFR variant that slows that step down. In summer you may never notice. In winter, when your brain needs every bit of help, the shortfall shows.

The workaround is to skip the conversion and give the brain L-methylfolate directly. A prescription form at 15 mg a day is already used alongside treatment for low mood, because it gives the brain what it needs to keep making serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

A typical multivitamin has a fraction of a milligram of folate, almost all of it folic acid. It is not close.

Last October a coworker told Jill about MTHFR. She found BrainDrops: 15 mg of L-methylfolate and 1,000 mcg of methyl-B12 in one dropper. The same active form, at the same 15 mg, with no prescription. She kept her light box and her doctor’s plan, and added one dropper every morning.

“The clocks fell back and I kept waiting for it,” she says. “It never really came. I went to the gym in December. I hosted my daughter’s birthday sleepover in January. In February I was still me.”

Once a day, while the coffee brews, hold one dropper under your tongue for 30 to 60 seconds. It is already in the active form, so there is nothing for your body to convert. Mild berry flavor, no pills.

USDA Organic, vegan and non-GMO, made in the USA in a GMP-certified facility, with no gluten, soy, dairy, preservatives or anything artificial.

Start in October, so it is already working when the clocks change on November 1.

Week 2 to 3: The alarm goes off in the dark and you get up anyway.

Week 4 and on: 4:30 stops taking the whole evening with it. You answer the text. You say yes to Friday.

By January, people stop asking if you are okay.

The dark lasts until the end of March. The Winter Supply covers all of it: Buy 4 Months, Get 2 FREE. That is three bottles, about six months, at roughly 56 cents a day. Shipping is free.

If you do not feel the difference in 30 days, you get your money back.

Jill spent ten winters thinking this was just who she was from November to March. Last winter she found out it didn’t have to be. Start now, and it is already part of your morning when the 4:30 dark arrives.