I joined several Norwegian meditation groups, which gave me friends outside the student community, and my Norwegian friends in these groups were kind enough to hold conversations in English for my benefit. Instead of frequenting bars and restaurants as I had in the U.S., I enjoyed hikes, cabin trips, and yoga with my new friends. I found a group of friends composed mostly of European international students, all of whom shared my desire to experience all that Tromsø had to offer (and to do it cheaply- Norway is prohibitively expensive). I took Norwegian lessons, which I used mostly to decipher food items in the grocery store, as almost everyone in Norway speaks English. I settled into my student-housing apartment, with its amazing fjord views and three Norwegian roommates, and began building my Tromsø life.
The main pedestrian street is thrumming every day of the week except Sunday, when most shops are closed, and is particularly lively on Saturdays and after 2 a.m. In a relatively small city, I was pleasantly surprised to find it home to an astounding number of festivals, cultural events, and city-wide celebrations. Surrounded by mountains and fjords on all sides, it also felt isolated and wild.įor all that, I soon found Tromsø likable.
With everything a person could “need”-a mall, three main shopping streets, and a few movie theaters-but nothing extra, Tromsø felt more like a small suburb than a city. Tromsø is a tiny island, roughly the same size as Manhattan, and is home to approximately 70,000 inhabitants, making it the second-most populated city north of the Arctic Circle.
When I arrived in Tromsø in August, the Midnight Sun period had just ended, the sky was dark for only an hour or two each night, and the Polar Night was still some three months away. It seemed like the perfect place to test just how adventurous I really was, while also providing a unique population for a psychology research study: How do the residents of northern Norway protect themselves from wintertime woes? And could these strategies be identified and applied elsewhere, to the same beneficial effects?Ī few months after our initial correspondence, Vittersø agreed to serve as my advisor on a research project designed to answer these questions a year later, after receiving a U.S.-Norway Fulbright to fund my study, I boarded a plane to Norway. In search of an opportunity that would allow me to explore my interests in positive psychology and mental health-and satisfy my sense of adventure-I stumbled upon the work of Joar Vittersø, a psychologist at the University of Tromsø who studies happiness, personal growth, and quality of life.Īfter reaching out to him via email, I learned that the University of Tromsø is the northernmost university in the world. I first learned of Tromsø two years ago, as a recent college graduate looking for more research experience before applying to graduate school for social psychology. While there is some debate among psychologists about the best way to identify and diagnose wintertime depression, one thing seems clear: Residents of northern Norway seem able to avoid much of the wintertime suffering experienced elsewhere-including, paradoxically, in warmer, brighter, more southern locations. In fact, the prevalence of self-reported depression during the winter in Tromsø, with its latitude of 69°N, is the same as that of Montgomery County, Maryland, at 41°N. “That winter would make me so depressed,” many added, or “I just get so tired when it’s dark out.”īut the Polar Night was what drew me to Tromsø in the first place.ĭespite the city’s extreme darkness, past research has shown that residents of Tromsø have lower rates of wintertime depression than would be expected given the long winters and high latitude. “I could never live there,” was the most common response I heard. So, perhaps understandably, many people had a hard time relating when I told them I was moving there. After the midnight sun, the days get shorter and shorter again until the Polar Night, and the yearly cycle repeats. Then the days get progressively longer until the Midnight Sun period, from May to July, when it never sets. During the Polar Night, which lasts from November to January, the sun doesn’t rise at all. Located more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Tromsø, Norway, is home to extreme light variation between seasons.