This point in the year is brutal — the 4 p.m. sunset and the thick exhaustion that settles into the darkness. But inside the pool, it’s always bright. The deep water of the lap lane is cool, while the hot tub and sauna are warm.

I’ve always dreaded the approach of winter. Every year, seasonal affective disorder and its less severe (or less pathologized) sibling, the winter blues, cast a spiritual fog over Vancouver. Energy to make plans and complete tasks becomes a finite resource that depletes faster than it regenerates.

As any laundry list of mental health wellness resources recites, exercise helps. It’s annoying to admit that maybe they’re right.

I’ve been a runner and soccer player for most of my life, so I know how movement can help shake a feeling. But, running also comes tied to years of pressure. If I can only run badly, it can seem better to not run at all than risk splintering under the weight of my own expectations.

A friend told me that the Aquatic Centre is free for students and has a sauna, and seemed surprised I didn’t know about it already. I jumped in.

Swimming laps is hard and boring while I’m doing it — arms straining, chlorine in my sinuses and the goggled stare of the guy in the speedo who keeps passing me. I’m not a great swimmer. Once I hit a stride though, I can move for 20 minutes with something close to weightlessness.

Unlike running, I don’t measure a swim by distance, but by time. After less than half an hour of kicking off the wall and touching back, it’s over. Regardless of how fast or well I swam, the hot tub is there as a reward. As I shift from the lap pool into the hot tub, the tension in my lower back releases and melts in the heat.

I go on Tuesday nights, when it’s a solitary type of crowded. The space echoes with chatter and splashes, but it’s quiet in the ways that matter. Nobody has ever tried to talk to me there. People gossip in the hot tub, but the hiss of the jets drowns out most juicy details.

In the steam room, a posse of old men sit, legs spread and elbows braced on knees. Sweat pours, steams and recondenses into hot drips on the tiles. When a drop hits me, I try not to think about where it’s been. These guys are in a stoic fight to outlast the heat, exhaling with effort. The sauna always wins, and they leave defeated but satisfied.

The endorphin high lasts a while after I leave the sauna. Outside, I breathe in the smell of rain — alive with the evergreen temperate rainforest and briny from the ocean. I remember for a moment that the turn of the season is natural and healthy, and I’m a part of it too. Then I get on my bike and face the dark hill back home.

But the white light inside the Aquatic Centre is still on. The blue chlorinated water shimmers with it. Like an industrial-strength overhead SAD lamp, lap swimmers and toddlers in floaties alike can steal and share an extra hour of light.

There’s nothing special about swimming, but I hope you have a place where you can shake the heaviness — somewhere that makes no demands of you, and where you can make fewer demands of yourself.