How to Get Better Healthcare & The Strange Ways Weather Affects You

Ever notice that the trip home often seems shorter than the trip there—even when the distance and travel time are exactly the same? It happens so often that researchers have given it a name: the “return trip effect.” And the explanation reveals something fascinating about how your brain experiences time. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3179583 You’re told to “take charge of your healthcare.” But how exactly are you supposed to do that when the doctor is the expert, appointments are short, and navigating the healthcare system can be frustrating and confusing? It turns out there is a lot you can do to get better care. Dr. Lucy McBride explains how to make better use of your doctor, ask the right questions, know when to push for answers, and become a more effective partner in your own healthcare. She is a primary care physician and author of Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor’s Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health (https://amzn.to/4hAEoc3). Weather is doing things to you that you probably never realize. Sunshine, rain, heat, cold, wind and even changes in atmospheric pressure can affect how you think, feel, sleep and behave. Why are some people far more sensitive to weather than others? Can certain weather actually make us more aggressive or anxious? And why can a particular kind of day trigger such powerful memories and emotions? Dr. Trevor Harley has spent years studying the surprisingly intimate relationship between weather and the human mind. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee and author of Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health (https://amzn.to/4xN5L7v). Could you tell whether water is hot or cold just by listening to someone pour it? You probably can—even if you’ve never realized it. Hot and cold water actually sound different, and there is a fascinating reason why. https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-does-hot-water-sound-different-cold-water-when-poured PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS MONARCH: Write your own money story with Monarch! Use promo code SYSK at https://Monarch.com to get your 1st year of Monarch Core half off at just $50 AQUATRU: Head to https://AquaTru.com now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back! WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. QUINCE: Find your next Fall favorites at Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL: Built for those who want better. The Dell XPS, built for you! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/realm⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:44Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:22Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, why the ride home from a trip seems shorter than the ride there. Then, how to take charge of your health care and your health goals, and what happens if you don't.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  If you don't define what your health goals are in our system, the system will define it for you. So you run the risk of being medicalized, meaning you get a prescription for every symptom, and you're on 20 medications by the time you're 80, and you have side effects from many of them.

• 1:51Mike Carruthers?

  Also, hot and cold water sound different, and why you already know that difference. And how weather affects you, rain, snow, sunshine, even the wind.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Wind can provoke anxiety. Some winds make people irritable. You find that crime goes up. And even, it has an effect on children. In the UK, there's one study that showed that when it was windy, it makes children misbehave.

• 2:17Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:42Mike Carruthers?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support our show.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 4:12Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I suspect everyone has had that weird experience of going on a car trip, and you notice that the trip home, the return trip, seems shorter than the trip to get there. Why is that? Well, that's what we're going to kick off this episode of Something You Should Know with today. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. So I'm sure you've driven somewhere and felt like the trip home went faster than the trip there, even though you traveled the same distance. Researchers have studied this, and it has a name. It's called the return trip effect. The obvious explanation is that the trip home feels shorter because the route is now familiar. Except, researchers tested that explanation

• 4:55Mike Carruthers?

  by having people return by a different route, and the effect was still the same. In experiments involving bus trips, bicycle trips, and even people just watching someone else make the journey, the return trip was perceived as shorter. In two experiments, it felt roughly 17 to 22% shorter. The explanation appears to have more to do with expectation. On the way there, the journey often feels longer than you expected. Your brain then adjusts its expectation for how long the return trip should take. When it doesn't take as long as the revised expectation, it seems surprisingly quick. And that's the reason why. And it's something you should know.

• 5:43Mike Carruthers?

  We are constantly being told to take charge of our health. Okay, but how exactly are we supposed to do that? Most of us aren't doctors. Doctor visits can feel rushed. Getting an appointment can take forever. And between medical advice, Google, social media, and the wellness industry, there's no shortage of people telling us what we should and shouldn't be doing. So what does it actually mean to be a smart, informed patient without trying to become your own doctor? And how do you get better care from a health care system that often seems designed to move you through as quickly as possible? Dr. Lucy McBride has spent more than 25 years thinking about exactly that.

• 6:27Mike Carruthers?

  She is a primary care physician and co-founder of the Ackerly McBride Group in Washington DC. And she's author of a book called Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor's Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health. She has some very practical ideas on how to get more out of your doctor, ask better questions, make better decisions, and take more control over your health. Hi, doctor, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Mike, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

• 6:54Mike Carruthers?

  So as somebody on the inside, who works in the medical world every day, how do you view it? What do you think of it?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Modern medicine is brilliant at fighting diseases. It's terrible, however, at sitting with people who have them. We have a system that unfortunately, and through no fault of doctors, treats patients like a set of transactions, a bag of organs, a set of symptoms, as opposed to whole people with real lives, different tolerances for risk. And we just don't have a system that's set up to understand the whole person.

• 7:37Mike Carruthers?

  Why not?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It's very simple. The economics in our country favor prescriptions, referrals, and tests over conversation, over the dialogue between patient and doctor, which is where the real action happens. The problem with US health care is that we have lots of solutions, lots of fixes, but not enough time to surface the issues that people are actually struggling with. The questions that often matter most are the ones that no one has time to ask. Like, what keeps you up at night? Tell me what you're scared to say out loud.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  What is your worst fear about your health? Explain to me what you're not understanding about your lab tests. What are your health goals? Those are the kinds of questions that take time between patient and doctor to build rapport, to build trust, and to surface the questions that patients are actually asking.

• 8:46Mike Carruthers?

  Okay, so here's my question about that. You say, you know, these are questions that nobody has the time to ask. There's not enough time. Why? Why can't the system be fixed? Why is everyone going, yeah, jeez, I don't know. It's just, other businesses that have problems fix them in order to continue. But health care seems to be this big, jeez, I don't know. We just don't know what to do.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Well, Mike, there's a lot of money being made by the pharmaceutical industry and by insurance companies. So the system is not designed for patients or doctors. In fact, we don't really have a health care system in this country. We have a health insurance system. Now, we need insurance. We need prescription medications. I prescribe them every day as a primary care doctor. But what we first need is what patients and doctors both want. Time, relationship-based, evidence-based medicine that has to be rooted in the patient-doctor relationship. It doesn't help my patient, who, for example, came in to see me last week with high blood pressure,

• 9:51Speaker 01

  to lecture him about taking his medications. What helps him is me understanding that his wife just died. He's depressed, grieving, and struggling with a bum hip, which makes it difficult for him to get out to the pharmacy to pick up his prescriptions. That takes time to elicit that information.

• 10:11Mike Carruthers?

  But my sense is that even if patients had more time, a lot of what you just said about, I'm depressed, my wife just died, I have trouble getting to the pharmacy, those are not things to talk to your doctor about. The doctor has no role in those problems. So even if you had more time, I'm not sure people would talk about that.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  I think because health care is so broken in this country, Mike, patients have conceptualized health as a set of lab tests, a set of transactions. But actually, health is about...

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Health is about me as a physician empowering you as a patient with information and experience and evidence on how to live your life socially, emotionally, mental health-wise, physically, behaviorally. I'm not saying I'm a moral expert. I'm a habit expert. I'm saying that I am here to transfer power from me to you. It's not about a transaction. It's about an understanding of a whole person.

• 11:13Mike Carruthers?

  It seems to me that the role of the primary healthcare doctor, which you are, has changed in this sense. When I was young, you got sick, something was wrong, you went to the doctor, the primary care doctor, and that was the last doctor visit you had. He fixed whatever was wrong. Now it's referrals to specialists and lab work over here. And the primary care doctor seems more like a traffic cop than put your arm up here and let me sew some stitches in it.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  That's right. Primary care at its core is meant to be a hub for problem solving. In the old days, even when I was a kid, the doctor, the primary care doctor, was the person who knew your family. They knew the kind of social context of who you were, which then informed how you made decisions, how you approached problems, how you thought about risk. And you trusted that person because they knew about you more than just your cholesterol levels. But healthcare has evolved such that primary care has become a gatekeeping apparatus, like you said, kind of a traffic cop kind of thing. So doctors in primary care have

• 12:32Speaker 01

  either had to submit to that format where they are basically writing prescriptions, writing referrals. And then when someone comes in with a problem that is more complex, it's difficult for the system to hold that problem. Take mental health issues. What better person to help you with mental health issues than your primary care doctor, someone who's known you ideally for years and years and years, than you calling a random mental health provider out of the phone book? That just doesn't happen when there isn't rapport and

• 13:10Speaker 01

  trust between primary care doctor and patient. So to reframe that, I would say that you're right. Primary care is designed and ideally should serve as a hub for problem solving, not a gatekeeping apparatus. But because of the way reimbursement is in this country, primary care has become basically a traffic cop. And doctors don't like it, patients don't like it. Doctors have then taken matters into their own hands, like I have, and built their own practice to do what we set out to do when we became doctors, which is to care for human beings, not just body parts.

• 13:50Mike Carruthers?

  So you're not a doctor who's part of some big doctor organization?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Right. I made the difficult decision to leave the insurance system to be able to see patients for the time that they need.

• 14:03Mike Carruthers?

  Wait, so people come to you and they have a doctor visit and they write you a check and that's it?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  So there's something called direct primary care, where it's an annual membership, and you get what you need. You can submit your bills to your insurance for out-of-network benefits, and you get what you need. So we do an annual physical. And the physical, by the way, isn't just a set of labs and a check, check, check, check, check. It's a conversation. So when I'm helping someone with their cholesterol, I'm not just talking about their lipotortosis. I'm talking about their relationship with food and their habits and their insomnia that makes it difficult to go to the gym, that makes it difficult for them to lose weight, that makes their whole cholesterol issue more than just about a medication and prescription refill. That takes time. And that is where agency happens. That's where

• 14:55Speaker 01

  health agency happens. That's where patients are able to understand that their health is not just about me saying yes, no, here's a prescription. It's about them taking action where action moves the needle.

• 15:09Mike Carruthers?

  You know, there's something about patients' expectations when they go to the doctor that has changed. And I want to ask you about that in just a moment when we return. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday, I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility: sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what

• 15:50Mike Carruthers?

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• 16:37Speaker 04

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• 17:06Mike Carruthers?

  I'm speaking with Dr. Lucy McBride. She's author of the book, Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor's Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health. So, Doctor, patients' expectations seem to have changed. I mean, I remember going to the doctor and would rejoice if the doctor said, no, there's really nothing wrong with you. But it seems now that the expectation is, I need a pill. And so they're disappointed if they walk out of the doctor's office without a prescription. That's potentially a problem because they may not need a prescription.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Right. There's only so much that pharmacology can do. We know just how much habits, lifestyle, emotional health, like sort of emotional resilience, mindset, the social determinants of health, poverty, race, gender affect, health outcomes, that I would be practicing pretty terrible medicine if I just took patients' complaints at face value and handed them a pill. Again, my goal isn't to offer quick fixes. It's to help people understand the

• 18:22Speaker 01

  biological, psychological, and social determinants of their disease. Take dementia or breast cancer. There are myriad determinants for those two phenomenon that are in the hands of patients. So we know, for example, that getting regular exercise and eating a low-fat diet and prioritizing, limiting alcohol, is so important for preventing breast cancer and dementia. They are two different diseases, but they happen to have similar lifestyle determinants. But patients think that if they just have a normal mammogram, they're okay, when actually they have so much more control over their health outcomes than they

• 19:03Speaker 01

  think. But educating patients, practicing preventative care, takes time, and it then puts the patients in the driver's seat, which is ultimately what they want.

• 19:16Mike Carruthers?

  And so, given what you know and believe in practice, what's the advice to people who are not able to go to a doctor like you, but they're in a system, their healthcare plan says this is who you go see when you're sick? What can patients do differently to improve the quality of the care they get?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  First is, take the time to do the very difficult work of understanding your health ecosystem, which is defined as the totality of your health, beyond just your lab results. I call it the health ecosystem because your health is about more than just your lab test. It's about your nutrition. It's about your body mechanics. It's about your mental health. It's about your relationships to food, alcohol, other people, work. All of those factors play a role in your health outcomes. And all of those things are the things that your

• 20:19Speaker 01

  doctor doesn't have time to ask you about. So if you, as a patient, a consumer of healthcare, can take the time to understand, from a primary care doctor's perspective, what information I need to be able to connect the dots, for example, between your childhood obesity and your current relationship with food and your current diabetes management, then I'm handing you some agency that the system we live in currently deprives you of.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Secondly, you need to understand what your health goals are. So if you don't define what your health goals are in our system, the system will define it for you. So you run the risk of being medicalized, meaning you get a pill for every body part, a prescription for every symptom, and no one is talking to each other. The cardiologist isn't talking to the orthopedist, the orthopedist isn't talking to the kidney specialist, and you're on, you know, 20 medications by the time you're 80, and you have side effects from many of them. If you can start to understand just how much agency you have over your health, then you

• 21:32Speaker 01

  can start to employ that and bring a more sort of honest and authentic rendering of your health goals to your doctor's office. You also can start to understand your patient personality. I have a whole chapter about the patient personality type. There are occupational hazards to being the people pleaser who wants to win the doctor's appointment. They tend to not bring up things that they think are irrelevant, or they tend to sugarcoat things that are going wrong. Are you an optimizer? Are you the person who thinks that optimizing every body part and sort of leaning into the kind of wellness culture, you know, ideals about health is actually depriving you of a sense of agency over your health?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Are you an outsourcer? You don't want any sort of insight into how things are going or why they're going the way they're going. You just want the prescription, you want the pills. Those personality types really matter. If you can practice some self-awareness and understand how you approach being a patient, a uniquely vulnerable position, and how you may be hamstringing your ability to get information from your doctor, that is, that is gold. And then finally, you really need to spend some time understanding where you don't have control over your health. Like, do you have a genetic predisposition to disease that you cannot change?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Do you have a part of your past that you wish didn't happen, but you can't change? Do you have someone in your life, like a bad boss or a difficult spouse, who you're trying to control, but you can't? Because when you accept the things in your life and your past that you can't control, that opens up brain space and energy to work on the things you can control, which is a lot.

• 23:20Mike Carruthers?

  So you said, know your health goals. What does that look like? Give me an example of a health goal.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  So a health goal, for example, some people would rather take a pill just to be sure that they're reducing their risk for cardiovascular disease, even though their risk for cardiovascular disease is already as low as it can possibly be. Like, I have patients who are taking Lipitor, who actually have low cholesterol, no family history of heart disease, but they want to have every I dotted and every T crossed, even if the medication causes side effects, because the fear of cardiovascular disease is so big. I also have patients, on the flip side of that, who have high cholesterol, they have

• 24:09Speaker 01

  heart disease, they have a family history of premature heart attack, and they would rather try to work on exercise and diet and sleep and stress management, because they do not want any pharmacological intervention in their bodies. My job is to understand where people are coming from. So it's very useful for you as a patient to be able to come into your doctor and say, "Look, I like to be natural when I can. I don't want to take prescriptions I don't absolutely need." Versus, "Look, my tolerance for risk for heart disease is so low that I want to do every single possible thing I can possibly do, even if it doesn't make logical sense to you." Do you see what I'm saying?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  That helps me really frame the conversation.

• 24:55Mike Carruthers?

  I mean, how often is it when somebody comes in for a physical that you find something horrible? Like, I mean, it's pretty rare, right? I mean, if there are no symptoms and they're just coming in for their annual physical, you seldom say, "Oh, my God, you've got six days to live."

• 25:11Speaker 01

  That is true, and disease lives so far upstream from the presentation of illness. We know, for example, that coronary artery plaque, cholesterol plaque that accumulates in arteries, starts developing in people's teenage years. So for me to counsel someone about diet and exercise in their 20s is not just to be cute or, you know, trend, on trend, it's actually to protect them against cardiovascular disease in their 80s. In other words, preventative health is so underappreciated and so underdone.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  We have a damage control system, not a preventative health system, and that's part of the problem. It deprives patients of agency, because there's, as I said before, there's so much people can do to prevent illness.

• 26:07Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think another concern people have is that, you know, a lot of the times, it seems that advice keeps changing. You know, there's, "You should take a low-dose aspirin to prevent heart disease." "Oh, no, you shouldn't unless you're at risk." And so people get, say, "Look, if you don't really know, then I'm not, then what am I supposed to do?"

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Well, people need to understand that, that medicine is iterative, science is iterative. We change recommendations as robust, replicatable data come in. So it would be completely inappropriate and bizarre if recommendations didn't change over time. I think the problem is that patients right now don't know who to trust to mine the gray, to navigate the nuances of medical data and how it applies to that particular person's situation.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  So I think people have become very disenchanted with medicine, as you said, when they see a CNN headline that says, you know, "Hormone replacement therapy is now good for everybody." And then the next day, it's like, "Hormone replacement therapy is bad for everybody." The truth is in the middle. It depends on the person, and that's actually where medicine shines, when it's practiced one-on-one, is we take population-based data that studies populations of people and apply it to you, the person sitting in front of me.

• 27:36Mike Carruthers?

  As a primary care doctor, what would you like people to understand about what you do that perhaps they don't?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Listening is what we do best. Listening is not what we're paid to do, and there's 15 other patients in the waiting room waiting to be seen, and this is why people are leaving primary care or not going into it in the first place.

• 28:00Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I can tell, anybody listening can tell, the passion in your voice about this topic and how important healthcare is and how important it is for people to get involved. And I think your perspective is kind of a wake-up call for a lot of people. Dr. Lucy McBride has been my guest. The name of her book is Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor's Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health, and there is a link to that book in the show notes. Lucy, great, thank you.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mike. I've so enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for having me.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  At Zocdoc, we know you care about your health. You wouldn't do that early morning cardio if you didn't. So the fact that your annual physical is overdue just shows how hard it can be to get seen by a doctor.

• 28:42Speaker 06

  Sorry, that doctor's not in network.

• 28:44Speaker 07

  Press 1 for more options. You've reached us outside normal business hours.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  The next availability is in three months.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  But Zocdoc makes finding the right doctor easy. Download the app and search by specialty, insurance, and availability. Read real patient reviews, then book instantly. Zocdoc, ready to be seen.

• 29:01Speaker 04

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• 29:35Mike Carruthers?

  You already know that weather can affect your mood. A dark rainy day can make you feel down. The first snowfall can make you feel nostalgic. A rainbow can stop you in your tracks. But it turns out, weather may be influencing us in ways that go far beyond mood. Heat can affect our temperatures. Storms can affect anxiety. Sunlight can change how we sleep and feel. And some people are far more sensitive to all of this than others. And since you can't do anything about the weather, it would be useful to understand what it's doing to you and what you can do about that. Trevor Harley has spent years studying this.

• 30:18Mike Carruthers?

  He is a meritist professor of psychology at the University of Dundee and author of the book Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health. And I think you'll be surprised by just how much the weather outside can change what goes on inside your head. Hi Trevor, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 30:40Mike Carruthers?

  So I said that people have a sense that weather can affect their mood and, you know, particularly a rainy day can maybe bring you down. And people have probably always thought that. But how long has this actually been studied by science?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  It hasn't been studied for that long. My personal interest came about because my earliest childhood memories were all to do with the weather. In fact, it was the weather that made me interested in science. And then I became a psychologist and it took me about 30 years before I realized I could combine these two interests and look at how the weather affects our psychology. And that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years or so. But it is a relatively young field and there's still lots of questions and a lot of things we don't know or understand. I think part of the problem is that inasmuch as we all have our own personality, we all have our own weather personality. We like different things.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  We might assume that most people like it warm and sunny, but not everyone does. There are people who actually detest the sunshine. So we have to take into account these individual differences too.

• 31:49Mike Carruthers?

  So weather affects different people in different ways?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Yes, and there are different aspects of the weather that affect us differently. The effects of sunshine, for example, are particularly important. Rain, as you said, that can affect our mood. We tend to think of rain as being something of a downer, making us feel a bit depressed. But in fact, it's the lack of sunshine that is the most important way in which it affects our mood. Sunshine, I think, is the most potent weather variable.

• 32:24Mike Carruthers?

  Why is sunshine so powerful?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  First of all, it regulates our sleep-wake cycle. So sunshine falls in the retina of the eyes and there are a number of pathways from the eye through the brain, but one of them is to the pineal gland, that small gland right in the middle of the brain that hangs down like a little pine nut. And it's important because it manufactures melatonin. And melatonin helps us sleep, but we have to have it at the right time of day. We need light in the morning suppresses the production of melatonin and that enables us to be alert and awake. Sunshine in the morning helps us produce cortisol, the stress hormone, which in small amounts is necessary and good for us.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  It makes us feel alert. Obviously, we want to sleep when it's dark and be alert when it's light. And that's what sunshine does. It makes us ensure that we are alert at the right time. And it's thought that this dysregulation of this sleep-wake cycle is what gives rise to seasonal affective disorder. Seasonal affective disorder is when people are depressed.

• 33:36Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that certainly makes sense and I think everyone's had a sense of that when on a dreary day, you feel kind of dreary. And on a sunny day, you tend to feel a little more up and happy. But is there more to it than that? It seems like that's about it when it comes to how the weather affects your mood and your mental health.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  No, there's much more to it than simply sunshine. So I think sunshine is the single most powerful factor, but just about every type of weather has been shown to have some particular effect on behavior. You mentioned rain earlier and in fact, being out in the rain can be quite good for us. Rain, first of all, washes pollutants and allergens from the sky. So that's good for our... and that reduces inflammation. And we know that information is very bad for our mental health and is in fact involved in some types of depression and anxiety. It's also when the rain hits soil, it releases a chemical called josmin, which is manufactured

• 34:41Speaker 02

  by bacteria interacting with rain in the soil. And josmin possibly affects our mood, possibly might create serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter to do with good mood and the one upon which selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors act. And so that might elevate our mood. So going for a walk in the rain can be actually quite beneficial. I think also it's no surprise or no coincidence that if you buy some kind of ambient noise app or machine, one of the most popular sounds is that of rain. People find it very soothing.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  It somehow seems to create algorithms in the brain which help us to relax. So rain is good. Snow has this very transformative effect on the landscape and actually makes us appreciate it more. It makes the world seem very, very different and that changes our perception. And wind, now wind, I think, is my least favorite sort of weather and most people's least favorite sort of weather. I don't like wind because I associate it with disruption, particularly in living in the country. When it's windy, power lines come down and I live in fear of my worst nightmare, which

• 36:05Speaker 02

  is internet access going off. Don't want that at all. So wind can provoke anxiety, but it has actually been shown that independently, wind makes us anxious. And in California, you have the Santa Ana wind, which has long been associated with changes to behavior and personality. It makes people... some winds make people irritable. You find that crime goes up and even has an effect on children. In the UK, there's one study that showed that when it was windy, more children were sent to the naughty corner. It makes children misbehave. And the other really strong variable is temperature.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  We know that when we get too hot, particularly when it's humid, people become angrier, irritable. And there have been studies that show that is the effect of temperature specifically makes people angry. And when temperature goes up, violent crime goes up, domestic abuse goes up, arguments go up, road rage goes up, the number of riots increases. So heat makes us angrier, but it also has subtle social effects in that it makes us also more outgoing. Cold has the reverse effect. It calms people down, but it also makes people tend to be a bit meaner, more socially withdrawn.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  I think the phrase cold-hearted is there for a reason. Cold weather makes people more cold-hearted.

• 37:36Mike Carruthers?

  So this is interesting information, but what do we do with it? I mean, you know, you can't do anything about the weather. Can you do anything about the way the weather affects you? Or the weather affects you the way the weather affects you?

• 37:50Speaker 02

  You can do an awful lot. Given that the most important thing is sunshine, if you suffer from seasonal affective disorder, or in fact, I think virtually everyone would benefit from changing their behavior slightly in winter. Because like many sorts of psychological process, it's a continuum. Some people are severely depressed in winter, whereas others just get a bit of winter blues. And what we can do is that we can simulate sunlight. We can get one of these light boxes. I've got a number around the house and they produce very bright, blue-white light, which is the sort of light that we get in the morning. And I use that and it raises our mood.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  There are a large number of studies showing how effective light boxes are. All you need to do is just use them in the morning, not in the evening, and that has the same effects as being outside on a sunny morning. We can go outside in the morning. We can avoid too much light at night. But there's also a large number of studies now that show that just being out in nature is beneficial for us. Green spaces, looking, pausing and just paying attention to nature, that's highly beneficial for our mental health. So what is more accessible in nature than the weather?

• 39:14Speaker 02

  We should pay attention to it and that would generally improve everyone's mental health.

• 39:19Mike Carruthers?

  What about things like, that are not really weather, but they're part of weather, like rainbows or thunder or things like that, that it affects us, right?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Yes, th- th- thunder, first of all, does have a specific effect on us and because of the electrical discharge and the noise. The electrical discharges affect the production of ions. The research is still a bit in its infancy and there are some contradictory results. But generally, it's thought that positive ions make people irritable and anxious. Negative ions have a soothing effect, which is why you can buy iron generating machines. They generate negative ions, which are thought to relax and calm us. And thunderstorms actually produce negative ions. Rain produces negative ions. Waterfalls produce negative ions.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  So going near sources of water can be, again, mentally beneficial for us. Thunder also generates very low frequency noise, the rumbling of thunder. Low frequency noise, we don't always detect, but it can make us anxious. But there is also, you're right, in that some sorts of weather are particularly striking. And you mentioned rainbows. I think they're some of the most beautiful things. We had one here the other day and it was a magnificent double rainbow. They do make us just feel inspired. They make us feel awe. And again, awe has been shown to be very beneficial for us. It gives us a sense of purpose.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  It gives us some meaning in life. It elevates our mood. And there are several things about the weather that are awe inspiring. Rainbows, sunsets, sunrises, if you're up in time. All of these things are awe inducing and extremely inspiring and make us feel good.

• 41:16Mike Carruthers?

  Is a lot of the way we react to weather conditioning, association? We remember the snowy days of Christmas when we were young or we remember the, the, the thunder showers on vacation. Like, so we associate it with something and then that affects what we think and, and our mood?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  It is in part and associations are important for everything. And I think snow particularly, we have this association between snow and Christmas. But in California, you probably get hardly any snow at Christmas and particularly along the coast. And it is the association that's important. But the weather does have biological effects on us. It affects, first of all, neurotransmitter levels. So some sorts of weather are particularly good at elevating serotonin, the feel-good chemical. It affects the immune system. Sunshine in particular produces vitamin D, which as well as being involved in bone health,

• 42:18Speaker 02

  is also involved in the, the immune system is, and which, and the immune system and neurotransmitter systems work together. So they reduce information, they make us feel healthy, they make us feel good. So there are biological mechanisms involved too. And as I said earlier, the sleep-wake cycle is an important part of, uh, behavior too. It's essential that we sleep at the right time and we are awake at the right time. And that's regulated by light, which is an aspect of the weather.

• 42:53Mike Carruthers?

  Well, wouldn't it stand to reason that if, if these effects of weather on people are so profound, that people who live in cold climates all the time or people who live in the heat all the time would have profound personality differences? Because one's hot and one's cold?

• 43:12Speaker 02

  I think there are personality differences and the place of birth makes a difference to our personality. It makes a difference to our mood. We find things like the suicide rate varies across the world depending upon latitude. But of course, there are lots of other differences too. As you go towards the crater, things like poverty increases and that has an effect on mental health too. So it's diff- it's, it's quite difficult to parse out all these variables and you need very large studies, which are expensive and haven't all been done yet. The other thing that makes a difference as well as place of birth is time of birth.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  There are some effects of season in that things like the temperature at the time of our birth makes a difference. For example, mothers who are pregnant over the winter have different diets and exposure to sunshine and exposure to disease compared with people who are pregnant over the summer. And all of these things have an effect. So it's not surprising that children who are born in winter have slightly different personalities compared with those who are born in summer. And it isn't just personality too. There are a number of mental health risks that are elevated in winter babies.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  It's long been known that schizophrenia, the rate of schizophrenia is higher in children that are born in winter. It's just one variable, but it's an important one. And once we, again, once we understand these things, we can do something about it. For example, we can see what aspects of diet are important, exposure to light. And so studying the effects of season and weather on behavior will have important, long-term, positive consequences.

• 44:59Mike Carruthers?

  Is the effects on, of weather on people generally momentary or cumulative or what?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I think it is a combination of things, but it is cumulative. For example, it has been hot and humid for quite a long time in the south of Britain. And people are starting to get fed up with it. Whereas the first few days, people think, yippee, it's sunny, it's a heat wave, let's have fun. After two to three months of relentless heat and humidity, they start to get down about it and increasingly so. People get worn down. Similarly, if it's raining, then at first we might be quite pleased that the drought is over or that the air is fresher. But if it just carries on drizzling relentlessly day after day,

• 45:53Speaker 02

  then there is a cumulative effect which brings people down. So I think there's both momentary and cumulative effects, yes.

• 46:00Mike Carruthers?

  But, but when the rain stops and the sun comes back, people are fine. I mean, it, it, it seems very momentary, it seems very situational rather than, than cumulative to me.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  It is cumulative because the longer the sort of weather goes on, the more prolonged the effects. But yes, when it stops raining and the sun comes out, people start rejoicing. We go out in the streets and have a party. That's true, yes.

• 46:27Mike Carruthers?

  Are there things you can do in general that, that kind of safeguard you from the effects of weather? Or it, it depends on the kind of weather and where you are and what your life is like. It's too, you can't say that?

• 46:42Speaker 02

  It, it, there is to some extent. But I have realized that one of the most adaptive strategies for living, I have suffered from depression and anxiety myself. And one of the most important things is when I learned acceptance, that you can't change the world, that you are the way you are to some extent and you are limited. Obviously, you can change your behavior, but if you're born with a certain predisposition, it's often a fight. And I have learned to accept that I am the way I am and that that isn't necessarily always a bad thing.

• 47:21Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I think people have a sense and they've heard that like when the weather's hot, tempers can flare, we know crime goes up. When it's cold, the cold weather can make people kind of irritable. But in the moment, people don't think, oh, that, that's why I'm upset because, because it's hot out or it's cold out. They don't factor that into the equation, even though intellectually we all have heard this before.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  I don't think most people are aware of the extent to which the weather influences their behavior. And that's correct. And some people are. For example, there's this famous story about how a British policeman once said that when there's after a period of hot weather, when crime goes up, violent crime goes up, rioting goes up. This is the policeman's best friend are the wind and the rain and the cold weather, because that calms people down again. So some people wear the link, but I think you're right that for many people, they are just unaware of the extent to which the weather and things like temperature and sunshine affect them.

• 48:30Mike Carruthers?

  Are there any other effects weather has on people that we haven't talked about yet?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  There are all sorts of strange effects of weather and on behavior, some of which, again, aren't very well understood. So temperature affects the way in which we think as well. When we're cooler, when the weather's cooler, people tend to be more analytical. And when the temperature is higher, they tend to be a bit more creative. And so we can use this to our benefit. So when we have things, jobs or tasks that involve a lot of, when we want to be creative, we should do that on sunny, warm days. Whereas when we've got more administrative jobs or more analytical jobs to do,

• 49:19Speaker 02

  we should be doing those on cold rainy days, cold, dull rainy days. And also, temperature generally clouds thinking. So that the hotter it gets, the less analytic we become, the less able we are to produce syntactically correct sentences, affects our language. So we should be aware that temperature can have all these cognitive effects on us too. There is this optimum temperature for, for living, which is about 21 degrees, which is the perfect summer's afternoon day, at least in Britain. If it's cooler than that, it has negative effects. If it's too warm, it will have negative effects too. So there's this optimum temperature.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  And of course, there's no coincidence. So that's the temperature which most people like to set their heating or the air conditioning in their homes.

• 50:12Mike Carruthers?

  Well, your 21 degrees is our, I think that's 70 degrees here.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  That's right, 70, yes.

• 50:19Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think everyone's experienced, at least in some way, how the weather can affect their mood and their thinking. But it's, it's fascinating to hear that there's more science to it than I think most of us imagine and, and all the different ways it can affect us. I've been talking with Trevor Harley. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee. And he's author of a book called Head in the Clouds. How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Trevor, great, thank you.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. Anytime.

• 50:59Mike Carruthers?

  Here's something you may never have noticed, but actually you probably have, you just didn't realize it. Hot and cold water sound different when you pour them. In fact, people can identify which is which by listening. You can probably too. Temperature changes the physical properties of water, and importantly, the bubbles created as it pours. Research has found that hot water tends to produce larger, more abundant air bubbles, changing the frequencies in the sound. Try it yourself. Have someone pour very hot water and very cold water into the same kind of cup while you keep your eyes closed. Cold water tends to have a crisper, sharper sound,

• 51:44Mike Carruthers?

  and hot water sounds softer and somewhat deeper. And there's a good chance your ears will know the difference, even though you've never thought to notice the difference before. You've heard it so many times. Apparently, you've been listening to the temperature of water your entire life without realizing it. And that is something you should know. We really rely on you to help us out and spread the word about something you should know. Tell your friends, tell everyone you know, or at least tell one person you know about this podcast, and tell them how to listen to it. If you like it, they'll probably like it, and it'll do us a big favor. I'm Mike Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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