Something You Should Know - How to Get Better Healthcare & The Strange Ways Weather Affects You

Starting point is 00:00:02 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. 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. 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. Wind can provoke anxiety.

Starting point is 00:00:45 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. All this today on something you should know. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:31 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

Starting point is 00:01:53 because the route is now familiar. Except researchers tested that explanation by having people returned 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.

Starting point is 00:02:19 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.

Starting point is 00:02:45 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,

Starting point is 00:03:06 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. She is a primary care physician and co-founder of the Ackarly McBride Group in Washington, D.C. And she's author of a book called Beyond the Prescription, A Doctor's Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health.

Starting point is 00:03:44 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. Mike, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. 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? 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.

Starting point is 00:04:26 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. Why not? 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 U.S. healthcare is that we have lots of solutions, lots of fixes, but not enough time to surface the issues that people are actually struggling with.

Starting point is 00:05:15 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. 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. Okay, so here's my question about that. You say that, you know, These are questions that nobody has the time to ask.

Starting point is 00:05:55 There's not enough time. Why? Why can't the system be fixed? Why is everyone going, yeah, geez, 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, geez, I don't know. We just don't know what to do. Well, Mike, there's a lot of money being made by the pharmaceutical industry and by insurance companies.

Starting point is 00:06:18 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.

Starting point is 00:06:48 It doesn't help my patient who, for example, came. in to see me last week with high blood pressure 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:29 The doctor has no role in those problems. So even if you had more time, I'm not sure people would talk about that. 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 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

Starting point is 00:08:08 transfer power from me to you. It's not about a transaction. It's about an understanding of a whole person. It seems to me that the role of the primary health care 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 he, 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.

Starting point is 00:08:51 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, 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 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... the system to hold that problem. Take mental health issues. What better person to help you with

Starting point is 00:10:00 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 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. So you're not a doctor who's part of some big doctor organization? Right. I made the difficult decision to leave the insurance system to be able to see patients for the

Starting point is 00:11:05 time that they need. Wait, so people come to you and they have a doctor visit and they write you a check and that's it? So there's something called direct primary care where it's an annual membership and you get what you need. You get, 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 lipitor dose. 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,

Starting point is 00:11:48 that makes their whole cholesterol issue more than just, you know, about a medication and prescription refill. That takes time. And that is where agency happens. That's where 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.

Starting point is 00:12:13 You know, there's something about patients' expectations when they go to the doctor that has changed, then I want to ask you about that in just a moment when we return. 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, patient's expectations seem to have changed. 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.

Starting point is 00:13:02 Right. There's only so much that pharmacology can do. We know just how much habits, lifestyle, you know, emotional health, like sort of emotional resilience, mindset, you know, the social determinants of health, you know, 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 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

Starting point is 00:14:02 prioritizing, you know, 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 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. And so given what you know and believe in practice, what's the advantage? what's the advice to people who are not able to go to a doctor like you, but they're in a system.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Their health care 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? 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.

Starting point is 00:15:23 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 doctor doesn't have time to ask you about. So if you as a patient, a consumer of health care, 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 deprive you of.

Starting point is 00:16:11 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.

Starting point is 00:16:44 If you can start to understand just how much agency you have over your health, then you 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 everybody 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.

Starting point is 00:17:35 Are you an outsourcer where 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 hamstrunging your ability to get information from your doctor, that is.

Starting point is 00:18:01 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? 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. So you said know your health goals. What does that look like?

Starting point is 00:18:42 Give me an example of a health goal. 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 eye 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-collarthurated. They have heart disease. They have a family history of premature heart attack. And they would rather

Starting point is 00:19:32 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? That helps me really frame the conversation. How often is it when somebody comes in for a physical that you find something horrible?

Starting point is 00:20:20 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. 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 cured. or on trend, it's actually to protect them against cardiovascular disease in their 80s.

Starting point is 00:21:02 In other words, preventative health is so underappreciated and so under done. 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. that requires a conversation. 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?

Starting point is 00:21:45 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 situation. 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

Starting point is 00:22:33 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. As a primary care doctor,

Starting point is 00:22:57 what would you like people to understand about what you do that perhaps they don't? 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. Well, I can tell, anybody listening can tell the passion in your voice about this topic

Starting point is 00:23:23 and how important health care 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. Thanks, Mike. I've so enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:23:51 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,

Starting point is 00:24:19 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. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee, an author of the book Head in the Clouds, how the weather affects our minds and mental health.

Starting point is 00:24:46 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. Hello. 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? 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.

Starting point is 00:25:23 In fact, it was the weather that made me interested in science. And then I became a psychology, 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 in as much as we all have our own personality, we all have our own weather personality, we like different things. We might assume that most people like it warm and sunny, but not everyone does. There are people actually detest the sunshine. So we

Starting point is 00:26:04 have to take into account these individual differences too. So weather affects different people in different ways. 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 affects our mood. Sunshine, I think, is the most potent weather variable. Why is sunshine so powerful? First of all, it regulates our sleep wake cycle. The sunshine falls in the retina of the eyes and there are a number of pathways from the eye through the brain,

Starting point is 00:26:55 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:27:36 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 effective disorder is when people are depressed. 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.

Starting point is 00:28:17 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, that reduces information. And we know that information is very bad for our mental health and is in fact involved in some types of depression and anxiety.

Starting point is 00:28:51 It's also when the rain hits soil, it releases a chemical called giosmin, which is manufactured by bacteria interacting with rain in the soil. And gosmin possibly affects our mood positively might create serotonin. which is the neurotransmitter to do with good mood and the one upon which selective serotonin re-uptake 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

Starting point is 00:29:30 some kind of ambient noise app or machine one most popular sounds is that a rain people find it very soothing It somehow seems to create alpha rhythms 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.

Starting point is 00:30:00 And wind, now wind, I think, is my least favorite sort of weather and most people's least favourite sort of weather. I don't like wind because I associate it with disruption, particularly living in the country. When it's windy, power lions come down and I live in fear of my worst nightmare, which is internet access going off. Don't want that at all.

Starting point is 00:30:26 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 it 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.

Starting point is 00:30:58 It makes children misbehave. And the other really strong variable is temperature. We know that when we get too hot, particularly when it's humid, people become angrier and irritable. And there have been studies that show that the effect of temperature specifically makes people angry. And when temperature goes up, violent crime goes up, domestic abuse goes up, arguments got road rage goes up. There are a number of riots increases. So heat makes us angrier. But it also has subtle social effects and that it makes us also more outgoing.

Starting point is 00:31:39 Cold has the reverse effect. It calms people down, but it also makes people tend to be a bit meaner, more socially withdrawn. I think the phrase cold-hearted is there for a reason. Cold weather makes people more cold-hearted. 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.

Starting point is 00:32:08 You can do an awful lot, given that the most important thing is sunshine, if you suffer from a 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 I use that

Starting point is 00:32:49 and it raises our mood and 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 effect as being outside on the 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

Starting point is 00:33:16 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? should pay attention to it and that would generally improve everyone's mental health. What about things like that they're not really weather but they're part of weather like rainbows or some thunder or things like that that it affects us right? Yes, thunder first of all does have a specific effect in us and because of the electrical

Starting point is 00:33:55 discharge and the noise. The electrical discharges affects 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.

Starting point is 00:34:28 Waterfalls produce negative ions. 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, that some sorts of weather are particularly striking.

Starting point is 00:34:54 And you mention 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.

Starting point is 00:35:15 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 all-inducing and extremely inspiring and make us feel good. Is a lot of the way we react to weather, conditioning, association,

Starting point is 00:35:39 we remember the snowy days of Christmas when we were young, or we remember the thunder showers on vacation. So we associate it with something, and then that affects what we think and our mood. 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,

Starting point is 00:36:07 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 field good chemical. It affects the immune system. Sunshine in particular produces vitamin D,

Starting point is 00:36:33 which as well as being involved in bone health, is also involved in the immune system, 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 the important part of 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.

Starting point is 00:37:11 Well, wouldn't it stand to reason that 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:37:44 But of course, there are lots of other differences, too, as you go towards the equator, things like poverty increases, and that has an effect on mental health too. So it's quite difficult to partial 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 a place of birth is time of birth. There are some effects of season in that things like the temperature at the time of birth makes a difference. For example, mothers who are pregnant over the winter have different diets and exposure to sunshine

Starting point is 00:38:23 and exposed 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. It's long been known that schizophrenia, the rate of schizophrenia, is higher in children that are born in winter.

Starting point is 00:38:55 It's just one variable, but it is 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 delight. And so studying the effects of season and weather on behavior will have important long-term positive consequences. Is the effects of weather on people generally? momentary or cumulative or what? I think there's 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.

Starting point is 00:39:38 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,

Starting point is 00:40:10 then there is a cumulative effect which brings people down. So I think there's both momentary and cumulative. effects, yes. But when the rain stops and the sun comes back, people are fine. I mean, it seems very momentary, it seems very situational rather than cumulative to me. It is cumulative because the longer 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. Are there things you can do in general that kind of safeguard you from the effects of weather? Or it depends on the kind of weather and where you are and what your life is like.

Starting point is 00:40:57 You can't say that. 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 it was 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 isn't necessarily always a bad thing. You know, I think people have a sense and they've heard that like when the weather's hot, tempers can flare.

Starting point is 00:41:44 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's why I'm upset 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. 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, this is this famous story about how a British policeman once said that after a period of hot weather when crime goes up, violent, crime goes up and writing goes up, 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,

Starting point is 00:42:40 they are just unaware of the extent to which the weather and things like temperature and sunshine affect them. Are there any other effects weather has on people that we haven't talked about yet? 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

Starting point is 00:43:29 that on sunny warm days whereas when we've got more administrative jobs or more analytical jobs to do 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 it 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 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. And of course,

Starting point is 00:44:22 there's no coincidence. And that's the temperature which most people like to set their heating or the air conditioning in their homes. Well, your 21 degrees is our, I think that's 70 degrees here. That's right, 70, yes. Well, I think everyone's experienced, at least in some way, how the weather can affect their mood and their thinking. But it's fascinating to hear that there's more science to it than I think most of us imagine and all the different ways it can affect us. I've been talking to Trevor Harley. He is professor. I've been talking with Trevor Harley.

Starting point is 00:44:59 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. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure any time. Here's something you may never have noticed, but actually you probably have, you just didn't realize it.

Starting point is 00:45:28 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:46:16 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 Herruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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