From BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY and the “temperature is not the problem” department comes this study that says pretty much what we intrinsically know about ourselves, and what climate proponents try to convince us of with stories like this one:
Sunshine matters a lot to mental health; temperature, pollution, rain not so much
BYU psychologist, physicist and statistician collaborate on unique study
Sunshine matters. A lot. The idea isn’t exactly new, but according to a recent BYU study, when it comes to your mental and emotional health, the amount of time between sunrise and sunset is the weather variable that matters most.
Your day might be filled with irritatingly hot temperatures, thick air pollution and maybe even pockets of rainclouds, but that won’t necessarily get you down. If you’re able to soak up enough sun, your level of emotional distress should remain stable. Take away sun time, though, and your distress can spike. This applies to the clinical population at large, not just those diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder.
“That’s one of the surprising pieces of our research,” said Mark Beecher, clinical professor and licensed psychologist in BYU Counseling and Psychological Services. “On a rainy day, or a more polluted day, people assume that they’d have more distress. But we didn’t see that. We looked at solar irradiance, or the amount of sunlight that actually hits the ground. We tried to take into account cloudy days, rainy days, pollution . . . but they washed out. The one thing that was really significant was the amount of time between sunrise and sunset.”Therapists should be aware that winter months will be a time of high demand for their services. With fewer sun time hours, clients will be particularly vulnerable to emotional distress. Preventative measures should be implemented on a case-by-case basis.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, started with a casual conversation that piqued Beecher’s professional curiosity.
“Mark and I have been friends and neighbors for years, and we often take the bus together,” said Lawrence Rees, a physics professor at BYU. “And of course you often talk about mundane things, like how are classes going? How has the semester been? How ’bout this weather? So one day it was kind of stormy, and I asked Mark if he sees more clients on these days. He said he’s not sure, it’s kind of an open question. It’s hard to get accurate data.”
A lightbulb went off in Rees’ head. As a physics professor, Rees had access to weather data in the Provo area. As a psychologist, Beecher had access to emotional health data for clients living in Provo.
“We realized that we had access to a nice set of data that not a lot of people have access to,” Beecher said. “So Rees said, ‘Well, I’ve got weather data,’ and I’m like, ‘I’ve got clinical data. Let’s combine the pair!’ Wonder Twin powers activate, you know?”
The duo then brought in BYU statistics professor Dennis Eggett, who developed the plan for analyzing the data and performed all of the statistical analyses on the project.
Several studies have attempted to look at the weather’s effect on mood with mixed results. Beecher cited four reasons why this study is an improvement on previous research:
- The study analyzed several meteorological variables such as wind chill, rainfall, solar irradiance, wind speed, temperature and more.
- The weather data could be analyzed down to the minute in the exact area where the clients lived.
- The study focused on a clinical population instead of a general population.
- The study used a mental health treatment outcome measure to examine several aspects of psychological distress, rather than relying on suicide attempts or online diaries.
- The weather data came from BYU’s Physics and Astronomy Weather Station, and the pollution data came from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mental and emotional health data came from BYU’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center.
The three BYU professors were just the beginning of the collaboration on this research. There are 10 other authors listed on the study, including Davey Erekson, Jennie Bingham, Jared Klundt, Russell Bailey, Clark Ripplinger, Jessica Kirchhoefer, Robert Gibson, Derek Griner, Jonathan Cox and RD Boardman. Both Ripplinger and Kirchhoefer are currently doctoral students in BYU’s counseling psychology program.
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I love rainy, cloudy days. We have so few inTucson, Arizona. Day after day of sunshine gets old.
After living and working in the High Arctic for several decades, I nod in agreement bigtime noting that the endless nights, Northern Lights and the winter moon made poor substitutes for sunshine.
https://notonmywatch.com/
I think many of these studies are written by an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and then the output is read by a human who adds “CO2 caused this”. Job, done, tick, grant is in the mail.
Hmmm, no word about vitamin D, “the sunshine vitamin”? In northern climes especially, vitamin D can be deficient in the winter months, due to both less time (if any) spent outdoors with any skin exposed, as well as fewer hours of daylight, and a lower sun angle. Now, being deficient in D is not good for a number of reasons, but one of them does seem to be susceptibility to depression. In any case, as a preventive measure, I take a 5,000 IU vitamin D & K2 (1100 mcg) once a week, starting in November and into April.
Diet is a very poor source of vitamin D3. We get it primarily from direct exposure to sunlight. And many health problems can be related to a deficiency in D3, as you indicated.
Therefore, it seems reasonable that we would react favorably even to the very presence of sunshine. There could well be a body mechanism that encourages us to feel better and get out and enjoy the sun on days when it’s out. That is, there could be a release of chemicals in the body triggered by the sight/feel of a sunny day that encourages us to actually get out into the direct sunlight so our skin can manufacture the essential vitamin D3.
Those who feel better in a warm sunny room, for example, are getting no additional D3, but they probably feel more favorable about getting out of their houses and into the sunshine.
Right, forgot to mention that it was D3, the most bioavailable form. As far as a psychological component to sunshine, I don’t doubt that, however there is plenty of evidence that the supplemental form is beneficial in all aspects, including prevention of SAD, when exposure to sunlight is limited or non-existent.
I thought the article made excellent sense and that the authors took a scientific approach and adopted a scientific method. I would have liked to see some of the statistics from which the conclusions were drawn, but I expect that the statistics are available to those who read the entire study. I saw no reference to “climate change,” so I was willing to believe that the article was relatively unadulterated by nefarious influence.
Climate change is making links to articles irrelevant. How did two guys in Utah get to be experts on clmate change or anything? Speaking of irrelevant one caption to a photo says “The British medical journal Lancet estimated in June that we are four times more likely to be exposed to extreme rainfall later this century compared to 1990 levels.” When did doctors become weather modelers?
Isn’t “extreme rainfall” brief heavy rain, not day after day of rain?
I’ve said it before and no apologies for repeating myself. When all contributors and commentators say “ever changing climate” as opposed to “climate change” we
will effect a change away from any hint of AGW and political claptrap.
Sinusoids are everywhere.
“Climate change” damages mental health not so much as an environmental phenomenon but as a dogma.
Nice article, probably confirming what many of us who spent time in the far north or working in mines, already know or at least suspect.
What really gets me upset is that the words “climate change” or “global warming” or even “climate” don’t appear in the article.at all. Not once. They are only in the headline and subtitle.
This is a blatant example of a news (for want of a better word) paper taking an article that says absolutely nothing about any climate issues and trying to turn it into support for alarmism. Of course it’s not surprising, it just confirms my low opinion of most journalists, editors and publishers.