I wonder if there is a psychological twist to summer I may have missed...this from Psychology Today from a year ago
Summertime Sadness
Don't ruminate in the rain
My husband will confirm that dull, cold, wet weather does not bring out the best in me. But is it just the lack of sunshine or is the rain adding insult to injury?
Research on seasonal affective disorder (SAD) tends to concentrate on the effect of low sunlight and Denissen et al’s analysis of the effect of weather on the daily mood of over 1200 Germans found temperature and sunlight to have the greatest effect on low mood (but no effect on those already in a good mood). The effect of rain was mainly accounted for by the associated lack of sunshine.
But apart from lack of sunlight, it has always seemed to me that rainy weather, associated with low atmospheric pressure, could bring on a bad mood—and it seems I am not alone. Forget lunar cycles, when those isobars on the weather map start crowding together and the pressure drops, people go crazy. Violence and emergency psychiatric visits can soar as barometric pressure goes down.
Mizoguchi and Fukaya were able to control climate conditions to show that low atmospheric pressure alone can make rats depressed—they become increasingly immobile when forced to swim, which is thought to indicate helplessness and despair. If you are not convinced that we can tell when a rat is depressed, bear in mind that this effect was counteracted by giving the rats an antidepressant, imipramine, and they also returned to normal under natural atmospheric pressure.
Denissen’s study found that individuals varied a great deal in their response to the weather. Maybe there is something about me that makes me susceptible to cold, dark and rain. In fact, I think I may have found the key psychological factor in Sigmon et al’s study: they found that "rumination" (or "thinking" as I prefer to call it) combined with weather conditions predicted depression in a group of moderately SAD women.
Well, at long last the sun is shining and astonishingly, it hasn’t rained for three days. But for all my fellow moderately SAD people out there, when you see the clouds rolling in again and the barometer drop—stop ruminating and get busy!
"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves." Marcel Proust
“For the sight of the angry weather saddens my soul and the sight of the town, sitting like a bereaved mother beneath layers of ice, oppresses my heart.” Khalil Gibran
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