Why Weather Changes Affect Your Mood More Than You Think

When we randomly feel bad, we go to the obvious - disturbed sleep patterns, more eating out maybe or an extended argument with someone you love. But when someone brings out the weather as a reason, there's an air of doubt about it. But it's always been in our lexicon.

Long before seasonal mood change became a subject of research, writers instinctively wrote about how the weather affects your mood. Sylvia Plath related seasonal change to her own psychological turbulence, the romantics such as William Wordsworth correlated the promise of a summer sun with happiness, T.S. Eliot called April "the cruellest month" as the onset of spring brought emotional unease. A tiff between the weather and mood has always been there. The only difference is that they're not just personality quirks like being a summer baby or hating winter just 'cause. Winter blues actually has a clinical framework.

Winter for most human history has been a period of slowing down. Bears go into hibernation and we would too if we could. It's known to be a season of slowing down where community gatherings move into more house parties, lazing around in bed for a minute suddenly becomes two hours, physical movement is decreased and calorie intake is increased. No matter how does the weather affect your mood, deadlines do not wait. Chores pile up and so do KPIs, which means we're expected to perform at full capacity even if the Sun decides to hide in the clouds. A study done by Wang J et al (2023) on 787 ORNs shows the direct relation of daylight exposure and mental health, so maybe we're all really flowers, falling apart without the Sun. So, the weather and mood are unfortunately interlinked.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) was identified in 1984 as a type of depression linked to seasonal changes, particularly during autumn and winter. The diagnosis helped explain what many people had quietly suspected for years - that their emotional lives follow the calendar. And it's usually just associated with winter but it's again a half truth.

Heat, for instance, appears to affect us very differently from cold. Studies have consistently found links between higher temperatures and increased irritability, aggression and impulsive behaviour. During heatwaves, rates of conflict, road rage and even violent crime tend to rise. Suddenly, snapping at your partner after spending forty minutes on a delayed Tube platform in thirty-degree heat feels a little less like a personal failing and a little more like biology. So, even though you might not account for weather when you have an off day, your body still does.

This is the part of modern life that is only now getting attention. We climate-control our rooms, wake up to artificial light and order groceries without touching and feeling how ripe the avocado is. But that doesn't change how our biology responds to light. Our factory settings are stubbornly old fashioned. It still responds to sunlight first thing in the morning, temperature and seasonal shifts. While we like to believe we have transcended from nature and escaped seasonal mood change, unfortunately we haven't.

Research such as by Schwarz and Clore (1983) shows that sunlight actually acts as a mood regulator with people reporting higher levels of happiness on sunny days versus on days when it's either gloomy or pouring rain. In workplaces, people prefer more natural 'artificial' lighting that is the most comfortable to work in and there's a reason you love small yellow lights instead of the big scary white light. Yet instead of acknowledging these shifts, we try to resist them.

In a culture obsessed with optimisation, the idea that our minds and bodies might naturally ebb and flow feels almost radical. Yet for most of human history, people organised their lives around seasons rather than fighting them. There were periods of growth, periods of harvest and periods of rest. The goal was adaptation, not perpetual peak performance. So, the only way to go is: learn to live with seasonal mood change.

Firstly, resist the urge to pathologise every fluctuation. A quieter winter does not automatically mean you're becoming lazy, understand the relationship between the weather and mood. Feeling slightly more energetic when spring arrives does not mean you've suddenly cracked the code to self-improvement. Sometimes the weather is simply doing what it has always done: influencing how we move through the world. Borrow from other cultures that have long embraced the reality of seasons. Scandinavia has hygge, a celebration of comfort and warmth during long winters. In Japan, the changing seasons are marked through food, festivals and traditions that encourage people to notice shifts in nature rather than fight them. Across India, monsoon foods, summer drinks and winter gatherings have long served as seasonal rituals. These customs are not just cultural quirks. They are ways of helping people move with the rhythm of the year rather than against it.

Living with the seasons is less about changing your life and more about paying attention to it as well as how does the weather affect your mood. The next time you find yourself feeling unusually flat, restless or energised, it might be worth looking out of the window before looking inward. The answer may not always be there, but it is probably playing a bigger role than you think.