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Birds, buds and bright days: how spring can make us
healthier and happier
Health
& wellbeing
Longer, lighter days can help us banish old habits,
sleep better and improve our mental health, even during the lockdown
Amy Fleming
Sun 29 Mar
2020 15.00 BST
Thank
goodness that, in this time of crisis, it is now spring. In the northern
hemisphere, at least, we can say hello to green shoots, flowers, bumblebees and
butterflies. Finally, the clocks have gone back to British Summer Time. We’ve
lost an hour of sleep, but hello, light.
The
greatest hope for the new season this year is that better weather will start to
make it harder for coronavirus to spread. And for those lucky enough to still
have their health, spring can provide other consolations. Its strong sense of a
new beginning nudges our outlook and actions in welcome ways. Katherine
Milkman, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School at the University of
Pennsylvania, has studied the phenomenon and found that there is more to spring
cleaning than the sunlight suddenly showing up cobwebs and window smears. “The
start of spring generally makes us feel more motivated – it’s a so-called
‘fresh start date’,” she says. As such, it makes us feel less connected to the
past. “That disconnect gives us a sense that whatever we messed up on
previously, we can get right now. Maybe the old you failed to quit smoking or
start a lasting exercise routine, but the new you can do it.”
These
moments, she says, also tend “to promote bigger-picture thinking, which gets us
focused on our goals”. Whether facing health, financial or professional
worries, newly working from home or home schooling, or being suddenly at a loss
for something to do, Milkman says this effect can stretch “across all of our
goal-oriented activities. We’ve seen that it affects everything from decisions
about exercise to retirement savings.”
Spring can
also fortify us with the relief it brings from seasonal affective disorder
(Sad). Even if you do not have a clinical case of it, says Hugh Selsick, chair
of the sleep working group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, “most people
will experience some degree of lifting of mood in the summer months”. Studies
looking at populations in North America have illustrated this neatly, according
to Selsick. “The further north you go, the worse our mood gets in the winter,
because of that lack of light. For us [in the north] the payoff is that we also
get these really nice bright long, spring and summer days.
“As humans,
we evolved in a tropical place, where there was a lot more light,” Selsick
says. This means our brains have evolved to expect a certain amount of it.
“It’s probably why we are so susceptible to changes in light,” he says. And why
the gloomier months can negatively affect sleep patterns and mood.
Sad
symptoms that spring might alleviate include low mood, tiredness, sleeping
longer than normal and, says Selsick, cravings of carbohydrates in particular.
So feel free to harness this knowledge to fuel a new effort to start exceeding
your five a day.
Now that
most of us are only allowed out once a day, for exercise, the greatest gains in
terms of making the most of spring light are to be had from stepping out first
thing in the morning. Not only will getting up and out help avoid the crowds of
joggers, but morning light is the most crucial for setting our circadian
rhythms. “It’s much better at synchronising our body clocks and getting us back
into sync with the outside world,” says Selsick.
When it’s
dark, we produce melatonin, which acts as a time signal to the body, telling it
we should be sleepy. “That first bit of light in the morning,” says Selsick,
“is very effective at switching that melatonin off, which then tells the brain
and the rest of the body it’s now time to be awake and active.
“We have a
special set of receptors in our eyes which communicate directly with the body
clock in the brain,” he adds. “They’re particularly sensitive to blue-green
light, which on a [sunny] day like today is the colour of the sky. So that sort
of bright sunlight, that outdoor light is what our brains are particularly
sensitive to.” Exposure to this in the morning helps us to wake up and shake
off bleary-eyed grumpiness. “And it helps to regulate our sleep. If your body
knows when the day is starting, it’s easier for it to also know at what time it
needs to start winding down and getting ready for sleep.” And of course
sleeping well has the positive knock-on effect of giving you a better shot at
feeling content and having good overall health.
The big
danger with being locked down, warns Selsick, is “allowing your whole rhythm to
drift”. Even if a temporary break from commuting allows you to sleep in a
little, keep your waking-up time consistent to reap the benefits of the spring
sunshine. “If you’re getting that first dose of light at a different time every
morning, your body has no idea where it is in time,” he says. “You’re
essentially jet-lagging your body by having a different rising time every day.”
Setting regular meal times helps keep our daily rhythms in sync, too.
It’s
essential that we make the most of opportunities to be outside, whether it’s
that one permitted outing, or additional gardening, or spending some time on
the balcony. “The more outdoors you can get the better, without getting in
close contact with people,” says Selsick.
Getting
some sun can fill our heads with new ideas, too. In 2005, psychologists at the
University of Michigan found that half an hour out in the sun boosted not only
mood, but also memory and creativity. To test the latter, they assessed changes
in what they call cognitive broadening – “a style of thinking in which people
become more creative and which is hypothesised to be an adaptive shift in
cognition that leads to behavioral flexibility and exploration”, write the
authors.
Late-evening
light may be less likely to have an impact on circadian rhythms than morning
rays, but, says Selsick, “people do generally report a better quality of life
if they have some light in the evening”. Indeed. A 2016 study by researchers at
Brigham Young University in Utah looked at six years of data from more than
16,000 adults and found that seasonal increases in hours of sunshine correlated
with decreased mental health distress.
Longer days
also seem to extend the amount of use we get from waking hours. When it’s light
in the evenings, it feels like daytime for longer. Staying up to batch cook,
bake bread or, in the current climate, have beers with friends over Zoom, will
seem appealing all of a sudden. “Light does to some extent push sleep away a
little bit,” says Selsick. “And people do often feel more alert when there’s
bright light.”
And of
course, with spring, light and warmth comes nature. April will see the return
of swallows, swifts, cuckoos, martins and other feathery summer visitors. The
more birds we see in our neighbourhoods, and the more greenery, the more robust
our mental health will be, according to a 2017 study by the University of
Exeter. In 2019, data from 20,000 British people crunched by researchers at the
same university showed that the more time spent enjoying nature, the greater
life satisfaction reported.
This is why
GPs have been prescribing gardening as therapy. So plant some seeds and watch
them grow, whether that’s in a flowerbed or a window-sill or balcony pot. Get a
bird feeder – ensuring it’s inaccessible to squirrels, which are bird’s nest
predators. Dig out your binoculars and indulge in some twitching, or figure out
(with some online help) which song belongs to which bird.
The green
shoots of a new chapter in our lives provide opportunities to do better, says
Milkman. “The Covid-19 crisis is inaugurating a new era and shaking up our
routines. Horrific as the crisis is, it presents an opportunity to size up our
routines and consider what we want to change and how we can be better. I hope
people will capitalise on that motivation and find ways to help one another
(from a requisite social distance) and themselves achieve important goals.”
Yes, we are
on lockdown. We may be emotionally exhausted and scared, but at least spring
makes our daily outdoor exercise allowance more enticing. On warmer days, we
can throw open the windows, let the fresh air flood in and expel the indoor
pollutants that have accumulated from a winter’s worth of cooking and cleaning.
We can welcome the reduction in traffic noise and fumes. These may be
bittersweet byproducts of virus hell, but it’s all the better to hear the
birds.
Nature can be source of solace in crisis, says David
Attenborough
Broadcaster says in magazine interview that if we
damage nature ‘we damage ourselves’
PA Media
Mon 30 Mar
2020 00.01 BST
David
Attenborough
David Attenborough spoke to the Big Issue in
early March, before the UK went into lockdown.
The natural
world can be a source of solace during times of crisis, Sir David Attenborough
has said.
Speaking
about the climate, the broadcaster and naturalist, 93, said the world was at an
unprecedented point.
He told Big
Issue magazine: “In times of crisis, the natural world is a source of both joy
and solace. The natural world produces the comfort that can come from nothing
else. And we are part of the natural world. If we damage the natural world, we
damage ourselves.”
He also
said he had cause for hope: “Kids these days are knowledgeable, aware of what’s
happening, and are concerned. They are vocal. I haven’t known a generation of
children that could be placed alongside these today.”
He said of
the environment: “We’re in an unprecedented situation. We know quite a lot
about the history of the world. We go back 500m years and there is no species
with anything like the power Homo sapiens has over the natural world.
“There is
nothing remotely like the situation we’re in at the moment. There’s no moral to
be taken from what happened in the past. We’ve got a completely blank sheet of
paper in front of us.
“The plain
fact is that every mouthful of food you eat comes from the natural world.
There’s no food that nourishes you that doesn’t come from the natural world.
Every lungful of air that you take is refined by the natural world, oxygen
breathed out by plants. If you can’t breathe and you can’t eat, you don’t
exist.”
Attenborough
was interviewed by the magazine in early March, before the UK went into
lockdown.
He said:
“Problems are short-term and long-term … the short-term we deal with and the
long-term ‘we’ll do tomorrow’. But tomorrow never comes. And then suddenly we
discover it’s too late.”
The full
interview is in the current edition of Big Issue. Vendors are unable to sell it
on the streets because of the coronavirus pandemic, but the publication and its
beneficiaries can be supported via subscription.
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