Rain rain go away...

Willow Blooms #18 Weathering the weather

Note- Today the weather is glorious!! I’m not sitting at my computer any longer.

Imagine the scene- as spring creeps into summer it’s another grey, rainy morning in the UK. People in the park are walking along the path with their heads tipped down, staring at the tarmac, dodging the mud, and hurrying to get a few extra steps in before work. Some people have dogs, on leads, or not. The pooches are variously sniffing at posts, other dogs, and the ground, snuffling for scraps. One or two people lift their heads for a briefly shared smile of solidarity, though most are zipped up inside dark coloured jackets, hoods shrouding, and shadowing their faces. If their experience is like anything like mine, they each watch as water drips from the peak of their hoods, dropping to the floor just in front of them, or down their legs. Or they feel it creeping down the outer sides of their coat, forming a dark rim where the water meets unprotected trousers, seeping deeper in. The dark patch keeps growing, until the clothes change colour, like hyper-colour gear from the 80s. Today we get more damp with each loop of the park, so those step counts come at a cost!

A male runner zips past, and I’m jolted from thinking my thoughts, into my body. I attend to where I am, and feel my feet on the path. The runner is accompanied by a small child, furiously peddling on his bike. It’s the half term holidays, and they’re making the most of the day. A woman walking from the opposite way steps aside for them, and exchanges a brief smile with me. It is a day for brief smiles it seems, sometimes even a quick hello, but not on this occasion. On we plod, getting further and further from each other as we try to outpace the rain. Are we all too sick of the rain, that we will not linger?

Rain and well-being

It is often said that one of the main topics of conversation amongst the British is the weather. I don’t know if we talk about it more than other nations, if it’s thought that we moan about it more, or if it’s just a myth.

I found an article posted online in 2019 (no author given) that reported talking about the weather as the top British pastime, above drinking tea and queuing. Really?, I thought. ‘We really are a boring bunch of people’. I wanted to check this out. I can’t find the actual data, as the website link is out of action, but it looks as if the conclusion is a misinterpretation of a different write up of the research. The poll was completed by the British Science Association and Operation Weather Rescue for British Science Week, and their website tells a slightly different story-

Discussing the weather is our most stereotypical ‘British’ trait, ahead of drinking tea and queuing, finds a poll of 2,000 people undertaken for British Science Week.

The people in the poll said that talking about the weather is the most stereotypical trait, they did not say this is how we most like to spend our time. There’s a big difference, thank goodness. This nicely demonstrates that the way we interpret data and form a narrative about it is critical to the meaning that we take from it. We are hopefully not choosing to sit and talk about the rain rather than get out and have fun (she says, sitting and writing an article about the rain...).

What’s the evidence?

But there is a purpose to this, and a more useful question, as I have wondered about the correlation between the weather and our well-being. It won’t surprise you I’m sure, to hear that this curiosity prompted a very quick literature search online! There were a couple of interesting articles that I’ll share with you.

An article by Derek Brockway, BBC Wales Meteorologist was published on the BBC website this week, with the optimistically titled - How rain can make you happier and healthier. It tells me that I’m not the only one wondering about the psychological impact of the incessant rain! Despite the fact that my observational study of park people was that most looked gloomy, the research cited by Brockway suggests that we should expect to feel otherwise. Good news!

Brockway quotes Dr Niek Buurma of Cardiff University School of Chemistry-

"There are clear indications that people feel more positive after inhaling negative ions”.

This is relevant because negative ions, Buurma says, can be made when raindrops hit the ground.

"When drops of water hit a hard surface, they break up and in that process, the drops of water, the smaller drops of water, pick up a charge… That charge, if it's negative, has additional electrons and those additional electrons can be picked up by molecules in the air, such as oxygen and carbon dioxide and that's how the negative ions are formed… There are quite a lot of scientific studies that suggest that inhaling these negative ions has a positive effect on your health"

Brilliant- with all this rain we must be getting lots of these negative ions, we should all be getting extra healthy!

Brockway shares a number of possible positive effects of these ions- boosting our mood, relieving stress, and giving us more energy. And there is more- apparently the air is cleaner after the rain, washing the ‘dirty particles out of the atmosphere’. (The article doesn’t mention where the dirty particles go though, and if the downside is that our waterways get dirtier…)

If you have good sense of smell, you may recognise ‘petrichor’, which is referenced in the article. I have not looked the science of this up myself, so am leaning heavily on Brockway’s researching. He explains that this distinctive smell occurs because post-rain air contains a chemical geosmin, generated by bacteria in the soil. He says there is a calming effect when inhaling it (when it’s in the air, not just by sniffing the soil, I assume, though this might explain the well-being benefit of gardening?). Another scientific link between well-being and nature.

This all sounds very positive for the rain dwellers amongst us, and the research evidence is apparently growing. Yet with our seasons getting wetter and warmer, is there the same effect when spring rain follows winter rain follows autumn rain follows endless rain all the way into summer? It does seem to have rained for an incredibly long time now… I also note that the article says petrichor occurs when rain follows a long dry spell. I wonder if we’re getting low on the geosmin magic whilst waiting on that long dry spell!

Despite my soggy coat, soggy shorts, soggy shoes, and soggy legs, I did feel adventurous braving the elements!

Why does it always rain on me? (Travis, 2012)

Another article on the BBC website offers a slightly different perspective (No author given, dated 26 March 2022). It says the sound of rain is a form of pink noise, which ‘decreases brain activity and in turn enables relaxation or even sleep’ (no citation given, so I can’t check the source). Interestingly it reports that women are more susceptible to the negative effects of rain on their mood, and ‘life satisfaction decreases with the amount of rain on the day of the interview’. (Connolly, 2012, interview refers to the interview in the research study). This means they found a general tendency for women to report feeling less satisfied with life on days when it was more rainy, though they do not suggest why.

Curious, I looked at Connolly’s original paper. Unlike news headlines that try to grab a reader’s attention (with often simplified conclusions), Connolly acknowledges that there may not be a simple causative relationship between the weather and our well-being. Rain might not directly be impacting our mood.

Rather, she considers underlying factors that might mitigate or enhance the impact of the weather on our mood, e.g. we feel good because we spend more time outside on sunny days, we engage in more activities with people so benefit from the activities and the social contact when it’s dry, and we work longer hours on rainy days, which perhaps reduces our mood.

Not everything is as we might expect. For example, Connolly includes a variable intended to capture the effect of long rain spells, but this did not show a statistically significant effect size. This means that there is no general negative impact of experiencing days and days and days and days of rain on our well-being. Apparently. Or that the effect on the mood is not large enough for the maths to show this as statistically significant.

Perhaps most interestingly, Connolly highlights an error in people’s perception. She says that we often make incorrect links between the weather and our well-being, which she refers to as a ‘focussing illusion’-

‘people generally think that they would be happier living in California when in fact studies have shown that they do not (Schkade and Kahneman 1998).’

California is used as an example of a place with lots of sunshine and less rain, and somewhere we would expect to feel happier if we lived there. The data, she says, does not support this ‘illusion’. Our human tendency to think ‘that the grass is always greener on the other side’, is evidently not true when applied to the weather and well being, but it is an undeniable side effect of all this rain that our grass is looking spectacularly green!

The rain’s not going away

I want to bring us all back to my story about the walk around the park, because there’s an important scene that I missed out. Whilst research offers us ideas about possible links between rain and our well-being, it is not inevitable. The missing part of my park story invites a different kind of outcome, where there is perhaps no need for the heady hits of geosmin for us to find joy in the rain. Let me explain…

On my second lap of the park, I see a young man up in the bandstand, with his blonde hair shining bright amongst the gloom, like sunshine. With him is a similarly coloured dog, a Labrador or retriever. I watch as it runs down the steps into the verdant green of the park in Labrador-retriever-toddler style. The man bounds down after it, bare-foot, bare-chested, (but not entirely bare) in his shorts. He follows the dog’s run across the grass, and leaps with similar joyful energy amongst the falling rain. He does not seem sick of the rain, nor is he weighed down by bodily protection from the elements. Rather, he seems quite enthralled by all that the day brings.

I cannot say whether his apparent jubilant mood was aided by mind altering drugs, of course it is possible, but even so, the rain was not dampening his joy. And it struck me in that moment that he offered a slightly different question-

What if it is not the rain that impacts on our well-being, but our perception of it, and the ways in which we behave?

How often does the rain stop us from going out and having fun? How often does it make us moan, and focus on the negative? What impact does it have on our interactions with others when we hide our faces in a raincoat and hurry past?

What if, I think to myself now, that this man and his dog are the embodiment of acceptance? The resigned raincoat wearing walkers plodding around the perimeter path, seeking partial shelter beneath the trees, are understandably defending themselves against the rain, but the joy it seems, is in skipping into the rainy middle, meeting the weather unguarded.

If there had been a poll of the park people that morning, what would our moods each have been? Looks can always be deceiving, of course, but my mood definitely benefitted from watching the apparent joy of the man, shifting my perspective of the morning.

The rain in our lives, whether it be real or metaphorical, is not going away. We do not need to pretend there are always rainbows to be found, there is no place for toxic positivity, but no matter how much we tell the rain to go away, it will come again another day regardless.

At the very least, there is always potential for a reframe. That is not to say that is always easy, or that the shift will always be significant. In the words of Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s in Rain on me,

I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive.

So, when it seems as if it has been raining forever, what if we each aim to do whatever we can to shift our perspective. To do our best to find the glimmers amongst the gloom, and dance barefoot, barelegged (and in our bravest moments, perhaps also naked!) regardless.

Thank you so much for joining me on my meanderings. I hope to bring a smile to your face, and spark your curiosity! The best way to show that you enjoy what I write is by pressing the like button, making a comment, subscribing, or sharing the link with friends that you think might enjoy my writing too.

Whatever the weather where you are, I hope you have a great day.

Until next time x