Op-Ed Post: How do we really feel?
By 12th-Grade Blogger Melina Brodeur
I always wondered why the weather was able to have the power to ruin someone’s day. Living in extreme heat for half of my life, I’ve noticed that the weather doesn’t just make me feel uncomfortable, but it affects the way my day goes. It affects my mood, motivation, and my mindset, and it’s so tiring.
Extreme weather conditions are able to affect people’s mental health, and we should seriously start to think and talk about this more because this problem is mostly ignored or forgotten about. In the desert, where it is almost always scorching hot, basic tasks feel like I’m working a full-time job, even just taking out the trash is too much. You don’t want to go outside; you most definitely won’t feel productive, and your energy feels totally depleted. That’s when emotions start to go crazy: I start to feel irritated, lazy, and even feel stuck inside my own home.
This isn’t just a personal opinion of mine; this has also been studied upon by the American Psychiatric Association (psychiatry.org): the organization states that “Extreme heat has been associated with a range of mental health impacts in research over many years, including increases in irritability and symptoms of depression.” When your body is extremely uncomfortable by the weather or situations around you, your mind is also uncomfortable, so the heat is able to affect your sleep schedule, raise your heart rate, and most definitely will affect your mental health. But, this is not just linked to heat. It’s also linked to any sort of weather; if where you live outside is always rainy, you may begin to start feeling depressed due to the gloomy weather (health line.com).
During the school year, it’s insanely difficult for me to keep up with classes when the weather is horribly hot because it constantly drains me to the point where I’m exhausted. Even when I’m hanging out with friends, the moment I step outside, it feels like I’m walking near a volcano, and then I feel as if I no longer want to go even if before I was excited. It’s a cycle where I want to go outside less, move less, and feel less motivated to do anything productive, and it’s so tiring. Even if you lived here for so many years, you will never get used to it, and just because it’s common, doesn’t mean it’s not harmless to us.
There are only a few ways to deal with this horrible heat, so stay hydrated, make sure to stay in colder areas with AC, and adjust your schedules to avoid running into the heat. So, if you think your mood is bad, your motivation gone, and everything feels harder than it should be, it’s most likely not you but the heat.
Melina, 100% true – for some people, perhaps for most people. There are, however, people who actually like the heat – and I am one. In the spring, coming out of winter, I brighten up, knowing the months of sunshine here in the desert have begun. Even as the hot hot days of summer come, I welcome them – I enjoy the slower pace, the fewer cars on the road, fewer people around. One must do far less in a day, the hours can stretch lazily out across an entire afternoon, with far fewer things vying for your attention, more time to read, to relax, to swim, to contemplate, to slow down and chill out – even when it’s 110 degrees in the shade! It’s just our inverse of East Coast winter, when you must huddle inside, evade the freezing wind, wear tons of clothes, hunker down and wait for the thaw in April.
I prefer our HOT version. In the fall each year I actually mourn the loss of summer and its heat, as I feel our frigid winters coming on.