“
Just imagine: in the heat, the main task of the body was not to overheat, but in a matter of days it changes radically, and now it is important not to freeze! Then there is a sharp drop in temperature and humidity, clock change, short daylight hours…
Neurobiologist Sergey Danilov says that it is the change in the length of the daylight hours that has the greatest effect on our well-being. “Ukrainian Pravda.Zhyttia” asked the scientist how our body changes with the arrival of autumn and winter and how to help ourselves to go through the process of adaptation to the cold more easily.
How does the body adapt to the cold? Let’s start with the sad thing: there is no tumbler “autumn” in the body. Adaptation to the change of season can last for weeks and mainly depends not on external factors, but on the characteristics of each specific person.
Serhii Danilov says that it is almost impossible to separate adaptive reactions by human organ systems: each of them is connected to one another. Therefore, if we talk about the determining factors of seasonal changes in the body, then they will be external length of daylight and exposure to coldand internal – human temperament and her lifestyle. The influence of these factors on the endocrine and nervous system determines how the body will get used to new conditions.
“We primarily react to the length of the daylight hours: the amount of melatonin released in the brain changes, and it determines our level of sleepiness, certain apathy. And already specific adaptations to the cold depend very much on how much time a day a person is outside“, the neurobiologist explains.
Adaptation to the cold directly depends on the processes of thermogenesis, that is, the formation of heat in the body. It can be physical (or contractile, the one from physical activity) and chemical (related to a change in the intensity of metabolism).
In our seasonal adaptation, chemical thermogenesis is activated.
“Chemical thermogenesis is associated with the activity of brown adipose tissue. Its cells, unlike white fat, do not store energy, but produce heat. Cells of brown adipose tissue are located in us between the shoulder blades, along the large vessels of the aorta, spinal cord. The condition of brown fats – how many there are, how “pumped” they are – significantly affects a person’s ability to resist cooling“, Serhiy Danilov notes.
PET image of a person with brown fat (left) and without it (right).Briefly about brown fats. There are many of them in newborns and they serve as a kind of “metabolic furnace” – they maintain body temperature while contractile thermogenesis is formed. It used to be thought that this type of fat simply disappears with age, but it turns out that it can be stored or formed from white fat in people who have cold and physical stress. This topic is currently being actively researched by pharmaceutical companies.
Another somatic reaction that affects our resistance to cold is the switching speed of the vasoconstriction and dilation mechanism. It is one of the simplest and the most trainable (through hardening).
The neurobiologist notes that if the mechanisms indicated above are predictable and relatively standard, then psychological adaptation is a much more complex phenomenon, but no less important in adapting to changes.
“Regulation of the entire state of people is determined by how the nervous system predicts the future. Physical factors also affect this prediction, because the body perceives autumn and winter as stress, the amount of cortisol increases, and serotonin decreases due to the lack of daylight. Added to this is the concept of entrainment, when our internal rhythms are synchronized with external stimuli (such as light, temperature, social signals, etc.). And then there are some situational factors, personal or global, and these can also jointly affect mood“, Serhiy Danilov explains.
That is, conditionally, it is easier for optimists, people with a positive outlook on life, sanguine people to adapt to seasonal changes than pessimists, those who always have “everything lost” and melancholics. This is how our psyche works.
There are people who are very sensitive to the change of seasons. There is even a separate diagnosis that can be established in this category of patients – seasonal affective disorder. This is a type of depressive disorder, the exacerbation of which occurs every year in a certain season (more often in the cold season, but it also happens in the summer).
The most vulnerable to SAD are young and middle-aged women and those who have had or have other mental disorders. Serhiy Danilov says that relatively few people get sick and only 1-2% are diagnosed with a severe form, and the prevalence depends very much on the geographical latitude: the further from the equator, the higher the probability of manifestations.
SAD is managed with psychotherapy, lifestyle changes, antidepressants, light therapy, or a combination of these approaches.
Is it possible to escape adaptation to the sea? As soon as it starts to get cold on the street, it gets cold and the child brings the first autumn viruses from kindergarten or school, the thought creeps in – to throw it all away and run away to a place where it is always warm and there are no such disgusting puddles and frosts.
Is this a good idea? It depends on how long you are going, how you feel and what you want from the trip.
“If, for example, you went to the heat for the whole autumn and returned to the frost, then you will adapt faster (or should gradually, throughout the autumn), but it will be more energy-consuming. But maybe you gained strength during the rest, returned in a good mood and then there is a chance to easily adapt to new conditions“, says the neuroscientist.
In short: you can escape from adaptation if you return already in the warm period. Otherwise, you are simply postponing adaptation.
Whether the adaptation will be more difficult depends on the state of the body that you currently have. Some chronic diseases, depression in the anamnesis can make it difficult to adapt to autumn and winter after rest. Quality rest, good sleep and a balanced diet on vacation will make it easier to adapt to the cold.
Do you really have a cold from the cold? Serhiy Danilov explains that frequent colds are really related to the body’s adaptation process to a drop in temperature, but the cold itself is not the direct cause of the infection.
“The circulation of respiratory viruses usually increases in the cold season, but we get sick not because we are “frozen”, but because the body has not yet had time to adjust its protective mechanisms“, the scientist explains.
One of the key mechanisms is the condition of the nasal mucosa. In cool and dry air, the epithelium does not have time to maintain an optimal level of hydration and local immune protection, which facilitates the attachment and penetration of viruses into the cells of the respiratory tract. At the same time, it is in the cold village ezon viruses circulate more actively, we spend more time in closed rooms, closer to each other, and this facilitates the transmission of infections.
Then a cascade of secondary reactions occurs: we get infected, feel chills, instinctively limit activity and stay in the cold, which further reduces physiological adaptation. As a result, the illusion is created that it was the cold that “caused” the disease.
“Hiding from the cold only worsens the adaptation, but what can really help is frequent hand washing. Most seasonal viruses are not transmitted through cold air, but through contact when we touch different surfaces and then our face. Regular hand washing breaks this chain of transmission and reduces the risk of catching a cold by 20-40%. But influenza and COVID are more often spread by airborne droplets, so ventilation of premises and masks are important here“, Serhiy Danilov advises.
How to help the body adapt? 5 simple solutions It’s best to develop your body’s adaptability before the cold hits, but it’s never too late to improve yourself. So here’s what a neuroscientist advises, regardless of whether you’ve had a bad fall or you’re still hanging on.
Celebrate life.
Holidays help to level the balance, raise the level of life satisfaction, various holidays. They set the rhythm of our social life, add an element of pleasant anticipation, create reasons to go out somewhere and not sit still. This also explains why we feel better in December than, for example, in February.
So don’t hesitate to look for reasons to celebrate, don’t overlook festivals and seasonal entertainment activities. Participating in preparations and celebrations helps us get some endorphins and get us through the winter. Charity concerts and festivals, Halloween, St. Andrew’s evenings, preparations for the Christmas holidays – look for an excuse to do something special for yourself and your loved ones, prepare gifts, special treats. This is not just tinsel and unnecessary nonsense, it is a concern for mental health, so do not avoid such opportunities.
To be hardened.
We deliberately put the celebration before the tempering. First of all, take care of your moral state, then take care of your body. Choose something that you like: a contrast shower, diving into a well (just be careful with this, it is a strong stress for the body), long walks in the fresh air. Do not force yourself, but test: how do I like this method? how am i feeling Do I like it? Your feelings are important. That’s why.
“If a person does something they don’t like, it can make things worse. Actually, remember what I told you? And the mood, emotional state depends on what a person expects. If she expects to go diving into that stupid hole tomorrow, and she hates it, she tried it once, twice, three times, it doesn’t get better, there is no satisfaction, then maybe that hole is hers? I am often asked: what should be done? I say – a person has to determine for himself what is good for him“, says Serhiy Danilov.
We note that hardening does not necessarily have to be radical: it can be a gradual habituation to drinking colder water, and lowering the temperature in the room during sleep, and taking a shower in colder water than you are used to. It is necessary to start hardening while being healthy.
Move more.
It is not always easy to force yourself to move, there are people who do not manage to fall in love with sports, and that is ok. Then treat physical activity like washing or brushing your teeth – you need to devote some time to it for your health.
30 minutes of walking with your favorite music in headphones, light cardio at home between work calls, evening yoga or stretching before bed with aromatic candles. Everything will do, the main thing is that you are happy and you “shake your buns” a little. Don’t torture your body with exhausting workouts if you don’t feel like them, because you will get the opposite effect.
Keep the beat.
Serhiy Danilov says that “larks” usually manage to adapt to the change of seasons more easily than owls due to the fact that they capture literally the entire possible daylight. So, maybe it makes sense to at least try to “change shoes” from the early birds.
Get up earlier, don’t forget about meals (let them be regular), go to bed earlier than midnight. Enter small rituals that will set the rhythm: first brush your teeth, wash your hands, put scented cream on your hands, read a book, sleep. Such predictability and stability will signal to the body that everything is fine and reduce stress levels.
Learn to hear yourself.
The most difficult, but necessary. At this level, there is a fine line, when you can stop falling into a trap and give no chance of depression.
“We have a psychological startup that helps people assess their mental state. Do you know what the basic pattern is? I come to work and think: that’s it, I’m burnt out, I can’t do anything, I hardly slept at night. I pass the test, it shows – everything is fine, go to work. You think it’s a contagion! You start working, and really everything is fine. But sometimes it happens when the system says after the test – everything is in the red zone for you, go and rest. And if you don’t stop here, your body will “turn off” itself, that is, it will react with some kind of pain. In many cases, when it seems that you are not taking out, you still have a lot of hidden energy. But there are situations when we need to stop and rest – instead, we drive ourselves by inertia. This ability to feel oneself consists precisely in the absence of catastrophizing and honest contact with one’s body“, the neuroscientist notes.
If you feel that you have problems in this area, try body-oriented psychotherapy. Perhaps even a few sessions with a psychologist can be useful to start asking yourself the right questions and looking for answers.
Lyudmila Panasiuk, “UP. Life”
”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Just imagine: in the heat, the main task of the body was not to overheat, but in a matter of days it changes radically, and now it is important not to freeze! Then there is a sharp drop in temperature and humidity, clock change, short daylight hours…
Neurobiologist Sergey Danilov says that it is the change in the length of the daylight hours that has the greatest effect on our well-being. “Ukrainian Pravda.Zhyttia” asked the scientist how our body changes with the arrival of autumn and winter and how to help ourselves to go through the process of adaptation to the cold more easily.
How does the body adapt to the cold? Let’s start with the sad thing: there is no tumbler “autumn” in the body. Adaptation to the change of season can last for weeks and mainly depends not on external factors, but on the characteristics of each specific person.
Serhii Danilov says that it is almost impossible to separate adaptive reactions by human organ systems: each of them is connected to one another. Therefore, if we talk about the determining factors of seasonal changes in the body, then they will be external length of daylight and exposure to coldand internal – human temperament and her Mr persons of life. The influence of these factors on the endocrine and nervous system determines how the body will get used to new conditions.
“We primarily react to the length of the daylight hours: the amount of melatonin released in the brain changes, and it determines our level of sleepiness, certain apathy. And already specific adaptations to the cold depend very much on how much time a day a person is outside“, the neurobiologist explains.
Adaptation to the cold directly depends on the processes of thermogenesis, that is, the formation of heat in the body. It can be physical (or contractile, the one from physical activity) and chemical (related to a change in the intensity of metabolism).
In our seasonal adaptation, chemical thermogenesis is activated.
“Chemical thermogenesis is associated with the activity of brown adipose tissue. Its cells, unlike white fat, do not store energy, but produce heat. Cells of brown adipose tissue are located in us between the shoulder blades, along the large vessels of the aorta, spinal cord. The condition of brown fats – how many there are, how “pumped” they are – significantly affects a person’s ability to resist cooling“, Serhiy Danilov notes.
PET image of a person with brown fat (left) and without it (right).Briefly about brown fats. There are many of them in newborns and they serve as a kind of “metabolic furnace” – they maintain body temperature while contractile thermogenesis is formed. It used to be thought that this type of fat simply disappears with age, but it turns out that it can be stored or formed from white fat in people who have cold and physical stress. This topic is currently being actively researched by pharmaceutical companies.
Another somatic reaction that affects our resistance to cold is the switching speed of the vasoconstriction and dilation mechanism. It is one of the simplest and the most trainable (through hardening).
The neurobiologist notes that if the mechanisms indicated above are predictable and relatively standard, then psychological adaptation is a much more complex phenomenon, but no less important in adapting to changes.
“Regulation of the entire state of people is determined by how the nervous system predicts the future. Physical factors also affect this prediction, because the body perceives autumn and winter as stress, the amount of cortisol increases, and serotonin decreases due to the lack of daylight. Added to this is the concept of entrainment, when our internal rhythms are synchronized with external stimuli (such as light, temperature, social signals, etc.). And then there are some situational factors, personal or global, and these can also jointly affect mood“, Serhiy Danilov explains.
That is, conditionally, it is easier for optimists, people with a positive outlook on life, sanguine people to adapt to seasonal changes than pessimists, those who always have “everything lost” and melancholics. This is how our psyche works.
There are people who are very sensitive to the change of seasons. There is even a separate diagnosis that can be established in this category of patients – seasonal affective disorder. This is a type of depressive disorder, the exacerbation of which occurs every year in a certain season (more often in the cold season, but it also happens in the summer).
The most vulnerable to SAD are young and middle-aged women and those who have had or have other mental disorders. Serhiy Danilov says that relatively few people get sick and only 1-2% are diagnosed with a severe form, and the prevalence depends very much on the geographical latitude: the further from the equator, the higher the probability of manifestations.
SAD is managed with psychotherapy, lifestyle changes, antidepressants, light therapy, or a combination of these approaches.
Is it possible to escape adaptation to the sea? As soon as it starts to get cold on the street, it gets cold and the child brings the first autumn viruses from kindergarten or school, the thought creeps in – to throw it all away and run away to a place where it is always warm and there are no such disgusting puddles and frosts.
Is this a good idea? It depends on how long you are going, how you feel and what you want from the trip.
“If, for example, you went to the heat for the whole autumn and returned to the frost, then you will adapt faster (or should gradually, throughout the autumn), but it will be more energy-consuming. But maybe you gained strength during the rest, returned in a good mood and then there is a chance to easily adapt to new conditions“, says the neuroscientist.
In short: you can escape from adaptation if you return already in the warm period. Otherwise, you are simply postponing adaptation.
Whether the adaptation will be more difficult depends on the state of the body that you currently have. Some chronic diseases, depression in the anamnesis can make it difficult to adapt to autumn and winter after rest. Quality rest, good sleep and a balanced diet on vacation will make it easier to adapt to the cold.
Do you really have a cold from the cold? Serhiy Danilov explains that frequent colds are really related to the body’s adaptation process to a drop in temperature, but the cold itself is not the direct cause of the infection.
“The circulation of respiratory viruses usually increases in the cold season, but we get sick not because we are “frozen”, but because the body has not yet had time to adjust its protective mechanisms“, the scientist explains.
One of the key mechanisms is the condition of the nasal mucosa. In cool and dry air, the epithelium does not have time to maintain an optimal level of hydration and local immune protection, which facilitates the attachment and penetration of viruses into the cells of the respiratory tract. At the same time, it is in the cold season that viruses circulate more actively, we spend more time indoors, closer to each other, and this facilitates the transmission of infections.
Then a cascade of secondary reactions occurs: we get infected, feel chills, instinctively limit activity and stay in the cold, which further reduces physiological adaptation. As a result, the illusion is created that it was the cold that “caused” the disease.
“Hiding from the cold only worsens the adaptation, but what can really help is frequent hand washing. Most seasonal viruses are not transmitted through cold air, but through contact when we touch different surfaces and then our face. Regular hand washing breaks this chain of transmission and reduces the risk of catching a cold by 20-40%. But influenza and COVID are more often spread by airborne droplets, so ventilation of premises and masks are important here“, Serhiy Danilov advises.
How to help the body adapt? 5 simple solutions It’s best to develop your body’s adaptability before the cold hits, but it’s never too late to improve yourself. So here’s what a neuroscientist advises, regardless of whether you’ve had a bad fall or you’re still hanging on.
Celebrate life.
Holidays help to level the balance, raise the level of life satisfaction, various holidays. They set the rhythm of our social life, add an element of pleasant anticipation, create reasons to go out somewhere don’t sit still. This also explains why we feel better in December than, for example, in February.
So don’t hesitate to look for reasons to celebrate, don’t overlook festivals and seasonal entertainment activities. Participating in preparations and celebrations helps us get some endorphins and get us through the winter. Charity concerts and festivals, Halloween, St. Andrew’s evenings, preparations for the Christmas holidays – look for an excuse to do something special for yourself and your loved ones, prepare gifts, special treats. This is not just tinsel and unnecessary nonsense, it is a concern for mental health, so do not avoid such opportunities.
To be hardened.
We deliberately put the celebration before the tempering. First of all, take care of your moral state, then take care of your body. Choose something that you like: a contrast shower, diving into a well (just be careful with this, it is a strong stress for the body), long walks in the fresh air. Do not force yourself, but test: how do I like this method? how am i feeling Do I like it? Your feelings are important. That’s why.
“If a person does something they don’t like, it can make things worse. Actually, remember what I told you? And the mood, emotional state depends on what a person expects. If she expects to go diving into that stupid hole tomorrow, and she hates it, she tried it once, twice, three times, it doesn’t get better, there is no satisfaction, then maybe that hole is hers? I am often asked: what should be done? I say – a person has to determine for himself what is good for him“, says Serhiy Danilov.
We note that hardening does not necessarily have to be radical: it can be a gradual habituation to drinking colder water, and lowering the temperature in the room during sleep, and taking a shower in colder water than you are used to. It is necessary to start hardening while being healthy.
Move more.
It is not always easy to force yourself to move, there are people who do not manage to fall in love with sports, and that is ok. Then treat physical activity like washing or brushing your teeth – you need to devote some time to it for your health.
30 minutes of walking with your favorite music in headphones, light cardio at home between work calls, evening yoga or stretching before bed with aromatic candles. Everything will do, the main thing is that you are happy and you “shake your buns” a little. Don’t torture your body with exhausting workouts if you don’t feel like them, because you will get the opposite effect.
Keep the beat.
Serhiy Danilov says that “larks” usually manage to adapt to the change of seasons more easily than owls due to the fact that they capture literally the entire possible daylight. So, maybe it makes sense to at least try to “change shoes” from the early birds.
Get up earlier, don’t forget about meals (let them be regular), go to bed earlier than midnight. Enter small rituals that will set the rhythm: first brush your teeth, wash your hands, put scented cream on your hands, read a book, sleep. Such predictability and stability will signal to the body that everything is fine and reduce stress levels.
Learn to hear yourself.
The most difficult, but necessary. At this level, there is a fine line, when you can stop falling into a trap and give no chance of depression.
“We have a psychological startup that helps people assess their mental state. Do you know what the basic pattern is? I come to work and think: that’s it, I’m burnt out, I can’t do anything, I hardly slept at night. I pass the test, it shows – everything is fine, go to work. You think it’s a contagion! You start working, and really everything is fine. But sometimes it happens when the system says after the test – everything is in the red zone for you, go and rest. And if you don’t stop here, your body will “turn off” itself, that is, it will react with some kind of pain. In many cases, when it seems that you are not taking out, you still have a lot of hidden energy. But there are situations when we need to stop and rest – instead, we drive ourselves by inertia. This ability to feel oneself consists precisely in the absence of catastrophizing and honest contact with one’s body“, the neuroscientist notes.
If you feel that you have problems in this area, try body-oriented psychotherapy. Perhaps even a few sessions with a psychologist can be useful to start asking yourself the right questions and looking for answers.
Lyudmila Panasiuk, “UP. Life”