There are people who love the days when it rains on the street and the best plan in their mind is to stay indoors while listening to the rain. For many, it may be associated with a depressed personality, but psychology suggests that enjoying the rain has a lot to do with the way our brains process low-intensity stimuli and seek relief from stress.
Hate summer. Before we know why this happens to rain lovers, we must deny the fact that everyone is affected by the weather in the same way. Here we take as a reference a study from 2008 that analyzed more than 1,200 people and concluded that the average effect of time on mood is small, but with great individual variation. Curiously though, the concept of “deep relaxation” disappeared in the rain, since the lack of sunlight was directly linked to greater fatigue.
It was three years later when a new study revealed more, analyzing nearly 500 teenage girls and their mothers and their climate profiles. One of them was called ‘Summer Haters’, represented by 27% of teenagers and 12% of mothers, who felt happier and more satisfied with more rain, less sun and lower temperatures.
theory. To understand the appeal of rain, psychology turned to Attention Retrieval Theory (ART), originally formulated by Stephen Kaplan in 1955. Here Kaplan proposed that our environment reduces our ability to concentrate through what he calls “hard fascination,” which is intense stimulation that completely absorbs attention, such as a screen or traffic.
As an antidote, nature provides a “soft fascination” that is nothing more than an effortless attention, induced by subtle stimuli such as watching the movement of clouds, the rustling of leaves or the flow of water.
the rain It fits perfectly with this soft fascination here, since it is a constant, predictable, and low-intensity stimulus that occupies a small portion of attention, allowing the rest of the brain to wander, reflect, and restore itself. Furthermore, it is well known that the sounds of nature relax us a bit, the sound of water falling is one of the sounds that has the most effect in increasing positive emotions.
What happens in the brain? To understand this effect, a study published in 2017 combined functional magnetic resonance imaging and heart rate variability. Here they discovered that compared to artificial sounds, natural sounds increased the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for the ‘relaxation’ mode and improved performance in external attention tasks.
At the physiological level, the effect is subtle, but measurable, as in 2010 40 participants were given a stressful math task and then made to listen to natural sounds or sounds. And while heart variability didn’t show major changes, skin conductance (a classic indicator of stress and sweating) recovered slightly faster with nature sounds.
white noise It is said that the sound of rain can instantly reduce stress and cortisol levels and that is why it is used as white noise for sleep. However, the evidence in our table tells us otherwise, since after measuring cortisol in a natural environment, it was found that the parasympathetic part of our nervous system was activated, but the stress hormone levels did not decrease.
Picture | Leonardo Pavao
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