what is going on inside the body?
“You’re not at your best when you’re not comfortable,” says C. Munro Cullum, a clinical neuropsychologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The discomfort of heat and the energy your body needs to cool down can reduce your overall resilience.
Our bodies get used to certain baseline levels of stress, says Dr. Martin Paulus, scientific director and director of the Award-Winning Brain Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who collaborated with Dr. Obradovich on the 2018 study. says that As the body tries to regulate its temperature during a heat wave, it puts additional strain, increasing stress and inflammation.People with pre-existing mental health conditions may be particularly vulnerable to added heat stress. , which may exacerbate symptoms.
What happens in the brain during extreme heat is difficult to study, Dr. Paulus said. You can experiment with how you endure, but you can’t do it over days, weeks, or months at a time. It is very important in understanding how climate change will affect us in the long term.
But the fact that this relationship between heat and mental health is so consistent in people around the world suggests that heat has some effect on the brain, says Nori-Sarma. Some researchers have hypothesized that heat may be the culprit, Dr. brain signal imbalance Also brain inflammationBut another leading theory is that heat causes sleep disturbances, which can exacerbate mental health symptoms.
Warm nights significantly worsen sleep, Dr. Obradovic said. “And the vast body of literature in psychology and psychiatry has found that poor sleep, sleep disturbances, and insomnia are very closely associated with worsening mental health over time.”
An explanation for the effects of heat on mental health could come from a combination of these different existing theories, Dr. Obradovich added.