Cold calling: the positive side of icy dips and walks in winter
Spending as little as five minutes outdoors can boosts mood and self-esteem.
Temperatures have dipped and the nights are darker, but that’s no excuse not to get outside.
Experts have proven that outdoor activity is key to staying mentally and physically on top of your game in any year, but with the added pressures that 2020 brings, such steps to stay healthy have become essential.
Earlier this year, Sport Ireland and Mental Health Ireland, in conjunction with the University of Limerick (UoL), unveiled the Nature Moves campaign, highlighting benefits of even small bouts of spending time outdoors when it comes to keeping body and brain healthy.
“Nature automatically engages us in a different mindset, outside the structure of normal life or a profession,” says Dr Tadhg MacIntyre, a lecturer in the Physical Education and Sport Sciences (PESS) department at UoL. “It helps us ease stress.”
McIntyre, who heads a GoGreen (Going Outdoors: Gathering Research Evidence on Emotions and Nature) initiative at UoL and is co-author of a book entitled , says there are specific brain-boosting benefits from the outdoors that you don’t get inside. And although almost two-thirds of people in Ireland are now living in urban settings, we have an abundance of green space around us in the form of parks and countryside. There’s really no excuse not to embrace the outdoors.
“Our research looking at memory and physical activity predicts that you can recall in great detail the outdoor experience — the wind, the weather, the views, the echoes of nature — these all clearly resonate with us and provide us with robust memories of the experience,” he says.
Here’s how and why getting outside is more important than ever this winter:
Contrary to popular opinion, research has found little evidence to support the idea that we get more depressed in winter. In fact, multiple research has found the mood-boosting and health benefits of being out in the cold. Findings from the University of Essex, published in the journal , showed that spending as little as five minutes outdoors boosts mood and self-esteem. And researchers at the University of Rochester showed that just being outside in fresh air boosts feelings of vitality by as much as 90% with the psychologists who conducted that study commenting that fresh air is “a better way to get energised” than taking a drink of coffee. Add the proven benefits of exposure to nature during even a short walk outside, even when decidedly chilly, and the mental gains are huge.
Last year a study in the reported that group nature walks at any time of year had a positive impact on depression and mental wellbeing, with winter days bringing benefits of their own. “Walking in a forest in the winter when trees are without leaves has been found to have positive, restorative effects on well-being,” reported Sara Warber, honorary professor at the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health and one of the study’s authors.
Cold air is often dry air and can irritate the airways. For anyone with asthma, it can be particularly problematic —
according to the Asthma Society of Ireland (ASI), cold air can be a trigger for an asthma attack — but it can it harder for all of us to breathe. If you are heading out for a walk on a cold day, make sure your chest and throat are covered — and at the very least wear a face mask.
“During cold spells, people need to be particularly careful and proactive in managing their asthma to avoid having an asthma attack, which, for some people, can be fatal,” says Sarah O’Connor, CEO of the ASI. “Some 470,000 people in Ireland have asthma and one of these people tragically dies every week.”
Connors says a tried-and-tested way to deal with this is by wrapping a lightweight scarf loosely around your nose and mouth to warm up the air before you breathe it in, which can be useful when outdoors. “Take extra care when exercising in cold weather — warm-up for 10-15 minutes,” O’Connor says. “And if you do have asthma, take two puffs of your reliever inhaler before you start.”
However cold it feels when you first head outside on a run, you will warm up. “Initially, peripheral parts of the body — the legs and arms — will feel the coldest, but the energy produced from running quickly generates heat on even the chilliest days,” says Professor John Brewer, author of . “Use extra layers to create a personal ‘microclimate’ of warmth — air is trapped between the layers — even on the coldest days, and your body will adjust well.”
Also, make gloves more of a priority than a hat. Brewer says the head represents only about 10% of the body’s surface area and the heat lost is not as dramatic as we might think — and ensure the muscles of the arms and legs are warm. “On a bike, it is important to make sure the upper body is well covered on cold days as it is largely stationary,” Brewer says. “Invest in some good thermal layers and some thermal and wind-resistant gloves.”
Once you’ve done your outdoor exercise, scientists give the green light to warm up and refuel with a mug of hot chocolate. Milk is isotonic (meaning it has a similar concentration to body fluids) and helps to replace the fluids lost in sweat as well as providing calcium, potassium, vitamin D and the amino acids much needed for muscle maintenance — a review of 12 studies published in the reported that chocolate-flavoured milk provides “similar or superior results when compared to placebo or other recovery drinks”. Researchers at Cornell University, reporting in the showed that a mug of hot cocoa contains an antioxidant concentration almost two times stronger than red wine, two to three times stronger than green tea, and four to five times stronger than that of black tea. And while it can be served hot or cold, the warm mug of cocoa triggers the release of more antioxidants than its cold counterpart, they said.
Exposure to cold temperatures is known to trigger the body’s stores of brown fat which, unlike the blobby white fat that settles on our hips or stomach, burns calories like a furnace. When we feel cold, this metabolically active tissue launches into overdrive and a small study published in the earlier this year found that short-term exposure to cold temperatures can boost calorie burning by 15%.
"We found that individuals with active brown fat burned 20 more kilocalories than those without," says Florian W. Kiefer, lead author and associate professor of medicine at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.
Head for a hike on a cold day and your calorie-burning could soar by 34%. Researchers reporting in the revealed that male participants burned 4,787 calories per day — and women 3,880 — hiking in winter, versus 3,822 — and 3,801 for women — when walking in spring.
If you can overcome the initial discomfort — and the advice is to wear a wetsuit — then outdoor swimming might prove a tremendous mood-booster even at this time of year. Researchers reporting in the found that tension fatigue, memory and problems were significantly reduced in people who practised outdoor winter swimming for four months. They showed that water induces a stress reaction, activating the sympathetic nervous system and increasing the secretion of catecholamines, hormones that influence mood. “This is probably one factor behind the refreshing and pain-relieving effect of winter swimming,” the researchers concluded.
Jumping straight into cold water for a prolonged swim will cause blood pressure, heart rate and levels of stress hormones to rise which won’t help your health or mood — it is important to acclimatise by getting in the water slowly and gently for two to three minutes at a time, says Michael Tipton, professor of human and applied physiology in the School of Sport, Health & Exercise Science at the University of Portsmouth.
However, the more often you swim, the more your body gets used to the cold temperatures. In a 2018 paper published in , Tipton reported how a programme of weekly open cold-water swimming led to “an immediate improvement in mood after each swim and a sustained and gradual reduction in symptoms of depression and consequently a reduction in, and then cessation of, medication” in a 24-year-old woman.
Experts are recommending that keeping a window open, even in winter, as it allows the coronavirus to escape, leading to a lower risk of infection. And there is another reason to keep the fresh air flowing inside.
“We have found that it’s often simple tools which can be the most powerful when restoring a sense of calm and clarity,” says Martin Rogan, chief executive of Mental Health Ireland. “Whether it’s throwing open the window while doing the housework or listening to the birds sing while gardening.”
Airtight double glazing also creates a warm, stifling environment that doesn’t help with fat-burning. In trials at the US National Institutes of Health, people were asked to lie still in a cold room wearing light clothing for half an hour at a time.
Results showed they burned as many calories as they had on an hour-long cycle thanks to changes in activity levels of their body’s brown fat stores. “Just by sleeping in a cold room they gained metabolic advantages,” the researchers wrote.
Even if you do it for an hour a day during the winter, let the cooler air inside.
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