Paul Hopkins: When there’s a bit of a spring in our step

It's perhaps an age thing but the last few years I have found the dark and dank of winter sapping what I have left of the will to carry on. That's probably an exaggeration. That said, I am not alone in finding the short days and long nights somewhat debilitating. I don't go outdoors as much, almost to the point of hibernation.

The good news is the days are slowly getting longer, the temperature is creeping up, the flowers are beginning to bloom, and we are beginning to find that spring in our step. And in spring a young man's fancy turns to... blue sky dating.

Blue sky dating is a term coined by UK research by Badoo which finds that spring with its lighter evenings and warmer weather has a positive impact on 74% of young people who are dating. More than half of those surveyed said dating in late autumn and winter was “more challenging”, with more than a third feeling “they couldn't be bothered”.

So, singletons' mating habits aside, what about the rest of us?

Spring has two official start dates, depending on your priorities. For meteorologists, spring will arrive on the first day in March, according to their neat, evenly spaced seasons formalised in the 1900s. But if you plot the seasons in line with our planetary activity, as humans have done for thousands of years, the 'astronomical seasons' show spring starting at what is termed the vernal equinox, which this year falls on 20th March. So, despite belief among many, February is not spring which may go some way to explaining the rain and wind of late.

The equinoxes (spring and autumn) lie halfway between the shortest and longest days of the year. At these points, fleetingly, day and night are of roughly even lengths all over the planet – closer to conditions in Africa, where our species began life, and where seasonal swings in daylight hours are less dramatic, especially closer to the Equator, on which I stood in Kenya back in 2008 while covering the short civil war there for Irish papers.

These conditions – where day and night are of roughly even length – may well suit the human circadian rhythm, that daily cycle that tells the body when to sleep, wake, eat and carry out various other biological processes, according to research at Queen's University.

Good light is why the onset of spring feels so good, important even – the temperature playing second fiddle. We are more likely to get snow in March than in December, according to the Met Office. It’s just a lot brighter. There is a sudden jump in the hours of sunshine we get, which is dictated by both daylight hours and weather. Ergo, December is the dullest month, with an average 41 hours of sunlight. In January, it’s 47 hours, February jumps to 70 hours and then there’s quite a leap into March where we get – or should get, climate change notwithstanding – 102 hours of sunshine.

At this time of year, too, when the sun climbs higher in the sky during the daytime it’s going through a shorter slice of the atmosphere than it did on winter days, so the sky ends up being bluer. And blues skies and lovely light make us feel good. Unlike the hedgehog, we are not hibernators by nature, despite my aforementioned enforcement of such.

During the pandemic lockdown I would take my daily constitutional – a phrase used by my father, an avid walker – over the hill and down by the water mills and the lack of pollutants in the air made for bluer skies and the soaring sounds of birds, in that time of grounded air travel, was indeed sweet music.

As well as the cheering colour of the sky, bright spring light can make us happier. In fact, light can be as effective in treating depression as, say, Prozac. A 2016 trial by researchers from several institutions in Canada, including the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, treated people with major depressive disorder without a seasonal (winter) pattern – Seasonal Adjustment Disorder (SAD) – to compare Prozac versus light therapy. They found that light therapy was just as effective as Prozac in treating depression.

I remember as a young boy my mother often telling me to “go out and get some daylight”. And my pals and I would gallop across the sprawling suburban landscape, the light dazzling in our eyes and the warmth enveloping our young hearts and lithe limbs.

Seems like light years ago now...