Whether the Weather Be Fine

It’s Andy here today. Ann is in OurLittleCorner thinking outside the box .

Whether the weather be fine
Or whether the weather be not,
Whether the weather be cold  
Or whether the weather be hot,  
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.
(19th century British nursery rhyme)

When it comes to the weather we are very spoiled here Sonoma County. For most months of the year we’re blessed with sunny, mild days. But January definitely is not one of those blessed months; it is even considered by many to be the most depressing month of the year. One source put it this way: “it’s that time of year where darkness seems to be sucking away our daylight and cold, rainy weather eats up the rest.”

A few gloomy January evenings ago I found myself repeatedly checking my weather app (even as I was at my keyboard composing this blog). Although it was pouring rain outside I was hoping that by some miracle it would clear up by morning so our scheduled bicycle club ride would not be cancelled — again. No such luck— my app showed nothing but rain at 10:00 am when the ride was scheduled to begin.

This brought to mind Bob Dylan’s famous lyrics, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” which he wrote in 1965, long before the first weather app appeared in 2007 (as a feature on the original iPhone). Did I really need a weather app and why was I compelled to keep checking it?

I did a little digging on the web to see if others shared my weather app obsession and quickly found plenty of evidence that I’m not alone. Especially informative was a 2023 Guardian piece by Hannah Marriott with the byline “We used to check every day, now it’s every minute: how we got addicted to weather apps.” Here are a few interesting tidbits from her article:

• Fifty percent of US smartphone users regularly use weather apps
• Android and iPhone app stores list more than 10,000 apps that have the word “weather” in the title (yes, the article says 10,000) .
• Revenue generated by weather apps jumped from $530m in 2017 to $1.5bn in 2023.
• The climate crisis will increasingly spur the growth of the weather app “ecosystem”
• Weather apps are part of a general trend towards “digitizing one’s life and schedule”.
• Apps can include options such as a“bee index” as well as indices for swimming, cold and flu, campfires, sinus, golf, and arthritis

But what interested me most is why these apps are so addictive. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic and the author of Dopamine Nation, suggests that weather apps appeal to our “dopamine-seeking brains” (dopamine is the “feel-good” hormone that supposedly gives us a sense of pleasure). Lembke claims that “it is not just the quantification but also the way that those numbers are displayed, the graphs and the charts. The brain has a way of really glomming on to numbers.”

Her bit about the brain “glomming on to numbers” must be about brains other than mine. Rather than stimulating pleasure, numbers and charts create twinges of anxiety in my brain — no doubt from suppressed memories of my struggles with math and statistics as a student. That doesn’t mean that I never feel moments of pleasure when checking my weather app. As a case in point, a few days after the rain-cancelled bike ride my app showed that the next scheduled ride would be on a rain-free, sunny day. That definitely boosted my spirits.

I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m guessing that those icons of the sun displayed on the app (see the above screenshot) were what appealed to my dopamine-seeking brain. Not only has research shown that exposure to sunshine itself produces dopamine, there is good evidence that anticipation of “positive events” (such as an upcoming sunny day?) can have a similar effect. I guess this means that I’m doomed to be forever checking my weather app trying to satisfy my dopamine-hungry brain.

ln the mean time I’m going to take a break from my weather app and work on generating some dopamine by turning to Spotify and listening to Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (source of the “weatherman” lyrics), perhaps followed by John Denver’s Sunshine on My Shoulders Makes Me Happy. I’ll pass on Gene Kelley’s Singing in Rain.

Have a good remainder of January and may your dopamine flourish.