Ok, I am not making this up. "As the thermometer goes up, so does your mood -- according to a new University of Colorado study. CU scientist Christopher Lowry, an assistant professor of integrative physiology, received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue studying the link between temperature and mood." At first, I was going to make this about place, one of the four elements of the "good life" in the study done by the MetLife Mature Market Institute with Dr. Richard Leider. Leider hypothesized that the Good Life was composed of four elements—Money, Meaning, Medicine and Place; and went on to discover that Meaning trumps all of them in the minds of the majority of more than a thousand persons aged 45-74 in this study group.
But enough about that, I was using the sun-baked beach headline to congratulate myself on the fact that I have settled on an island off the Carolina coast. But as I read on, I learned that warmth can come from within as well. The sense of well-being that comes from warmth can come from elevating your body temperature with exercise. Another data point on why we feel better after we exercise, isn't it? It seems that we have known since the 1970's that warming a small area of the skin on rats in the laboratory produced heightened levels of serotonin in the brain. So, we can get this mood-elevating boost from lying on the beach, or from exercising. What about the warm feeling that doing something for someone else can produce? Let's ask Dr. Lowry to work that into his study. I think I know already, but I'd like to know if science backs that up.
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