#toughlove #humor #motivation #seasons #winter
Because we’re hibernating animals, fool.
Many people are disappointed by how little motivation they have once autumn blows in. “Well, I had all this energy this summer!” You sure did, because it was warm and sunny and didn’t suck. “But why should it be different now? It’s just a little rain.”
There’s some sort of implied expectation that the body should act the same regardless of its environment. We have this idea that there is a barrier between our bodies and the world unless we open our mouths. For instance, we intuitively know that eating an entire birthday cake or swallowing a fistful of Exlax is going to lead us to a bad time. We also know breathing in smoke or heavy metals might give us cancer or turn us into serial killers. Put stuff in, get things out, so no surprises there.
But we forget that there are other portals to the body that influence these involuntary decisions. You see a snake on a path and your ass jumps back without even thinking about it; it’s called a spinal reflex. You feel a hair on your neck and your lizard brain is SURE it’s a spider, sending you screaming and flailing your arms while everyone at the funeral service stares you down.
In more somber and (hopefully) spiderless times, your eyes are always assessing the light level and feeding it into a bundle of cells in your hypothalamus, which integrates it into your circadian rhythm. A lack of light is directly linked to feeling a little “blah” on cloudy and rainy days. There are also receptors throughout your body that can sense barometric pressure (which is why some people get headaches or joint pain on said cloudy/rainy days), temperature sensors, and many other senses we weren’t taught about in school that tell us whether we should stay TF inside.
Listen, I’m going to break it to you, and it may shock you to learn this – we are animals. We are made of bones and sinew and squishy organs and salt water and nerves. Animals, mind you, take one look at a cold, wet day and say, “hell to the naw”, and stay in their little hole in the ground that they dug especially for these shit-tastic days. They probably have a nice cache of nuts or seeds or regurgitated bug bodies or whatever it is animals store up. And then they do something marvellous – they just SIT THERE. You’d be amazed at how often animals just do nothing.
And what exactly makes you think we humans are meant to be any different? Did someone, perhaps in your youth, tell you that human beings are morally superior to other animals because we have “free will” or some such manifest destiny nonsense? – completely ignoring the fact that nearly every biological entity has a survival instinct to go dormant when the environment isn’t great? (The ones who don’t happen to not live very long, JSYK.)
So cut yourself some slack, get a warm blanket, get your basket of regurgitated bug bodies, and get to snacking. You’ll have a lot of energy to blow when the sun comes out.