We have spent our entire lives blaming spring for our tiredness. Science has just shown that we have lived deceived

March is coming, the days are getting longer, temperatures rise and suddenly our body begins to fill with a feeling tiredapathy and drowsiness that takes over us. Traditionally, this is considered ‘spring astheniaand people, logically, do not stop searching for their symptoms on the Internet and buying expensive vitamin complexes to compensate for the bad feeling that the change of season leaves. But… What is true in all this?

A paradigm shift. Until recently, evidence on this phenomenon was scarce and contradictory; however, a key investigation published in the Journal of Sleep Research has recently come to shed light on the matter.

The research, led by Dr. Christine Blume from the Center for Chronobiology at the Psychiatric University Hospital of Basel, followed 418 adults from Germany, Switzerland and Austria for more than a year, from April 2024 to September 2025. Every six weeks, participants answered questionnaires about fatigue, drowsiness, insomnia and sleep quality, and at the end of the research they only had to cross-check information to determine if there really was any interfering pattern. with our health.

The results. Here what was seen is that a resounding 47% of the participants claimed to suffer from “spring asthenia”, but the reality is that when the information was cross-checked there was absolutely no seasonal or monthly variation in the levels of fatigue, daytime sleepiness or quality of sleep. And statistically the tiredness that people feel in spring is statistically identical to what they feel in autumn or winter.

In fact, fatigue in daily activities tended to decrease slightly as the days had more daylight hours, without any specific “peak” of fatigue being recorded during the spring. In this way, the conclusion drawn is that the discrepancy between what people think they feel and what objective data shows suggests that we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon and not a genuine seasonal syndrome.

Why do we believe it? This is where the study gets genuinely interesting, since the authors do not simply deny the phenomenon, but rather propose a psychological explanation for why we experience it so convincingly.

• Nocebo effect: if we expect to be tired in spring, we interpret any sign of fatigue as confirmation of what we thought was going to happen.
• Cognitive dissonance: good weather generates high social pressure to enjoy it with outdoor activities. The problem is that when the energy does not appear, saying that you have ‘spring asthenia’ is a good excuse to not feel guilty for not following the group.
• Labeling effect: Like wine tasting better when we’re told it’s expensive, knowing that “you get tired in spring” actively changes how we interpret our own physical sensations.

What chronobiology says. It is a reality that we are not robots and that our body reacts to the environment, and this is where chronobiology confirms that there are seasonal variations in sleep linked to the number of hours of daylight we enjoy.

Studies in pre-industrial populations in Tanzania, Namibia or Bolivia show that in winter they sleep approximately one hour more than in summer. Likewise, recent research on university students in Seattle confirms that exposure to daylight is vital for our circadian rhythm, however, none of these physiological changes translate into a “clinical picture” or a peak in fatigue in spring.

In medicine. Nowadays, when you go to your primary care doctor, it is impossible to receive treatment for ‘spring asthenia’ because it is not included in any official classification. However, doctors warn that a patient who arrives with great fatigue for consultation should not be sent away, even though he relates it to the arrival of spring.

It must be remembered that there are many diseases that can cause this condition, such as anemia, a severe allergy, an infection or even thyroid disorders, among others.

A lucrative business. While science dismisses the existence of ‘spring asthenia’, the reality is that people’s sensation is the perfect breeding ground for private clinics and dietary supplement brands. When we feel bad, we want a quick solution with a pill, and this makes the sale of multivitamin complexes, caffeine pills and a host of products related to reducing fatigue increase their sales.

Images | Vitaly Gariev Arno Smit

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