Apparently, Spring Fever is an Illness

Any old geezers out there with spring fever?

Variables

Michele Moore-V

First published Mar 27, 2018

Apparently, spring fever is an illness. At least, that’s what I read in this old Scientific American* article:

“There’s an illness that has been documented by poets for centuries. Its symptoms include a flushed face, increased heart rate, appetite loss, restlessness and daydreaming. It’s spring fever, that wonderfully amorphous disease we all recognize come April and May.”

“Spring fever is not a definitive diagnostic category,” says Michael Terman, director of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center. “But I would say it begins as a rapid and yet unpredictable fluctuating mood and energy state that contrasts with the relative low [of the] winter months that precede it.”

Have you ever had this ‘illness’? I used to get such severe cases of spring fever that multi-tasking was a treatment rather than a problem. Simultaneously arranging appointments on the phone, reviewing invoices, stretching, and unloading the dishwasher, was a typical self-treatment regime. Furthermore, my level of energy drove me to assign myself all kinds of jobs, only some of which were necessary and all of which were overseen by a completely unrealistic belief that spring had actually arrived. Which is why I lost a lot of bedding out plants to frost.

I’m not sure how my family felt, but sometimes my own enthusiasm made me crazy.

When spring fever hit me, my daily run became a sprint, my foot came down too hard on the gas pedal of my truck, and my office work piled up on my desk because I could not bear sitting still while the sun melted the snow and the river trails and mountains called. I pushed the boundaries of the volume dial on my stereo and did household chores at the speed of light and checked the soil against the house for signs of life morning noon and night. I often planted flowers out too early and then had to cover them with plastic garbage bags and blankets night after night. I washed the windows only to have a spring snowstorm or early rain splatter them with water stains all over again. It took me years to accept that there was no point in washing windows before July. I volunteered to help with too many community and school spring events that took up spare time I needed to complete university assignments and study for exams, which I often found myself doing in my Jeep while waiting for one of the kids to finish music or dance lessons. Unless I had to make a grocery store run because it never occurred to me that the kids would be just fine if I relaxed with a cup of coffee and didn’t replenish the peanut butter for another day.

Are you irritated yet? I am.

Weekends were the worst. I was a victim of my own rule that weekend down time was crucial to my children’s well-being. Therefore, on Saturday mornings, while they contentedly remained in their pajamas building lego castles until their natural rhythms told them it was time to go outside and stomp through some ice encrusted puddles, I was rearranging the furniture and cooking gigantic batches of hamburger soup to fill the freezer for the upcoming soccer season which would have me on the sidelines squirming in my chair, shadow kicking the ball on behalf of their team.

Why couldn’t I just curl up on the couch on those mornings and read a book?

My spring fever was also induced by late winter chinooks. At the end of one of those exhilarating early March days when under a blinding sun the snow pack had been reduced to a defeated crumpled layer, I would be on my deck barbequing burgers while the sky turned the colour of ripening saskatoons and Bruce Springsteen and Tom Cochrane blasted through the open deck door.

At the end of a southern Alberta chinook day, when you’re in the grip of a premature case of spring fever, the combination of rock and roll and the scent of sizzling burgers on the bbq is truly intoxicating.

More from the SA article:

“Such spring fever remains a fuzzy medical category, but there has been a great deal of research on how seasonal changes affect our mood and behavior. Matthew Keller, postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond, studied 500 people in the U.S. and Canada and found that the more time people spent outside on a sunny spring day the better their mood. Such good moods decreased during the hotter summer months and there is an optimal temperature for them, Keller claims: 72 degrees Fahrenheit, otherwise known as room temperature.”

Side note: Cheese, most fruit, and leftover pizza is optimal at room temperature, but I resent the idea that people are too. Surely, we can be equally tasteful at 65 or 80 degrees?

No doubt we would all agree that we don’t need a scientific study to tell us that spending time outside on a sunny spring day puts us in a good mood. But there’s a good mood, and then there’s the mania of spring fever which can drive people like me into states of euphoria that no weather forecast of an impending snowstorm will dispel.

In those days of my worst bouts of spring fever, had I been a tree, the energy I felt would have had me sending new branches out in every direction at once, quivering with excitement over the possibilities of how many birds my new arms would receive. Had I been a bird, well, I would probably have had rocks thrown at me by humans who did not appreciate my 4:30 a.m. performance of the avian version of Born to Be Wild.

Fortunately, I no longer suffer this ‘illness’. In fact, just recalling all that activity wears me out.

I have firmly concluded that there is only one cure for spring fever and that is age. While I’m still energized by the rising temperatures and sometimes forget to exhale when I’m in the forest breathing in the invigorating scent of warming earth and plants, I can relax with a cup of coffee in a pool of warm sunlight filling my living room. I don’t even think about planting a flower before June, and someone else washes my windows these days, so that I have more time for hiking and cycling.

The luxury of age is the ability to savour the moment. It is also the release from the often reckless intensity of youth. Just think of Bill Watterson’s Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, who, freed from the prison of school for the summer, went ripping down a hill in his wagon wondering aloud to his toy tiger friend:

Ever notice how the older people get, the slower they do things? I wonder why that is. I would think that the less life you had left, the faster you’d want to do everything, so you could pack more into the remaining years. You can bet when I’m a geezer like Dad, I’ll be going like a maniac.’

Here’s to spring, spring fever, and, to adult maniacs, may you find your nirvana without crashing your wagon.

*(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-spring-fever-is-a-real-phenomenon/)

photo: David Thielen, Unsplash