It's July 12th, you are halfway through your summer break, and the weather has been raging hot. On this particular day, your friends had asked if you wanted to go rock climbing. You had checked the weather the night before for the next day so that you could plan your rock climbing outfit accordingly. You see it's supposed to reach record temperatures close to 105 degrees. You remember that your doctor told you your anxiety medications can act differently due to heat and increasing body temperature. He said that the side effects can be much worse and that the meds react differently to heat and sometimes aren't able to give the full dose of medicine. You really wanna go rock climbing with your friends, but now your mom is super worried about how the different side effects due to the heat can mess with your mental health. 

Heat has always had effects on people's physical well-being, but did you know that the heat can affect your mental health just as severely if not worse? According to the American Psychiatry Association blog post, “Extreme Heat Can Take a Toll on Mental Health,” “extreme heat is associated with increases in irritability and symptoms of depression and with an increase in suicide,” meaning heat has the power to make you feel very irritable, making you sometimes feel out of control or violent, abuse substances, and even self-harm or end your life. Heat, however, is not all that bad; to a degree it can be very good and have positive impacts on your life. For some, it relieves stress and creates an environment where people who are struggling with mental health can take time to themselves and enjoy a nice warm sunny day in July. People with preexisting mental health issues have a greater impact because the heat can affect their medications and have an impact on the effectiveness of medication. 

Not only does the heat have great impacts on medication but the extreme heat also impacts your mind. “Ecological grief and eco-anxiety are terms describing the sense of loss or the anxiety people feel related to climate change, including the loss of a stable future,” according to the blog post cited above. The recent change in the climate has been based around increases in heat temperatures. Knowing when your mind is starting to act differently due to the heat affecting the brain is super serious and something you need to look out for. Knowing this type of thing can happen to anyone, it is extremely important to be patient with your friends and others knowing that they could be struggling with mental health related to the heat! Excessive exposure to heat impacts memory attention and our mental reaction time. The heat slows down the brain and makes us lack the ability to think and react quickly. Heat can make us act irrationally and treat ourselves unkindly. Mental health is not something to joke about, and people are struggling with it daily, so check in on your friends and family every now and then when the Salt Lake City temperatures start rising! Notice when your friends are acting more irritable and let them in on a few possible solutions. Some ways to calm yourself down include finding breathing exercises, like taking deep, long, slow breaths to ease anxiety. Another solution to calming your heat-induced anxiety and stress is drinking a lot of water and staying super hydrated!