Just a few degrees’ difference can turn a dreary rainy day into a nigh on magical scene straight out of a snow globe. “It’s more glorious and beautiful than everything else” in weather, says Alan Stewart, a weather and climate psychologist at the University of Georgia. Of course, snow has its haters, but there are some powerful scientific reasons why many people are so enamored by gently falling ice crystals.
For people who grew up carefully turning pajamas inside out and backward in hopes of manifesting some flakes, snow can be a powerful reminder of childhood snow days—that joyful surprise when another expected day of sitting in school turned into one that was instead filled with snowball fights or sledding.
But there are also plenty of reasons snow can appeal to people without that fond nostalgia. In fact, says psychologist and writer Kari Leibowitz, snow quite literally alters our physical experience of the world. For example, freshly fallen snow is porous enough to absorb sound well, making the world quieter.
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And it plays even more strongly on our sense of sight. “There’s something about the clean, fresh, white snow that is very aesthetically pleasing,” says Leibowitz, who has written a book about mental health in winter. One aspect of that visual appeal, she adds, is the way snow reflects light in the darker months “A lot of people really struggle with winter darkness as much as they struggle with the cold,” she says. “And so the brightening effect of the snow, I think, is really powerful.”
Snow also changes the very shape of the world people see around them, Stewart says, pointing to the way a fresh blanket of it hides and yet reveals our surroundings. “Things that you look at every day suddenly can appear very different,” he says. “You maybe see the place in a new way.”
Snow often nudges people into interacting with their surroundings differently as well, Leibowitz says. “I think the snow and the ice give us things to engage with in a sensory way that can be very playful and very childlike,” Leibowitz says. “There’s so much you can do with it in a tactile way.”
Whether school is canceled or not, snow shakes up the routines of life. “When the snow actually prevents you from going places and doing things, it’s a disruption of the norm,” Leibowitz says, “which can be annoying and frustrating and inconvenient—but can also be really fun and really exciting.”
Perhaps what’s most striking about our response to snow is that tension itself. In the right conditions, snow can be enchanting. But for certain people or under other circumstances, the same weather can become the very opposite: annoying, exhausting or even depression-inducing. “A little bit of the traditional dark winter, even if it has the wonder of snow—a susceptible person could experience it as really challenging emotionally,” Stewart says.
Leibowitz advocates adopting a mindset that embraces changing seasons, which can help people stay open to snow’s potential charms. “I think, in a lot of places in the U.S., we sort of delude ourselves into thinking, ‘I’m just going to do everything the same and throw on a coat and a hat and call it a day,’” she says. “We’re not adapting enough; we’re not changing our behavior enough. And so then all of these things like the cold and the darkness are just a burden.”
Leibowitz recommends slowing down in the winter, taking inspiration from the long nights and cold days—and argues that snow can be a helpful cue to do so. “It’s such a clear visual reminder that we’re in a different season that perhaps it inspires people to respond more adaptively,” she says.
But as climate change continues to unfold, some historically snowy areas will lose the most magical precipitation there is—and face nothing but cold rain. “There’s a lot of places in the world that are right on this borderline where the difference of a couple of degrees of warming is the difference between a white, snowy winter ... and a gray, rainy winter,” Leibowitz says. “I think there’s a lot that is lost when we lose the cold and when we lose the snow.”