Why Spring Hits Harder Than You Expect

We're over a week into spring and a lot of people aren't feeling the energy surge they were expecting. If you're more fatigued, more tense, more reactive, or just feeling off — this episode is for you.

It's not in your head. There's a specific physiological reason spring can feel harder than it should, especially if you've been dealing with chronic health conditions or you live in a northern climate.

In this episode I break down what's actually happening in your body as it transitions from winter's lower output state into spring's higher metabolic demand — and why that shift requires mineral support most people don't have coming out of winter.

We cover:

• Why your body feels worse when things are supposed to be getting better
• The role of sodium, potassium, and magnesium in seasonal transitions
• Why muscle tension and stiffness spike in early spring
• Why seasonal allergies are a mineral story as much as a pollen story
• What it actually means to support your body through the season rather than push through it

Spring isn't asking you to do more. It's asking you to be resourced differently.

New to the podcast? Start here → What Is Rewilded Wellness and How Does the Body Heal Itself

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. We are just a little bit over a week into spring, and I don't know about you, but it has been a welcome arrival, even if it's felt a little slower, maybe, maybe a little heavier than usual. Oh, we had a tough winter here in the north. Many of you can relate. Um, I have been busy out in the garden as much as possible. All my current beds are prepped. Uh, my cool season crops are already in. I'm waiting on that last frost date so I can plant even more. My little seed packets are waiting. Got a lot of little seedlings uh gearing up as well. And today I'm planning on getting into the woods for some early nettles because I've been noticing them really coming back. But before I go and do all the things, I wanted to sit down and talk to you about something that I've been noticing with a lot of people lately. This feeling of not quite as energized as they expected to feel now that spring is here. Um, you know, people are really looking forward to this season, especially if you live in the north, and are finding it harder than they thought. And I hear this pretty much every year, believe it or not, but I'm hearing it a little bit more right now, especially from people who have been dealing with more of a chronic health pattern, chronic health conditions, um, you know, and people, again, like those of us who live here in the north, of course, I'm in Southeast Pennsylvania, just for context. And there is a specific physiological reason for it that I don't think we're talking about enough. So I want to get into that today. If you're new here, welcome to Rewilded Wellness. Uh, this is a space where I'm looking to the natural world to help us all reconnect with it and even understand our human biology more in light of nature's ways, right? So if you haven't listened to my um episode on what rewilded wellness actually is and how the body heals itself, I'm gonna link that in the show notes for you. Definitely go back and check it out. Uh, it it was a good one to kind of set the premise of what this podcast is all about. Okay, so let's talk about what's actually happening in your body right now as we move into spring because it's more interesting and specific than people realize. So all winter long, you know, the our bodies have been in what I think of as like a lower throughput state, right? It's not bad or anything like that. It's just slower. Um, you know, the body changes because we have less light, so less cellular activity, more conservation, right? So we we adapt to that change, right? Um, so the body has to kind of like, I don't know, tighten things up a little bit, right? Lower demand, lower turnover, lower output, right? Intelligent, right? You look at the ground, right? Like I just talked about how my gardens are started, but they're not quite awake yet. That's just our bodies honoring the season. Then spring shows up, you know, we get more light right now. We have, I think we have a good 12-hour window from sunrise to sunset. Um, and the light's going to keep increasing until the summer solstice, right? So more light is not just about, okay, my mood feels better now, right? We all know that. Like every client I'm talking to is like, oh my gosh, thank God for the sun. My mood definitely feels a lot better. The light helps with cellular signaling. So when the light increases, it's going to send signals to your body to increase mitochondrial activity, to increase your thyroid function at the tissue level, increase dopamine and overall nervous system activation and even move fluid differently. So your body basically gets the message: okay, we're turning things back on. We're waking up, right? And that sounds great. That's what we've been waiting for all winter. But most people don't understand, this is the heart of what I want to talk about today, is that turning things back on means your body starts moving what was sitting still all winter, right? So, you know, and this can vary from person to person, especially if you've been in a chronic health scenario in your body for years, right? Um, you just don't have those reserves, that voltage, that charge, right? So what's gonna happen is, you know, all these things start moving, right? Metabolic byproducts, inflammatory debris, stored stress chemistry, maybe stagnant fluid. Um, and all of that movement, all of that ramp up requires minerals, specifically sodium, salt, for your extracellular fluid and your blood volume, and then potassium for that intracellular function for your muscles to relax. Then we need magnesium, of course, right? For ATP production, nervous system regulation, so many things. So if those minerals aren't, you know, you aren't getting sufficient minerals, um, you know, and most people coming out of winter are already in like a chronic burnout pattern to some degree that I work with, that I speak to. Um, and so the signal to increase output is there, right? Spring is here, the light is here, your body got the message, but the resources to support that shift are not that, are not there yet. And so your system can be in this like strange in-between state, like trying to mobilize, right? Maybe not able to as well as you would like, not clearing efficiently, right? Not able to sustain that increased activity it's wanting to and trying to step into. And that's when you feel it. You're maybe you're more tired than you think you should be, or more tense, especially in your neck and shoulders and jaw, maybe more on edge, or even having like that held guarded feeling, you can't quite shake. A lot of people are like, why do I get an afternoon crash? They think it comes out of nowhere. That's just running out of usable electrolytes for the level of activity your body is trying to step into. So instead of like this smooth, energizing spring activation, you get activation, but instability and then compensation, which can show up as fatigue and tightness. And many people are like having this frustrating feeling of like, well, why do I feel not as good as I want? Like maybe I feel they think they feel worse, right? When they think, okay, well, it's spring, I'm supposed to be feeling better. Um the answer, the bottom line is like your body is trying to shift into a higher gear, but your fuel tank isn't matching it for a simple analogy, right? A lot of people are talking about being stiff and tight, right? Um, I'm hearing this one a lot too. And so when potassium is low relative to what your body needs, muscles don't relax cleanly. They just turn on and off the way they're supposed, or they don't turn on and off the way they're supposed to. And they kind of stay in this partial contraction that doesn't like fully release. So it's like this tight, I don't know, held, almost buffered feeling can be in your neck, your jaw, your diaphragm, your shoulders, your hips, all those spots that everyone gets so tight in. Um and it's not that you suddenly became more tense. Okay, it's that the increased metabolic demand of spring is exposing some gaps, particularly, I'm thinking potassium, right? Um, and it wasn't as obvious when your system was running in that slower winter mode because the demand wasn't high enough to make it visible. And now it is. All right, most people in the north feel so much better in the summer. This is everyone's telling me, like, oh, I feel so much better in the summer. I feel my best in the summer. And I want to offer a little bit of a different way to think about that. It's not just the weather, okay? It's that summer naturally supports the mineral and metabolic conditions your body actually thrives in, right? We know that more light means more energy, more ATP, more time outside. Hopefully, people are going outside more. Um, means a better circadian rhythm, right? Maybe more local foods, more food variety, more fluids, more minerals coming in naturally without thinking about it as much. So it's the same body, it's just a different environment and a higher capacity matched to higher demand. That's the piece. So when capacity matches demand, you feel good. But when demand outpaces capacity, you struggle. So if you are a northern climate person, many of my listeners and clients are, this transition tends to hit harder for a really simple reason because the contrast is just much bigger, right? A darker winter means a lower baseline, a brighter spring means a sharper metabolic shift. So the gap between your where your body was in winter and what spring is now asking is just a bit wider, right? It's very physiological. Um, we just have all this adapting that we've done, right? And we are just recalibrating. So allergies. I want to talk a little bit about that. I I kind of alluded to this in an episode I did a while back in Pisces season on lymphatic flow and so on and so forth, um, trying to help people understand like how we move through the year. But I want to talk about seasonal allergies because a lot of people think, and you may or may not get true seasonal allergies, but you may struggle. And a lot of people think uh spring allergies are just about like the all the pollen's coming out suddenly, right? And pollen certainly can be a trigger. Um, but what determines how your body responds to that trigger has a lot to do with what's going on inside your body, your your barrier integrity, your gut lining, even your respiratory lining, your immune signaling, and your ability to clear histamine. And, you know, there's a lot of things that go into that for each of us are all in different places, right? But it does depend on minerals, right? We we need magnesium, potassium, we need all these minerals to help the body as we are being exposed to these environmental things, right? So a lot of people coming out of winter and you know, their thyroid has slowed down naturally, speaking, like it's just kind of a normal thing to for the system to slow down in the winter to restore. Um, so a lot of times, you know, people will have low tissue potassium. Um, and so, you know, your cells don't regulate super well. So then, you know, there's issues with inflammation, um, and it like this increase in histamine clearance becomes less efficient. So a lot of people are entering spring already undermineralized, um, leaky gut, you know, gut barrier issues, inflammation in their gut, you know, I've talked about this in the last bunch of episodes about all the layers of our um gut terrain, right? Um, and so we enter spring, we're undermineralized, we have some imbalances in our gut, the demand increases because of the exposures in nature, and so then the system, you know, each person's system becomes a little more reactive uh if in that state, right? So it's not that there's just more pollen. Um it's that your terrain isn't resourced to handle it the way it would be if your minerals were robust, your voltage was really good, your gut was a little more integral, right? So I've spent a lot of time in the last few months really like building my terrain map to help you all understand like these layers of your body for that very reason. So we can understand how we navigate life season by season, as well as just like what's really going on in our individual terrains. So, what do we do with all of this, right? Spring isn't just about more light, more things growing, more energy. Um, it's actually increasing our the metabolic demand, and it does require higher mineral support, uh, especially those intracellular minerals like potassium. And most people miss that. They they get into this whole thing of like, all right, I need to eat lighter, you know, I need to do a detox, right? Definitely moving more, getting outside more, and those things do help. However, if your mineral substrate isn't there, the underlying energy you need isn't there, too much of that too fast can actually make you feel worse, right? Because you're increasing demand on a system that's already under-resourced. So there's a lot of layers to this, of course. But when you begin to support the minerals, you know, getting a lot more support from sodium, potassium, magnesium, for example, those are kind of, I always have to talk about those with everyone. Obviously, there's more, but when you're getting that adequate charge from those minerals, you know, um, it's gonna help the shift that your body's trying to make in spring, right? Your experience will change, you know, tension will drop, energy will smooth out, your body will stop holding so much tension and start moving more easily. And that's what, you know, mineral support actually does. It doesn't force, we don't want to think about it in terms of like forcing change. We want to think about it in terms of creating conditions for your body to do what it was designed to do seasonally without compensating, without like holding all this tension or without, you know, that exhausted, wired, tired feeling that a lot of people get that makes spring a lot harder than it needs to be. So if you're feeling the spring transition in your body right now, and maybe you've felt it for many years, maybe you've loved the spring but dread the spring because you're worried about seasonal allergies or fatigue. You know, like a lot of times people might not get allergic, reactive sneezing and all that stuff, but they may find themselves feeling very tired, very tired because they can't process, you know, um all the variables that are changing in the spring. You know, um, so this is this is the kind of work we do in in my minerals and microbes client work. You know, I'm I'm looking at a heritage and mineral analysis to see kind of your your nervous system stability, your mineral patterns, you know, relative to seasonal demand, but like obviously this stretches beyond just season to season. It goes into all of your life, right? So we can build support that matches what your body is genuinely needing to do, right? Not some generic protocol, but terrain-specific work that really respects where your body is at right now and what this current season is asking of you. And of course, we go into the gut terrain as well in much more depth to match where your body is at. So I'm on boarding new clients for April. I have some space. If you've been considering working together, definitely head over, check out the link, read all read it thoroughly. You know, if you have questions, you're welcome to email me. The link's in the show notes. Uh I look forward to supporting those who are really ready to delve in. And if you're out there foraging nettles this weekend, I'll be right there with you. I'll be talking about that soon on the podcast again, a little bit. I appreciate you all being here. Stay wild, stay well, and I'll talk to you soon.