It’s smokey outside and it impacts my physical and mental health

I woke up this morning to an air quality warning with levels at 10+ on the air quality health index. Sadly, with climate change, these warnings are becoming more frequent during the summer months where I live. You can’t plan for specific ones, but you do have to plan that they will happen. As an athlete and an asthmatic, each one causes stress. Obviously, I’m grateful that I’m not faced with the fire itself and I’m concerned about all the people who are but, perhaps not surprisingly, my first thoughts are often what does this mean for my training.

If you are a coach in Canada The Coaching Association of Canada has some free elearning modules including one on air quality. It’s funny though, because as a coach, there is no question in my mind that the moment it hits 7 and higher practices are cancelled. In the numbers prior to that I send out notices to my teams to use their own discretion based on their health. But, when it comes to my own training, it is a whole other conversation.

I found an article this morning that I thought might help me think about this issue. Giles, Thomson, Lesser, and Brandenburg (2024) examined how wildfire smoke affects physical activity and mental well-being. The results are what you would expect – when there is smoke people engage in less physical activity, particularly vigorous activity, and move more of their activity indoors. At the same time, they report worse mental well-being when there is smoke. There is quite a bit of evidence that physical activity supports mental health. So, it seems to me like there is a double whammy here. Not only does the smoke itself potentially affect your mental health but then you also lose some of the tools like spending time outdoors and physical activity that help support your mental health.

Okay, so how did this shape my thinking? None of the above was surprising. I would very much be average in my responses compared to their participants. But, it got me thinking about how, if my mental well-being is worse, I might also have a harder time seeing the long-term plan and how changing or even stopping one or two workouts will not destroy all the training I’ve done. In other words, if the smoke itself impacts my mental well-being, and then my mental well-being is further impacted by lack of physical activity (and outdoor time), then I may also have reduced resilience to be able to respond to these changes in positive ways. As a result, that single workout becomes blown out of proportion in the overall training plan.

With my athletes, I’m always thinking about the long-term picture, and while I’d like to have that practice, doing damage to their health by going ahead isn’t worth it. But for myself, yes, I have a long-term plan, but what matters at that moment is that workout. And then if my mental well-being is reduced also in response to the smoke, then I may not have the capacity to zoom out from that single workout.

So, where does that get us? Giles and colleagues (2024) discuss that future research should examine strategies to support physical activity during wildfire events. I think that this is key. If the events are becoming more common then we need to look at other options. It makes me think of how we might improve air movement and cleaning inside buildings, both homes and places like gyms so that people have a valid option where they can avoid the negatives of the smoke. Or perhaps we need to move in the direction of designing masks that can filter the particulates but can also function while being active. I know I’ve tried to bike in a few masks of different types and they just end up as sweaty masses.

Of course, the most important action is to take action to reduce climate change. Does thinking about the health impacts of climate change influence your willingness to take action?