What symptoms do weather-sensitive people have?

If you ask ten weather-sensitive people what they feel when the weather turns, you will hear a surprisingly similar list. Head. Energy. Sleep. Joints. Mood. It comes out in the same order almost every time, which is why the list feels like folklore — something everyone knows and nobody has checked.

It has been checked. Not perfectly, and not for every symptom, but far more than most people assume. Large population surveys have counted which complaints weather-sensitive people report and how often. Smartphone studies have matched hundreds of thousands of individual symptom entries against real measured weather. And a few big, cold-eyed analyses have looked for the same patterns in medical records and failed to find them.

This article walks through that list symptom by symptom: what people report, how common each complaint is, what the research says about whether the weather is really involved, and how confident anyone can honestly be. Some of these links are well supported. Some are supported only by what people say about themselves. Knowing which is which is the whole point.

The short answer

The symptoms weather-sensitive people report most often are, in rough order of frequency:

1. Headache or migraine
2. Fatigue, low energy, feeling "drained"
3. Sleep problems — trouble falling asleep, waking up unrefreshed
4. Joint, back, neck and shoulder pain
5. Mood changes — irritability, low mood, restlessness, anxiety
6. Dizziness, light-headedness, blocked or popping ears
7. Circulatory sensations — blood-pressure and pulse changes, palpitations
8. Breathing difficulty, especially in heat, humidity or around thunderstorms
9. Trouble concentrating, slower thinking, more mistakes than usual

Two things stand out about this list. First, none of these symptoms is unique to weather. Every single one is also produced by a short night, a stressful week, a skipped meal or an ordinary infection. Second, the strength of evidence behind each one varies enormously — from "measured repeatedly in large datasets" for heat and for pressure-linked headache, down to "reported often, but the effect vanishes when researchers look at objective records" for rain and joint pain.

Where the symptom list comes from

The most useful numbers come from Germany, where the same question has been asked of a representative sample of the population for two decades. In the 2021 survey analysed by Graw, Sommer and Matzarakis, 46% of German adults said the weather affects their health — down from 50% in 2013 and 54% in 2001.

Among those weather-sensitive respondents, the symptoms broke down like this:

Symptom	Share of weather-sensitive people
Headache / migraine	62%
Exhaustion, general tiredness	54%
Reduced ability to do things, abnormal fatigue	49%
Sleep disturbance	37%
Joint pain	36%

The same survey found the pattern is not evenly spread: 56% of women versus 36% of men described themselves as weather-sensitive, 54% of people aged 60 and over versus 27% of people aged 16–29, and 55% of people with a chronic illness versus 29% of those without one.

A smaller Japanese study, published in Cureus in 2023, asked 133 adults attending routine medical check-ups the same kind of question and got a recognisable answer: 32% reported physical symptoms tied to bad weather, headed by headache (67% of those affected), then low back pain (21%), fatigue (19%), stiff neck or shoulders (12%), and wheezing and joint pain (about 7% each). Interestingly, in that group the people reporting weather symptoms were younger on average, with the peak in the 30s — a reminder that the demographic picture is not settled and depends heavily on who is asked and how.

Researchers have also tried to standardise the question. The METEO-Q, a validated 11-item questionnaire published in Comprehensive Psychiatry in 2012 and tested on 1,099 healthy adults, pairs its scored items with a checklist of 21 physical and psychological symptoms people link to weather change — which tells you something in itself: the phenomenon is broad enough that a serious research instrument needs twenty-one boxes to catch it.

Headache and migraine: the flagship symptom

Headache is the symptom weather-sensitive people name first, and it is also the one with the most direct supporting evidence.

The largest recent study of it is a 2023 analysis in Headache by Katsuki and colleagues. Using a smartphone headache diary, they matched 336,951 hourly headache records from 4,375 users against local weather across a full year. More headaches occurred with low barometric pressure, with falling pressure, with higher humidity and with rainfall. The single strongest signal in their model was not the pressure level itself but a marked pressure drop in the preceding six hours — the weather change, not the weather state.

This matches what people describe: the headache tends to arrive on the front edge of a system, while the sky is still changing, and often eases once the new weather has settled in.

A few honest caveats belong with that finding. The effect is a shift in probability, not a switch — plenty of pressure drops pass with no headache at all. The app's users were mostly young women, which is typical of headache research but limits how far the numbers generalise. And weather rarely arrives alone: a falling barometer usually comes with changed light, changed activity, changed sleep and changed plans, any of which can matter.

Fatigue and "no strength at all"

Just over half of weather-sensitive people in the German data name exhaustion, and about half name a reduced capacity to get things done. In everyday language this is the flat, heavy, grey-morning feeling: everything takes more effort than it did yesterday, and nothing hurts enough to explain why.

Fatigue is the hardest symptom in this whole list to study, because it is almost impossible to measure objectively and because so many everyday things produce it. What is reasonably well established is that the conditions people blame — heavy overcast, low light, warm humid air, low pressure, the front edge of a storm — also independently disturb sleep, reduce outdoor activity, and shift the daily light exposure that anchors the body clock. Those are plausible, ordinary routes from a grey day to a flat one, and they do not require any exotic mechanism.

That does not make the tiredness imaginary. It means the honest description is: real symptom, plausible pathways, weak direct evidence for a single specific weather cause.

Sleep problems

About 37% of weather-sensitive people in the German survey report disturbed sleep, and it is one of the symptoms that most often appears before the others — people describe a broken night first, and the headache or the flat mood the next day.

Two of the mechanisms here are uncontroversial. Heat clearly disrupts sleep: falling core body temperature is part of how sleep is initiated, and warm nights interfere with it. Light does too: the timing and amount of daylight is the strongest signal setting the human circadian clock, which is why long dark winters and bright short summer nights both show up in sleep complaints at high latitudes.

Beyond heat and light, the picture thins out. Noise from wind and rain, humidity, and pressure changes are all commonly blamed; the supporting evidence is much softer, and much of it comes from the same self-report surveys that generated the symptom list in the first place.

Joints, back, neck and shoulders

This is the oldest weather-and-body belief there is, and it is also where the evidence gets genuinely contradictory — which makes it the most instructive entry on the list.

On the "yes" side: the UK's Cloudy with a Chance of Pain study, published in npj Digital Medicine in 2019, collected daily pain reports from 2,658 people with long-term pain conditions over 15 months, with weather taken from each phone's own location. It found a modest but consistent link: on humid, windy, low-pressure days, a higher-pain day was roughly 20% more likely. Notably, and contrary to what most participants expected, temperature showed no association once averaged across the group.

On the "no" side: a 2017 BMJ analysis led by Jena looked at more than 11 million primary-care visits by older adults in the United States and matched them to daily rainfall. Joint or back pain was recorded in 6.35% of visits on rainy days and 6.39% on dry days — a difference of essentially nothing.

These two results are less contradictory than they look. The first measured how much pain people felt day to day; the second measured how often people went to a doctor about it. A modest daily worsening in people who already have chronic pain would not necessarily produce extra clinic visits. But the pairing is a useful corrective: the belief that rain specifically makes joints ache is not supported at the population level, while a subtler humidity-and-pressure effect within already-painful joints does have some support.

Mood, irritability and restlessness

Weather-related mood change is real enough that psychiatry has a named, well-characterised version of it.

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), described by the US National Institute of Mental Health, is depression that follows a recurring seasonal pattern, typically lasting four to five months of the year. The winter pattern is the familiar one: low mood, loss of interest, oversleeping, craving carbohydrates, weight gain, social withdrawal. There is also a less common summer pattern with insomnia, poor appetite, weight loss, restlessness and anxiety. SAD is more common the further you live from the equator, more common in women, and usually begins in young adulthood. The leading explanations involve serotonin, melatonin and the disruption of daily rhythms by changing day length — light, in other words, rather than pressure or storms.

Everyday weather irritability — the short fuse on a muggy afternoon, the flatness on the fourth grey day — is much less well characterised. It is reported constantly and studied poorly. Heat is the exception: the link between high temperatures and increased aggression and reduced tolerance for frustration is one of the better-documented findings in environmental psychology.

Dizziness, light-headedness and blocked ears

Ears are the one place where a pressure mechanism is not speculative at all. The middle ear is a sealed air pocket that equalises through the Eustachian tube; when outside pressure changes faster than the tube can keep up, you get the familiar fullness, muffling and popping — exactly the same physics as a descending aircraft or a fast lift, just slower and gentler. Anyone whose tube drains sluggishly — during a cold, with allergies, with sinus congestion — notices weather pressure swings more.

The connection from there to dizziness is looser. The balance organs sit in the inner ear, behind a bony wall and a fluid barrier, and they are far better protected from atmospheric pressure than the middle ear is. Some research suggests that people with existing vestibular conditions report more symptoms around weather changes, but the mechanism is not established, and everyday light-headedness has many more common explanations — standing up quickly, heat, dehydration, poor sleep, low blood sugar.

Blood pressure, pulse and palpitations

Many weather-sensitive people describe their symptoms in circulatory terms: pressure "jumping", the heart beating harder, feeling flushed or faint.

Here the well-established part is temperature, not barometric pressure. Blood pressure follows a clear seasonal pattern in populations worldwide — higher in cold months, lower in warm ones — because cold constricts surface blood vessels and heat dilates them. Heat also thickens the workload on the heart directly: the WHO notes that the strain of trying to cool itself stresses both the heart and the kidneys, which is why heat waves show up so sharply in cardiovascular statistics and why people over 65 and those with heart, lung or kidney conditions are the groups most affected.

The claim that atmospheric pressure changes drive blood pressure changes is much weaker. The size of a typical daily barometric swing is tiny compared with the pressures the circulation regulates continuously, and studies that look for the effect find at most small, inconsistent population-level shifts — nothing that predicts what any individual's reading will do tomorrow.

Breathing: heat, humidity and storms

Breathing symptoms turn up in the surveys at lower rates — about 7% in the Japanese check-up study — but they are disproportionately important because some of them have hard, unambiguous evidence behind them.

Cold, dry air is a recognised trigger for airway narrowing in people with asthma. Hot, humid, still air worsens breathlessness for people with chronic lung disease, partly through the air itself and partly because such conditions trap pollutants near the ground.

The most dramatic example is epidemic thunderstorm asthma. In Melbourne on 21 November 2016, a thunderstorm at the peak of grass-pollen season triggered thousands of acute respiratory presentations in a matter of hours, overwhelmed emergency services, and was linked to ten deaths. Research afterwards found the storm outflow was associated with a roughly 250% increase in ruptured grass-pollen grains — pollen broken into fragments small enough to reach deep into the lower airways, then swept down to street level by the storm's downdraft. This is a genuinely proven weather-triggered health event, with a mechanism that was measured rather than assumed.

Heat and cold: where the evidence is strongest

If you rank every "weather symptom" by the quality of the evidence, extreme temperature wins by a wide margin — and it is the part of the topic that health agencies actually treat as a public-health matter rather than a curiosity.

Early heat strain produces a recognisable cluster documented by the CDC and other agencies: heavy sweating, weakness, tiredness, dizziness, headache, nausea, and a fast, weak pulse. The WHO estimates roughly 489,000 heat-related deaths a year globally over 2000–2019, and stresses that heat-related deaths and hospitalisations happen the same day or within a day or two of the exposure — the effect is fast, not gradual.

The point for this article is a specific one. When people describe headache, exhaustion and dizziness during a heat wave, that is not vague weather sensitivity at all. It is a well-described physiological response with a known mechanism, and it deserves to be treated with more seriousness than the rest of the list — particularly in older adults, in people with heart, lung or kidney conditions, in outdoor workers, and in small children.

What all these symptoms have in common

Look at the whole list and four features stand out.

They are non-specific. There is no symptom on it that only weather produces. This is exactly why the topic is so contested and why personal tracking matters more here than in most areas of health.

Change matters more than level. Across headache, pain and mood, the research keeps pointing at transitions — a falling barometer, a temperature swing, a front arriving — rather than at steady conditions. People who have lived somewhere consistently humid or consistently high-altitude usually report far fewer symptoms than a visitor does, because bodies adapt to stable conditions and struggle with fast ones.

They cluster. Weather-sensitive people rarely report just one symptom. Head, energy, sleep and mood tend to move together, which is unsurprising — a broken night is a plausible route to all three of the others.

Expectation shapes them. Studies that tell participants what weather is coming get different symptom reports than studies that do not. That does not mean the symptoms are invented; expectation genuinely amplifies real sensations, and it is one reason objective-record studies (like the rainfall/doctor-visit analysis) often find smaller effects than surveys do.

What is not on this list

It is worth being clear about the boundary. Chest pain, sudden severe headache unlike your usual ones, one-sided weakness, speech difficulty, fainting, breathlessness at rest, or symptoms that keep getting worse are not "weather symptoms" — they are symptoms that need medical attention regardless of what the barometer is doing. The same applies to any pattern that is new, persistent, or interfering with daily life: that is a conversation to have with a doctor, not a forecast to check.

This is not a cautionary aside bolted onto the end. It is the practical core of the topic. The value of understanding your weather pattern is partly that it tells you which of your symptoms is ordinary and expected for you — and therefore makes the unusual ones easier to notice.

Turning a generic list into your own pattern

The single most useful thing about this symptom list is how bad it is at describing any individual. Two weather-sensitive people can share none of these complaints. One reacts to pressure drops, the other to heat, the other to nothing but long grey stretches in November.

The only way to find out which you are is to record it — symptoms and dates on one side, measured conditions on the other, over enough weeks that coincidence washes out. A few things make that record actually usable:

• Note the day, not just the bad days. A diary that only gets opened when you feel awful will always seem to confirm a link, because there is nothing to compare against.
• Record a couple of numbers, not a verdict. A 0–10 severity for one or two symptoms beats a written description for spotting a trend later.
• Include sleep and stress. They are the two biggest confounders in every study on this page, and they are the two most likely to be the real explanation on a given day.
• Give it at least a couple of months. Weather patterns need time to repeat before any relationship becomes visible above the noise.
• Watch for the change, not the level. If you record the direction the barometer moved, you will catch the pattern the headache research keeps finding.

That is exactly what a wellbeing journal is for, and it is what MeteoStorms puts alongside the measured data: geomagnetic activity from NOAA SWPC and GFZ Potsdam, atmospheric pressure for your location, and your own entries on the same timeline. Nobody can tell you from a list whether you are weather-sensitive or what your symptoms will be. Your own record can.

Sources

• Graw, K.; Sommer, M.; Matzarakis, A. The Prevalence of Weather Sensitivity in Germany Derived from Population Surveys. Atmosphere, 2022, 13(11), 1865. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13111865
• Akaishi, T.; Saito, T.; Abe, M.; Ishii, T. Subjective Physical Symptoms Related to Bad Weather Among Persons Undergoing Medical Check-Up: A Single-Center Observational Study. Cureus, 2023;15(12):e50642. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.50642
• Katsuki, M.; Tatsumoto, M.; Kimoto, K.; et al. Investigating the effects of weather on headache occurrence using a smartphone application and artificial intelligence. Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, 2023. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36853848/
• Dixon, W.G.; Beukenhorst, A.L.; Yimer, B.B.; et al. How the weather affects the pain of citizen scientists using a smartphone app. npj Digital Medicine, 2019;2:105. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-019-0180-3
• Jena, A.B.; Olenski, A.R.; Molitor, D.; Miller, N. Association between rainfall and diagnoses of joint or back pain: retrospective claims analysis. BMJ, 2017;359:j5326. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29237605/
• Mazza, M.; Di Nicola, M.; Catalano, V.; et al. Description and validation of a questionnaire for the detection of meteoropathy and meteorosensitivity: the METEO-Q. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 2012;53(1):103–106. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21489419/
• National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Seasonal Affective Disorder. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/seasonal-affective-disorder
• World Health Organization. Climate change, heat and health (fact sheet). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC/NIOSH). Heat-Related Illnesses. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/heat-stress/about/illnesses.html
• Thien, F.; Beggs, P.J.; Csutoros, D.; et al. The Melbourne epidemic thunderstorm asthma event 2016: an investigation of environmental triggers, effect on health services, and patient risk factors. The Lancet Planetary Health, 2018;2(6):e255–e263. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(18)30120-7/fulltext
• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — geomagnetic activity and Kp index data. https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
• GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences — Kp and Hp geomagnetic indices. https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/en/kp-index/