Why Your Mood Changes With Seasons: 5 Personality Traits

Have you ever noticed that your seasonal mood changes personality in subtle but real ways — feeling brighter in summer, heavier in winter, or restless when spring arrives? You are far from alone. Research suggests that these shifts are not random: your underlying personality traits may play a significant role in how strongly the seasons affect your emotional state. Understanding this connection can help you anticipate low-energy periods, protect your mental wellbeing, and make the most of every season.

A prospective study published in the European Journal of Personality followed 304 adults over 2 years, measuring their moods in winter and summer and mapping the results against the well-established Big Five personality framework. The findings revealed that 2 specific personality traits — openness to experience and neuroticism — are meaningfully linked to how much a person’s mood fluctuates with the seasons. This article breaks down those findings, explains what they mean for everyday life, and offers practical, evidence-informed strategies for working with your personality rather than against it.

Once again, personality researcher and author of Villain Encyclopedia, Tokiwa (@etokiwa999), will provide the explanation.
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What the Research Actually Studied: Seasonal Mood, Personality, and the Big Five

The Research Question: Does Personality Shape Your Response to the Seasons?

The central goal of the study was to determine whether specific personality traits predict the size and direction of seasonal mood changes — and the answer, researchers found, was yes.

Scientists had long observed that not everyone is equally affected by the change from summer to winter. Some people barely notice the shorter days; others feel a pronounced emotional dip that lingers for months. The researchers behind this study suspected that stable personality characteristics — the kind that stay relatively consistent throughout a person’s life — might explain part of that difference.

To test the idea, they designed a prospective, longitudinal study. Participants were assessed 4 times in total: once each winter and summer over a 2-year period. Crucially, the study measured both mood state and personality at the same time, allowing researchers to look at long-term patterns rather than a single snapshot. Common seasonal experiences they tracked included:

• Low mood and fatigue during winter — feeling sluggish, unmotivated, or sad as daylight hours shorten
• Elevated energy and positivity in summer — increased sociability, optimism, and drive
• Restlessness in spring — a sense of renewal or, for some, mild agitation
• Quiet contentment or melancholy in autumn — a reflective, sometimes wistful emotional tone

By linking these mood patterns to personality scores, the researchers hoped to explain why 2 people living in the same city, experiencing the same weather, can feel so differently about the same season. The results confirmed that personality is a meaningful piece of the puzzle — and that knowing your own profile can help you navigate the year more skillfully.

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Study Design: 304 Participants, 2 Years, 4 Measurement Points

The study recruited 304 adults from the general population in Melbourne, Australia, and tracked them across 4 separate assessments — giving researchers unusually rich, longitudinal data on how personality and mood interact across the seasons.

Melbourne was a strategic choice: it has clearly defined seasons, making summer–winter mood comparisons meaningful, but its climate is temperate enough that extreme cold is not a confounding variable. Participants were selected randomly from the general community rather than from clinical populations, which means the results are more likely to reflect the experiences of everyday people rather than only those with diagnosed mood disorders.

At each assessment, participants completed 2 types of measures:

• Current mood questionnaires — standardized scales capturing how the participant felt at that specific point in time
• The NEO Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) — a widely validated tool that measures each of the 5 Big Five personality dimensions on a numerical scale

The prospective design — meaning participants were followed forward in time rather than asked to recall past moods — is particularly important because it reduces memory bias. When people are asked “how did you feel last winter?” their answers are often colored by their current mood. By measuring in real time, the researchers captured a more accurate picture. The 2-year timeframe also allowed them to verify that patterns were consistent and not just the product of one unusual season.

The Seasonality Score: Quantifying Summer–Winter Mood Differences

To make comparisons between participants possible, the researchers calculated a “seasonality score” for each person — a simple numerical measure of how different their mood was between summer and winter.

The formula was straightforward:

• Measure mood score in summer (e.g., 80 out of 100)
• Measure mood score in winter (e.g., 60 out of 100)
• Subtract winter from summer: seasonality score = +20

A high positive score means the person feels considerably better in summer than in winter — the classic “winter blues” pattern. A score near zero means little seasonal variation in mood. A negative score, interestingly, means the person actually felt better in winter — a less common but real phenomenon sometimes called “summer SAD” (summer-pattern seasonal affective disorder traits).

Using this score allowed the team to treat seasonal mood variation as a continuous dimension rather than a simple yes/no category. They could then run statistical analyses to see which personality traits correlated most strongly with higher or lower seasonality scores — giving the study far more precision than simply asking “do you get the winter blues?”

The Big Five Framework: Measuring 5 Dimensions of Personality

The Big Five personality model — also called the Five Factor Model — is the most widely used and empirically validated framework in personality psychology, and it was the measurement tool at the heart of this study.

The Big Five organizes human personality into 5 broad, independent dimensions. Each person falls somewhere on a spectrum for each trait, and together the 5 scores create a nuanced profile. The 5 dimensions are:

• Openness to Experience — the degree to which a person is curious, imaginative, and receptive to new ideas, art, and sensory experiences
• Conscientiousness — the tendency to be organized, responsible, and goal-directed
• Extraversion — the degree of sociability, assertiveness, and positive emotional engagement with the world
• Agreeableness — the tendency to be cooperative, trusting, and considerate of others
• Neuroticism — the tendency to experience negative emotions such as anxiety, sadness, irritability, and emotional instability

Of these 5 dimensions, the study found that openness to experience and neuroticism were the 2 traits most clearly linked to seasonal mood variation. The other 3 traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness — showed no statistically significant relationship with the seasonality score. This specificity is important: it suggests the effect is not simply about being emotionally sensitive in a general sense, but about particular ways of processing the environment and one’s inner emotional states.

What is Big Five Personality Test? Overview, Genetics & MBTI

How Seasonal Mood Changes Personality Expression: Openness and the Winter Dip

What Is Openness to Experience?

Openness to experience is the personality trait that describes a person’s appetite for novelty, aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to engage with complex ideas and environments — and research suggests it is one of the key factors shaping how strongly seasonal changes affect your mood.

People who score high on openness tend to share several recognizable characteristics:

• Strong curiosity — they are drawn to new experiences, unfamiliar places, and unconventional ideas
• Rich imaginative life — they tend to daydream, create, and engage deeply with art and music
• Sensory sensitivity — they notice and respond strongly to changes in light, temperature, sound, and atmosphere
• Comfort with change — they generally adapt well to new circumstances and may even seek out variety
• Emotional depth — they experience both positive and negative emotions with greater intensity than those lower in openness

The study found that higher openness scores were associated with higher seasonality scores — meaning people high in openness tended to report a more pronounced mood difference between summer and winter. Several mechanisms may explain this link. First, highly open individuals are inherently more attuned to environmental stimuli: the reduction in daylight, the visual greyness of winter, and the restriction of outdoor activity are all changes they register more keenly. Second, winter limits opportunities for the novel experiences that open individuals thrive on. Fewer social events, less travel, and more time indoors can create a mild but persistent sense of deprivation. Third, the shorter photoperiod — fewer hours of sunlight — may interact with the heightened sensory processing that characterizes high-openness individuals, amplifying the neurobiological effects of reduced light exposure.

It is worth noting that this sensitivity cuts both ways: the same people who feel winter most acutely are also those most likely to feel genuine elation when spring returns. High openness is not a vulnerability alone — it is also a source of richness.

What is Openness? Big Five, MBTI N vs S Connections

Neuroticism and Seasons: Why Emotional Instability Amplifies Seasonal Mood Changes Personality-Wide

Neuroticism — the tendency toward emotional instability, anxiety, and negative affect — was linked in this study not to the direction of seasonal mood changes, but to their overall magnitude: people higher in neuroticism tended to show larger swings in mood between seasons, regardless of which season was their “low” point.

Neuroticism is defined as a stable disposition to experience negative emotions more readily and to recover from emotional disturbances more slowly than average. People who score high on this dimension commonly display:

• Heightened stress reactivity — minor disruptions to routine can trigger disproportionate emotional responses
• Mood lability — their emotional state shifts more frequently and more dramatically than those lower in neuroticism
• Negative self-appraisal — they are more prone to self-criticism and doubt
• Somatic sensitivity — physical discomforts like cold, fatigue, or reduced light are experienced more intensely
• Ruminative thinking — they tend to dwell on problems rather than move past them quickly

Crucially, the study found that neuroticism predicts the size of seasonal mood variation — not a consistent “summer high, winter low” pattern. For some high-neuroticism individuals, summer is actually the difficult season: the heat, social pressure, and disrupted routines can amplify anxiety. For others, winter is the challenge. This means that neuroticism and seasons interact differently for different people, and it is important not to assume that high neuroticism always means “worse in winter.” What it reliably predicts is that the gap between your best and worst seasonal moods will tend to be wider than average.

This finding has real practical value. If you know you score high in neuroticism, you can track which season consistently challenges you and build proactive coping strategies before that season arrives — rather than waiting until you are already in the dip.

What is Neuroticism? Big Five & MBTI Connections Explained

Actionable Strategies Based on Your Personality Profile

Understanding which personality traits make you more susceptible to seasonal mood shifts is useful only if you translate that knowledge into concrete action. Below are evidence-informed strategies tailored to the 2 personality profiles most affected by seasonal change, along with the reasoning behind each recommendation.

If You Score High in Openness to Experience

Your core challenge in winter is a shortage of the novelty, sensory stimulation, and creative engagement that sustain your mood. The goal is to build an “indoor novelty supply chain” that compensates for the experiential restrictions of the colder months.

• Schedule 1 novel activity per week throughout winter — this could be a new recipe, a documentary on an unfamiliar topic, a short day trip, or an art class. The specificity matters: vague intentions to “do something interesting” rarely materialize when motivation is low.
• Invest in light therapy early — a lightbox that delivers 10,000 lux of white light for 20–30 minutes each morning has strong research support for counteracting the mood effects of reduced daylight. Starting before you notice a dip is more effective than waiting until you feel low.
• Reframe winter aesthetics — high-openness individuals respond powerfully to sensory beauty. Actively noticing the visual qualities of winter (frost, bare tree silhouettes, the particular quality of winter light) can shift the season from something to endure into something to engage with artistically.
• Maintain a creative output practice — writing, drawing, music, or cooking all provide the generative, exploratory activity that openness craves. Winter’s slower pace can actually be reframed as creative time rather than lost time.

If You Score High in Neuroticism

Your core challenge is the amplification effect: seasonal transitions tend to make your natural mood variability even wider. The goal is to create emotional stability scaffolding — structures that dampen the amplitude of mood swings before they become destabilizing.

• Identify your difficult season now, before it arrives — keep a simple mood journal for 2–3 months. Note your mood each day on a 1–10 scale alongside the season and weather. Patterns will emerge within 6–8 weeks. This data becomes your early-warning system.
• Protect sleep and circadian rhythm rigorously — sleep disruption dramatically amplifies neuroticism’s effects on mood. Going to bed and waking at consistent times, even on weekends, is one of the highest-leverage behavioral interventions available. Research on environmental psychology and personality consistently links sleep regularity with reduced emotional reactivity.
• Practice graduated exposure to discomfort — high-neuroticism individuals often avoid the things that make them anxious, which paradoxically increases anxiety over time. In a seasonal context, this might mean going outside even on cold, grey days rather than retreating indoors and ruminating. Brief outdoor exposure, even for 10–15 minutes, has measurable mood benefits.
• Build a “seasonal transition toolkit” — identify in advance the specific self-care activities that reliably improve your mood (exercise, social connection, a particular playlist, a specific meal) and commit to deploying them proactively as the season changes, not reactively after the dip has already set in.
• Consider talking to a professional — if your seasonal mood swings are severe enough to affect work, relationships, or daily functioning, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) adapted for seasonal affective disorder traits has strong evidence behind it and is worth exploring with a qualified clinician.

General Strategies for Anyone Affected by Seasonal Mood Variation

Even if your openness and neuroticism scores are moderate, seasonal mood changes are a normal human experience. These universal strategies are supported by research in environmental psychology and personality:

• Regular physical exercise — approximately 30 minutes of moderate aerobic activity on most days is one of the most reliably mood-stabilizing behaviors available, and its effects are amplified in the darker months when light exposure is naturally reduced
• Consistent social contact — isolation tends to worsen mood in all personality types; scheduling regular social activities (not just waiting to feel like socializing) maintains emotional equilibrium through seasonal transitions
• Deliberate daylight exposure — going outdoors within 1 hour of waking, even on overcast days, helps regulate the circadian system and supports mood through winter
• Monitoring without catastrophizing — noticing a seasonal mood dip and naming it (“this is my annual winter adjustment period”) tends to reduce its emotional impact more than either ignoring it or over-identifying with it

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal for your personality to influence how much seasons affect your mood?

Yes — research suggests it is entirely normal and expected. The study discussed in this article found that 2 of the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience and neuroticism) are meaningfully linked to seasonal mood variation. This does not mean your personality is causing a disorder; it means that who you are shapes how you naturally respond to environmental changes like shifting daylight and temperature. Recognizing this connection is the first step toward working with your natural tendencies rather than being surprised by them each year.

What is the difference between seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and normal seasonal mood changes?

Seasonal affective disorder traits refer to a clinically significant, recurrent pattern of depression that follows a seasonal schedule — most commonly with episodes beginning in autumn or winter and fully remitting in spring or summer. Normal seasonal mood changes, by contrast, are milder fluctuations that do not significantly impair daily functioning. The key distinction is severity and impact: if seasonal low mood consistently interferes with work, relationships, or basic self-care for multiple consecutive years, a professional evaluation is strongly recommended rather than self-management alone.

Does high neuroticism always mean you feel worse in winter?

Not necessarily. The research found that neuroticism predicts the size of seasonal mood swings — not the direction. While many high-neuroticism individuals do experience their worst moods in winter, a meaningful subset finds summer more difficult: the heat, social demands, disrupted routines, and bright light can all amplify anxiety for some people. The practical takeaway is to track your own seasonal mood patterns rather than assuming the winter-low model applies to you automatically. Your personal data is more reliable than any general rule.

Can people with high openness to experience reduce their winter mood dip?

Yes — and because the likely mechanism involves reduced novelty and sensory stimulation, the most targeted strategies involve deliberately building those elements into winter life. Scheduling novel weekly activities, using a lightbox to compensate for reduced daylight, engaging in creative projects, and reframing the aesthetic qualities of winter can all help. The goal is not to eliminate the seasonal response entirely (which is probably neither possible nor necessary) but to keep the mood dip within a manageable range that does not compromise functioning or wellbeing.

What role does weather and emotional sensitivity play beyond just personality type?

Weather and emotional sensitivity interact with personality but are not identical to it. Factors like cloud cover, temperature variability, humidity, and barometric pressure all have documented effects on mood in the general population — independently of personality. However, personality traits like neuroticism and openness appear to act as amplifiers: they determine how strongly an individual responds to the same objective weather conditions. Two people standing in the same grey, cold street can have meaningfully different emotional reactions, and personality is part of the explanation for why.

At what age do seasonal mood patterns typically become noticeable?

Seasonal mood variation tends to become more self-apparent in late adolescence and young adulthood — typically from the mid-teens through the 20s — as both personality traits and the emotional self-awareness to recognize mood patterns become more stable. That said, research on environmental psychology and personality suggests that the traits themselves (particularly neuroticism and openness) are relatively stable from early adulthood onward, meaning the seasonal sensitivity associated with those traits is also likely to remain relatively consistent across the adult lifespan without active intervention.

Do the Big Five traits other than openness and neuroticism have any relationship with seasonal mood?

Based on the study discussed in this article, the other 3 Big Five traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness — did not show a statistically significant relationship with seasonal mood variation scores. This is a meaningful finding because it narrows down the personality profile most at risk: it is specifically the combination of heightened environmental sensitivity (openness) and emotional reactivity (neuroticism) that appears relevant, rather than personality in general. People high in extraversion, for example, are not necessarily more susceptible to seasonal mood changes than introverts.

Summary: Your Personality Is a Map, Not a Sentence

The research is clear and encouraging in equal measure: seasonal mood changes personality expression in ways that are predictable, measurable, and — once understood — manageable. Studies indicate that 2 of the Big Five personality traits stand out as the most relevant. People high in openness to experience tend to feel winter’s restrictions and reduced daylight more acutely, resulting in a more pronounced summer–winter mood gap. People high in neuroticism tend to show larger seasonal mood swings overall, with the difficult season varying by individual. Importantly, the other 3 Big Five traits showed no significant link, suggesting the effect is specific rather than a general feature of emotional sensitivity.

None of this means your personality dooms you to seasonal suffering. Quite the opposite: knowing your profile gives you a genuine head start. You can build the right supports before your challenging season arrives, invest in the specific activities and environments that counteract your particular vulnerabilities, and recognize seasonal low points for what they are — predictable, temporary, and navigable. If you have ever wondered why winter hits you harder than it seems to hit others, or why your mood swings through the year feel bigger than average, your personality profile may hold a significant part of the answer.

Ready to see where you land on the personality dimensions that shape your seasonal experience? Explore your Big Five profile and discover which traits are likely influencing your mood through the year.