You're Spending Too Much Time Inside If This Happens To Your Body

It's only natural to spend more time inside when the weather grows colder and the days grow shorter. With the window for outdoor activities smaller, we miss out on a number of benefits relating to both body and mind. These include increased vitality, better moods, better focus, and even a better immune response. Sure, spending time indoors has the advantage of protecting our skin from damage from the sun and other elements. While sunscreen, hats, and other protective clothing can protect the skin from damage, it's far more difficult to artificially replicate the benefits of being outside. 

As mental health counselor Jennifer Henry told Health Digest, humans were not meant to spend the bulk of our time indoors. If you don't believe it, all you would have to do is confine yourself to being indoors for a few days, and you would recognize pretty quickly how your body would react. Of course, that's not advisable because as anyone who has spent time in a lockdown can attest, all that time indoors comes at a price. If any of the following things happen to your body, you should consider whether you've been spending too much time inside.

Fatigue, which is defined as a persistent and behavior-limiting tiredness, can be a symptom of any number of illnesses and conditions, like insomnia. However, spending too much time indoors can also cause fatigue without insomnia. That's because time spent indoors can contribute to vitamin D deficiency, which, according to the telemed team at EZCare Clinic, counts fatigue as one of the major symptoms.

"Exposure to natural sunlight is important in increasing your body's Vitamin D levels," the telemed team told Health Digest. Thankfully, your skin manufactures vitamin D whenever it is exposed to sunlight, the Skin Cancer Foundation explained. Supplements and vitamin-D-enriched foods can also help your body to manufacture and store vitamin D, but sunlight is important. "Sun exposure is by far the best way to boost vitamin D levels, particularly because very few foods contain significant amounts," Healthline explained.

When we spend too much time inside, it's a setup for anxiety, mental health counselor Jennifer Henry advised Health Digest. There are multiple reasons for this, including a lack of exposure to sunlight and fresh air and reduced interaction with extended family and friends. In addition, spending time isolating from the rest of the world can contribute to an encroaching sense that your problems are expanding rapidly in relation to the size of your world (also known by some as that feeling of "living in a bubble").

By contrast, spending time outside allows you to be fully present in the real world and all its vastness, and that tends to put things in a much better perspective. In addition, scientists have been studying the effects of being outside in nature on negative "acute emotions," such as stress and hostility, and have consistently found that this practice (dubbed "forest bathing") works as an effective therapy for reducing such emotions.

The more time we spend indoors, the more likely we are to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, according to the telemed team at EZCare Clinic. But not only does spending too much time indoors fuel the urge to sit around doing nothing, it also may leave you feeling hungrier than usual. 

Another cause of weight gain when spending too much time indoors may be simply that you are closer to food, Dr. Leann Poston pointed out to Health Digest. The constant availability of whatever is in the refrigerator or pantry coupled with boredom from spending so much time within the same four walls (so to speak) can lead to snacking as well as eating too much at meals. "Eating out of boredom is a surefire setup for weight gain," according to Dr. Poston. And weight gain comes with a host of complications, not the least of which is cardiovascular disease. 

If you've been staying indoors a lot more as of late, you might find it surprising that all that time spent at home can actually compromise your immune system. "Limited sun exposure during the lockdown may worsen vitamin D deficiency or cause a sub-clinical deficiency to become apparent," according to a 2020 study published in Gastroenterology Research." And one of the symptoms of vitamin D deficiency is a compromised immune system. This puts you more at risk for catching colds and viruses.

While it is certainly wise to social distance and avoid going out to crowded places to reduce your chances of getting or spreading COVID-19, that doesn't mean you should avoid stepping out onto your porch or patio or going for a walk. "Spending time outside means more fresh air circulation, space and sunlight," Piedmont Healthcare explained. "These factors make it more difficult for the coronavirus to spread from person to person." Jenay Beshears, the director of infection prevention at Piedmont put it succinctly: "Outside, you've got the air circulating and fresh air blowing."

Your skin can reveal some surprising things about your health. Certain rashes have been linked to certain illnesses (e.g. itchy red bumps and chicken pox) and conditions (e.g. the butterfly rash and lupus). According to dermatologist Hadley King, there's even rash that is associated with spending too much time indoors. It's called polymorphous light eruption, or PMLE.

PMLE causes itchy patches of red bumps or blisters and can appear on any skin that is exposed to the sun after a long period of non-exposure. Yes, stepping outside after a while of being sequestered at home can really cause you to break out in a rash. PMLE affects approximately 10 to 15 percent of the U.S. population and it ordinarily presents in spring and early summer. However, it can also be seen in the colder months.

As society's use of electronic devices has grown over the past several years, so too has the concern among scientists that all that screen exposure is harming our health. Of particular concern is the blue light that comes from such exposure. Although some blue light is necessary for good health as it supports alertness, memory, mood, and cognitive function, according to the Prevent Blindness foundation, there is concern that the blue light from device screens is harmful because of how closely we hold our screens to our eyes and how much time we spend looking directly at them. 

One of the ways that blue light from small screens can harm us is by interfering with our natural sleep-wake cycle, according to Harvard's Healthbeat. Another risk associated with blue light exposure is premature skin aging, including the development of dark spots, according to dermatologist Joshua Ziechner. And if you can't get outside and away from your screen? Antioxidants can help protect your skin from damage, Dr. Zeichner said.

One consequence of spending too much time cooped up indoors that isn't talked about nearly enough, according to Time, is the feeling of disconnection that comes from the absence of contact not only with other people but with living things like animals and plants. Dr. Zachary Berk, meditation expert and CEO of online enlightenment app HappCo, told Health Digest that he concurs, pointing out that getting outside and putting yourself in the presence of nature, even in winter, when the trees are devoid of leaves, can bring about a feeling of connectedness with something outside of yourself. 

There's something to be said for that feeling of connectedness, according to Dr. Berk. In addition to an all-over feeling of wellness, it can inspire a sense of compassion toward others, which is precisely the opposite of the negative and "acute emotions," including hostility, which scientists have noted tend to diminish as a result of forest bathing.