The month you were born really does say something about your personality

For every person to immediately flicks straight to the astrology section to check out their stars, there’s another person who pooh-poohs horoscopes as nonsense.

But scientists now believe there may be something in the notion that when you’re born somewhat dictates your outlook on life. An interesting article in Time magazine this week explained it well, saying that there are many things that impact a baby’s development in the womb, including, it appears, the mother’s moods.

You can read the full Time story here but in short, it goes like this. Winter can cause seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a recognised phenomena in which the reduction in daylight during the colder months causes some people to become depressed.

Studies show this is likely due to the fact that some people suffer what is an effective reduction in serotonin – a brain signalling compound that helps regulate many things, including our moods, social behaviour and sexual desire – during winter because their brains respond to the fewer hours of daylight in a way that other people’s brains do not. 

In theory, if a woman suffers SAD (and the accompanying serotonin reduction) while pregnant, her baby could potentially be born with the same reduction in serotonin. 

Meanwhile, studies on mice have shown that winter-born mice are less good feeders and more sluggish in summer than summer-born mice (it doesn’t seem to happen the other way around, with summer mice having no problems adjusting to winter). That apparently occurs because a gene that regulates the circadian rhythms is less active in the winter mice.

Scientists have looked for the same effect in human, and Time says that they seem to have found it – the season you are born in does apparently impact your general outlook or mood. The research was done in the northern hemisphere so the months need to be switched around to make sense to those in the southern hemisphere, but this is how Time sets out the findings:

Spring: March, April and May (SAS note: September, October and November in the southern hemisphere) babies tend to be optimistic, always ready to see a glass half-full, but also most prone to clinical depression.

Summer: June, July and August babies (December, January and February in the southern hemisphere) are also optimists, but switch between high and low moods more rapidly than spring babies. They’re also the least likely to have bipolar disorder.

Autumn/Fall: September, October and November (March, April and May in the southern hemisphere)  babies tend to be the most ‘balanced’, the least likely to be bi-polar and unlikely to be depressed. But they can be irritable.

Winter: December, January and February (June, July and August in the southern hemisphere) babies get the worst of it, with the highest levels of schizophrenia, bi-polar, SAD and depression. But they are less irritable than the autumn babies and Time even says that a small study found that January and February babies are more likely to be creative and imaginative problem-solvers.

Do the findings ring true for you?