Almost half a population

Germans have been asked since the 1950s. 46% say weather affects their health. Headaches are by far the most common complaint.

46% of Germans believe that weather affects their health. Ten years earlier the figure was 50%. Twenty years earlier, 54%. The curve is going the wrong way, if you had expected more and more people to notice something as weather became a more frequent topic of conversation.

Asked since the 1950s

There aren't many population surveys on weather sensitivity that span seven decades. The German one does. The Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach has interviewed representative samples of the German population about weather-related complaints since the 1950s, on behalf of the German national weather service. The latest round, from 2021, was based on answers from 1,080 German citizens. That's a representative sample, not a self-selected panel of people who are already interested in the weather — which is part of why the figure is worth taking seriously.

In the 2001 edition of the same survey, 19.2% answered that weather affected their health "to a great extent", and a further 35.3% that it had "some influence". Added together, that's over half the population noticing something — even in the year when the total figure was highest of the three.

The survey doesn't itself offer any explanation for why the curve is falling. It isn't because the weather has become calmer — that's not what the material is about. It's tempting to guess at anything from changed language use to what people consider a symptom worth mentioning. That's a guess, not data, and it shouldn't be dressed up as a conclusion.

What the weather-sensitive actually feel

The survey also asked which symptoms were involved. The answers aren't evenly distributed. Headache and migraine top the list at 61%, far ahead of the rest: sluggishness 47%, sleep disturbances 46%, fatigue 42% and joint pain 40%. Older people and the chronically ill answer yes more often than average, and women answer yes more often than men. Five symptoms, and headache isn't just the most common — it's more common than the next four combined can match, if you compare the gap down to sleep disturbances and joint pain at the bottom of the list.

Felt, not measured

The figures aren't stable within the population itself either. Some groups answer yes far more often than others — it isn't one evenly distributed phenomenon, but something that clusters in particular parts of the population.

It's worth being precise about what these figures actually show. It isn't a measurement of whether weather actually triggers headaches in 46% of a population. It's a measurement of how many people experience that it does. The Allensbach survey asks about the feeling, not about a documented effect — and that's a different thing. The same research field has compared Germany with Canada in a similar survey, which in itself says something about how big a question this is considered to be in more than one country.

That distinction — between what people believe and what can be measured — isn't a footnote. It's the whole reason a figure like 46% can't stand alone as the answer to whether weather makes you feel worse. It can only tell you how common it is to believe that.

That's exactly the gap an app like Aneroid is built to investigate in the individual — not by asking whether you believe weather plays a part, but by holding an actual pressure record up against how you actually feel, week after week.