I hate cold weather, and feel the pain more severely than most people.
If I am outdoors in weather below 50 degrees F (10 C), I wear
long underwear and a heavy coat. (yes, I’m a very thin guy)
I like to joke that any time the temperature is below 98.6, I feel cold.
There’s
a thread running right now in IMHO
, from a southern person asking advice on how to handle winter when he moves north. And many of the answers say “you get used to it”.
Now my GQ question is in the title.: HOW does your body get used to it.?
Is it strictly a psychological thing, or are there actual physical changes which the body makes to protect itself? Are these physical changes measurable–i.e. something that can be verified in lab tests?
For me, it is impossible to “get used to it”.
For you northerners–how do ya do it?— Is my body somehow different than yours? And is it somehow verifiable by medical tests?
I visited southern Spain in November (I live in the UK); the locals were wearing thick coats, hats, scarves and gloves. I was still feeling very warm in shorts and a short sleeved shirt. There must be some physiological angle to it - if I had tried to dress like the locals, I would be soaked in my own sweat - they were not.
In January 1985 I traveled to Washington DC from Pennsylvania. This was Inauguration weekend, but the parade was cancelled because of cold weather (well below freezing). But by the afternoon, it had warmed up to about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. I considered this just fine weather (unzipped my jacket), since I had come from PA where it was about 0 degrees, but the students from Florida I ran into (I think they had been going to be in the parade) were feeling very cold, and asking each other if they were getting frostbite…
Yeah, I’ve got a friend in Nigeria and I was chatting with him in springtime saying it was a nice warm day here and I was in my shirtsleeves - and he was saying it was quite cold there today and people were putting on cardigans.
Then we talked numbers. My ‘warm’ day was 13 centigrade. His ‘cold’ day was 25.
When 25 centigrade happens here, people want ice cream.
I go through this ever year. You’ll hit the first really cold day of the year, and I’ll suffer just terribly. But the next equally cold day just doesn’t bug me a fraction as much. Same in early summer with the first really hot day. Weird. “Ya get used to it” is all the explanation I’ve ever heard, but it’s nice that you can get used to it fairly quickly.
I am not a northerner but it DOES get cold in Denver…and then warm…and then cold again. I am the same type as you, cold by nature, would like a minimum air temperature of about 80F, no maximum. But I go through a thing in the winter where I tell myself that it’s cold and I just have to accept it. It seems to be almost as much a mental thing as a physical thing.
And I didn’t think I would, but I do acclimate. One year we had an eight-day stretch where the temp didn’t get above zero. On the 9th day it got up to 16F and I unzipped my down jacket when walking from the bus to my office. Balmy! (Of course I had on thermal underwear and a wool layer under that down jacket, it’s not like I wasn’t protected.)
Decades ago, I walked into a physiology lecture class, because I was early for my class in that room. The prof was going over potential test questions and mentioned. “I’ll be asking what the body goes through 10 minutes after being exposed to cold temperatures and 10 days after being exposed to cold temperatures.”
I’ll never know the answer, but apparently it was a studied phenomena.
In my case, there is at least some acclimatization in a short period of time. When we get cold fronts overnight and I first step out of the house, it feels really cold. After warming up for a few minutes in the car and stepping out wherever it is I’m going to, it doesn’t feel nearly as cold as the initial blast.
This might be a tangent, or it might be a related phenomenon. Just an anecdote, but:
My family lives in and around the New Orleans area. My mom once worked at a shop in the French Quarter, and frequently met tourists through the course of her work. One winter day, it had gotten down to about 40 F (about 4 C). My mom was talking to some tourists from Chicago, and they said they had never felt as cold back home as they felt that day in New Orleans – because of the humidity, it was a “damp cold” and thus felt much colder than the mercury read.
Now … there are people from all over the U.S. and all over the world on this forum. Does that anecdote make any sense to anyone else? If so … perhaps it means that temperature is but one aspect of local climate to which a new arrival must get accustomed. Can humidity have that kind of effect as well?
Absolutely! Damp air has a much higher thermal mass than dry air, and damp cold is much colder than dry cold.
A confounding effect is that when it gets cold enough the air can’t hold a lot of moisture. But at, say, 40F, the humidity matters a lot to how cold the air will feel. Personally, I get much colder in 40F rain than if it’s 20F and dry and sunny.
I’ve personally noticed two things that seem to be correlated with how hot or cold I feel at a given temperature (and relative humidity) throughout the day.
The first is fairly obvious: activity. The more active I am, the hotter I get. However, that doesn’t explain why I am cooler just after waking up and hotter just before going to bed. I can actually find the same temperature freezing upon waking and for most of the day, but then too hot for covers by night time.
The one thing I think may be relevant is my body temperature, which has a fairly wide fluctuation. It can be as low as 96.1 degrees in the morning, and just above the classic 98.6 at might. And it would make sense that your body would feel warmer when it has more excess heat to get rid of.
So perhaps there are metabolic differences involved. It would be interesting to see what the average high and low body temperatures are for people in different climates.
Finally, there is one thing I’m pretty sure is psychological: the fact that the same temperature feels a lot warmer after being exposed to cold weather. And the same temperature feels cooler after being exposed to hot weather. This change isn’t instant: my body needs to cool down or warm up. But once it settles in, the above holds. 72 degrees Fahrenheit can be perfect in the summer or unbearably warm in the winter. Yet the changes in my body temperature remain all year 'round, as does the general daily trend of being cold in the morning and hot at night.
And of course seasonal acclimatization.
The first time I go jogging in sub 5 degree Celsius weather, my chest tightens and I really have trouble making any distance.
A week later, same clothes, lower temperature, I’m good.
Agreed. That’s why the standard joke in Saskatchewan when it’s 30 below is “But it’s a dry cold.” It actually does make a difference - damp cold is worse than dry cold.
I have one coworker who only starts wearing a jacket when it’s below freezing. He’s a climber and that’s his personal physiology. If you see him wearing a jacket, most other people will be wearing a heavy coat, hat and gloves.
I much prefer dry cold than wet cold. My body is able to keep the heat in a lot better.
The only thing odd about that story is that Chicago is famous for its damp (and windy) cold. Not so much in the dead of winter, but in the shoulder seasons. 35F and high humidity in or after a rainstorm feels remarkably cold.
I suspect the back story is the Chicagoans scoffed to themselves before going out “Hey, 40F is warm compared to the 10F we left at home; we’ll be comfy in a light jacket.” Then spend hours, not minutes, wandering around outdoors in the quarter. It’s the time that got to them on top of the damp.
When I first moved from Las Vegas to semi-snowy/icy St. Louis I lived down in the city and walked a lot. People who drove everywhere laughed at how heavily we dressed once the temp got down into the 40s. Big difference between going from your toasty parked car to the store door at 45F and walking a mile to the same store door at 45F. At 20F the difference is even bigger.
A few years later we moved to non-walkable suburbia. Between driving everywhere, being long since acclimatized, and having gained some Midwestern-standard extra poundage around the midsection, we too dressed lightly down to about freezing.
Now living in South FL and happily absent the extra poundage. We’re having a cold snap right now. It’s 58F at 9am and the high yesterday was just 55F. With a breeze but no clouds. Brrrr! Its freezing around here today!
Long pants, silk long underwear top & bottom, actual socks that cover your ankles, and a flannel long sleeve shirt are very comfy for a mile walk. Except my fingers and ears got unhappily cold. Acclimatization works both ways.
There is an easy psychology experiment you can do at home. Put one hand in a bowl of cold water for a minute, while putting the other hand in a bowl of warm water. Then put both hands in bowls of room temperature water. The one that was in the cold water now feels as if it is in hot water, and vice versa.
We recently had a very odd and welcome run of warm Canadian December weather, 7-10C. (44-50F). It felt really cold when the temperature dropped to a modest zero (32F). Recent experiences definitely affect perceptions.
But it is also a matter of expectations and preparation. If you expect bad weather, it is a little less annoying. If you dress appropriately for cold weather, it is much more manageable. Sure, one acclimatizes to heights, exercise, even the cold. But expectations and preparations matter too.
I once went to a town “on the far side of the mountain” that has lots of sunny days and little rain. When there was an unusual moderate downpour (I thought, I need to wear a jacket), locals were running around like it was a tornado. The next day, the paper had a picture of a tree with some branches blown off. I really wish in retrospect that I’d purchased the paper - headline: Chaos In The Streets.
