Not Feeling Cold

I was thinking about people who shiver and shake and say that they are ‘freezing’ when it’s not much below 6°C, which is really quite mild for a January here in the North of England and I was feeling so much compassion for them, so here are some helpful tips in the form of ways to not feel cold when you’re in a place with a low temperature.

Warning – don’t try the last one. It’s effective, but it’s not helpful if you have other stuff you want to do afterwards.

Here are the basic tips:

• Wear layers. The more layers you wear the more opportunity the heat of your body has for getting trapped in the air between the different items of clothing covering you
• Inject heat from the outside. There are two ways to do this. The first involves putting heat inside your body by eating or drinking something hot such as porridge or tea. The second is all about warming the air in the area outside of you by means of radiators or central heating or something like that.
• Stimulate your body to produce more heat. This is otherwise known as exercise. If you move more then your body will release heat as a byproduct of the extra work your muscles are doing.

Here are some more advanced techniques:

• Distraction. Take your mind off the way your body is feeling by doing something interesting. Writing a blog is one good example.
• Mind over matter. It may come over like a joke, but if you don’t mind then it really doesn’t matter. But that’s not what it really means – it’s more to do with training your mind to overcome the limitations of the flesh (matter). Same result either way, though.
• Live somewhere further south than where you were born. Have you ever seen a member of the people formerly known as Eskimos shivering in Scotland? Nope, me neither.
• Die. Only for the foolhardy and certainly not recommended by me, but it’s still true to say that you will not feel cold if you die. Yeah, once again – don’t try this at home.