Winter currently has Germany firmly in its grip. What to do if you are one of those people who are constantly cold? Even small changes can help you train your cold sensitivity and freeze less.
Where one person feels really comfortable, another prefers to put on a thick sweater. “There are very large individual differences in sensitivity to cold,” said Ralf Brandes, Professor of Physiology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, to the dpa in 2023. He represents an area of medicine that deals with the functions of the body.
In fact, there are tricks we can use to change our perception of cold. They have to do with thermoreceptors in the body that ensure that we sense heat and cold. They generate nerve impulses depending on the temperature. This is how they tell our brain whether our environment – or something we touch – is cold or warm. The thermoreceptors are not only located in the skin, but also in our body. And you can take advantage of that.
Trick 1: Sensitize the body with tea, ointments and spices
“Drinking something hot doesn’t mean your entire body is warming up,” says Brandes. “But just that heat receptors in the stomach are addressed, stimulate our brain and trigger a reaction.” This gives us the feeling that our body is warm. But in reality we only have warm liquid in our stomach.
The same principle applies when you smear yourself with a warming ointment or eat a spicy curry. Because the heat receptors also react to pepper and chili. As a result, they report warmth even though nothing has really changed in the body’s core temperature.
Trick 2: Avoid drafts to avoid freezing
Sometimes it is our environment that causes differences in our perception of temperature. “Anything that causes us to lose more heat makes us freeze faster,” says Brandes.
An example of this is drafts. In a calm environment, a layer of warmth forms around the body. If the wind comes up, the warm air around the body – to put it bluntly – blows away. We freeze faster. This phenomenon is also known as the wind chill effect.
At least at home you can try to curb this effect. For example, you can seal a leaky window through which a barely noticeable flow of air cools the skin. You can fill the gaps between the window and the frame with foam sealing tape or a rubber seal. Also read:
Front doors often let cold air through. A doorstop, such as a fabric snake, is one solution. But it has to be put down and put away again and again. A rubber lip that you attach to the bottom of the door, or the so-called cold enemy, are more practical alternatives.
Trick 3: Find another place instead of freezing
Sometimes it can help to sit in a different place in the room: According to the Federal Environment Agency, the closer a person’s body temperature is to the temperature of the room surfaces around them, the more comfortable they feel. This is what you feel in winter, for example, when you sit next to a cold window: you quickly feel more uncomfortable here than in the rest of the heated room.
Hanns-Christian Gunga, space medicine scientist at the Charité University Medicine in Berlin, explains to Spiegel that the humidity in a room also contributes to the feeling of cold. According to him, when the air is dry, the cold is perceived as less unpleasant. Therefore, dry heating air is “not wrong” in this case, says Gunga.
However, there are disadvantages: The heating air dries out mucous membranes – people have to cough and are somewhat more susceptible to viral infections, as the mucous membranes have a lower protective effect in this state.
Trick 4: Choose the right clothing to avoid freezing
According to Gunga, your choice of clothing can make a big difference. The doctor recommends the onion principle. Several layers are worn on top of each other. The air between the items of clothing serves as a further layer of insulation. A similar principle also arises with down jackets or down bedding, as there is a lot of air between the feathers that insulates and keeps you warm.
Nevertheless, the expert recommends textiles that are permeable to air for the onion look. The body produces moisture that needs to be able to escape. Because damp clothing cools the body instead of warming it.
According to Gunga, it is also crucial which parts of the body you keep warm. For example, there are many cold receptors in the neck, but at the same time the skin is thin and the vessels are poorly protected. That’s why the expert recommends keeping this area warm. You can do this with a cozy scarf or a turtleneck sweater.
Trick 5: Can we get used to cooler temperatures?
You can definitely train your cold sensitivity. A tip that you often read in this context: take a cold shower. “It certainly toughens you up and also has various positive effects on your health,” says Brandes. However, it has not been investigated whether short, cold showers sustainably reduce the feeling of cold.
The body can only get used to cold if it is exposed to it regularly. But there are limits. “When the temperature in the core of the body drops, we inevitably have to freeze so that we don’t freeze to death,” says Brandes. This manifests itself in the form of muscle tremors, through which the body produces heat.
It is therefore also important to keep the body’s heat loss within limits. And a hat helps. Because: At an average of 38.5 degrees, the temperature of the brain is slightly higher than the average body temperature. A hat can be put on quickly – and ensures that we lose less heat through our heads.
14 degrees are perceived differently in spring than in autumn
In fact, our sense of cold sends itself into training camp every year – due to the change of seasons. “If it’s 13 or 14 degrees in April, we think it’s warm and go out without a jacket. If the temperatures drop to 13 or 14 degrees in autumn, we freeze,” Brandes continued. Our bodies adapt within a relatively short period of time.
This adaptability can now also be used to feel comfortable in a less heated apartment. A longer-term increase in cold tolerance is possible through regular and ideally daily exposure, says Thomas Korff, professor at the Institute of Physiology and Pathophysiology at Heidelberg University.
“We see this, for example, in people who work outdoors. They generally move more, which is why they probably have more muscles and a higher basal metabolic rate.” They also unconsciously adjusted their behavior: “Someone who works outside a lot will probably also change their diet because an increased basal metabolic rate requires more calories.”
Not a good trick: add a protective layer of fat
Overall, this improves the body’s ability to perceive cool temperatures as pleasant. However, Korff advises against eating a protective layer of fat: White body fat is something different from the actually protective subcutaneous fat. “Of course, white body fat also has an insulating effect, but only where it is located.”
There is also brown fat, which for a long time was thought to only be present in infants. Instead, adults also have this type of fatty tissue, which acts like the body’s own heater – although usually only in small quantities. Babies, who do not have enough muscle to generate enough heat and are much more sensitive to cold, need brown fat to maintain their core temperature.
Studies show that cold stimuli can increase the proportion of brown, warming fat in adults. However, the research on this is not yet fully developed, explains Korff. It is clear that even small changes in behavior can make you less sensitive to cold: “It can help not to drive all the way to the office, but to walk the last kilometer or take the bike straight away.”
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