Furnaces fail. Cars slide into snowbanks. Mass transit doesn’t arrive when it was counted upon. Kids lose gloves. Footing slips, landing feet in cold water. Cold injuries (read more about them here) are a real risk in these kinds of situations. Here’s a collection of ‘cold hacks’ to protect you and yours and keep the cold at bay when Life Happens.
Cold Hack: Let them eat bread
Let them eat bread … so you can use the bread wrapper as a sock. This cold hack was very popular with moms during my childhood, and it worked great. Being out in the snow, even with good boots, often results in wet feet. Snow gets around the cuff of the boot, melts with body heat, wicks inside.
Mom’s solution: One layer of sock, one layer of bread wrapper (long, airtight plastic bags), second layer of sock, boots. The sock sandwich keeps the plastic from being torn up by friction with the boots and from feeling nasty against the feet.
Standard bread loaves come in long, airtight, flexible plastic bags; perfect for keeping feet dry.
Also works on hands, although manual dexterity is terrible.
Cold Hack: Bubble Wrap
Bubble wrap also makes a good insulator, although it doesn’t come in handy leg-sized bags. It’s best used as a barrier when you’re sitting or lying down. Going to be stuck while waiting rescue, or waiting out a storm? Raid discarded packing boxes for some bubble wrap to put between you and the cold, hard world.
Cold hack: Eat, Drink, and Be Warm
Cycling taught me this one. On a comfortable summer day, I’ll get in about thirty miles before I start getting hungry. On those ‘water freezes in the bottle’ days, I’m ravenous after just fifteen. As bodies start to chill, your hypothalamus cranks up your metabolism to keep your temperature up. Your furnace will run hotter and keep you toastier if you feed it plenty of fuel.
The birds know. The feeder gets *demolished* during cold snaps as these little guys run their motors top speed to replace lost heat.
Keeping hydrated is also important. People tend to be mindful of hydration in the summer, but forget it in the winter. You do lose body water though — with the low relative humidity of the air, you lose a lot of water just breathing. There’s also some sweating, although it’s often not enough for us to feel it happening. When body water gets low, blood flow gets sluggish. The cells are less able to get what they need to run, so metabolism slows. This means you’re not good at replacing the heat lost to the cold outside world and your body chills.
Frostbite is particularly more likely when dehydrated, as we sacrifice good blood flow to our extremities and skin first.
Cold hack: Don’t Overdress for Exercise
Want an eye-opening experience, and not in a good way? Work up a good sweat cutting wood or shoveling snow in the cold, then rest and let that wind chill work its magic. HOOOO that’s cold!
It’s much better to remove some layers during exercise to reduce sweating. Don them again soon after you stop. The clothes are still dry and wind chill doesn’t matter as much. I know this makes perfect sense to Hear, but it’s easy to overlook in the moment. I’ve particularly fallen for it with gloves. Who thinks about how much their *hands* sweat?
Cold hack so you don’t hack: Cover the mouth and nose
This one is particularly for two groups: Those who are exerting themselves, and those whose lungs irritate easily (such as most people who have asthma).
Cover the nose and mouth so air has to move through to get through to the lungs. This will increase both the temperature and the humidity of the inhaled air. Winter air has a very low relative humidity as soon as it enters you and starts to warm, so it sucks moisture out of your airways. That’s irritating and compromises your immune defenses. Similarly, the cold itself will chill your airways, again irritating both nerves and impairing immune cells.
A scarf or plain black balaclava will do wonders for your lungs. I thought this one looked cooler though.
On a related note: Breathe through the nose instead of the mouth as much as possible. Those nose hairs, nasal mucus, and complex nose passages do have a point, as they pre-warm and pre-humidify air, as well as removing some hitch-hiking microbes before the air gets to the lungs. You’ll hack less, in the sense of not having to cough as much.
Great reads, thanks for taking the time to educate us.
As we teach the scouts, keep your ears, nose, fingers and toes warm.