One day in my young adulthood, I discovered I'd strained some shoulder muscles the day before, from hunching and shivering against the winter cold the previous day, at the outdoor wind-tunnel Lechmere Station on the MBTA Green Line. At the time, I lived car-free in the Boston area, and spent a lot of time walking and waiting for public transportation in the winter cold. I'd never liked the cold. No winter coat was warm enough. I remember as a little kid feeling uncomfortably chilly just walking down the freezer aisle in a supermarket. But strained muscles was a wake-up call; it made no sense to react to the cold in ways that were clearly doing me more harm than the cold itself.
I'd tried various ways of pretending not to feel the cold. Visualizing warm surroundings, "thinking warm thoughts," and the like. Those were never effective and often seemed to make it worse. So at a loss for anything more sensible sounding I started trying the opposite, and eventually figured out a mental technique that did work, and why it worked. I called it "Resist Cold" (I was an avid D&D player at the time) but it's not the way one would usually think of resisting something. It's really more like "Accept Cold."
My technique is to focus on feeling the physical sensations of the cold. It's valuable information provided by your senses about your current surroundings. Try to experience it as truly and thoroughly as you can. The feel of the temperature, the movement of wind against your skin, the cold of the ground through your feet, wetness from rain or mist or melting snow, all of it. At first, I had to really concentrate hard on this, but by experiencing the cold entirely as information about the world, I wasn't experiencing it as a painful condition of myself. Especially, and this is where the concentration comes in, you're separating what you feel physically from all the emotions you might be feeling about it: resentment about the circumstances that are causing you to be in a cold place (damn train is late; gotta shovel this snow at the crack of dawn; cheapskate employer sets the thermostat too low); fear (possibly subconscious and instinctive) that the cold will kill you before you can reach safety; bad memories of other times you've been cold; self-recrimination that you didn't choose a different plan or a warmer outfit; distraction and unbalance from trying to face away from every puff of wind. Concentrate on how the cold actually feels instead, which is much easier to tolerate. If you know any of those insufferable people who stride through subzero wind chill with their jacket open and flapping in the wind while saying things like, "ooh, feel that breeze!"... chances are they're applying some version of this same approach.
What does "I feel cold" mean anyhow? What it should mean is that you feel that your surroundings are cold. But what it often means instead is that you feel yourself as being in a stressed condition due to your own physical and emotional reactions to your surroundings being cold. It's true that inescapable cold conditions can be dangerous and hypothermia is a real thing with serious consequences, but if you're dressed reasonably for the weather you're not going to suffer frostbite or hypothermia from having to wait for a bus on a cold windy day. Most of the time you don't need to feel cold in that second way. Concentrate on the first way until it becomes your normal way of perceiving cold conditions.
Generalized, this approach does work on other kinds of pain or discomfort too. It's a bit more difficult to apply to heat at first, because heat (unless it's really extreme) doesn't create strong immediate external sensations to focus on. But once you've experienced and practiced the underlying concept of detaching sensation from emotion, it will work. Be cautious, though; in many people overheating can reach harmful levels without them feeling it much.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2025-01-14 04:28 am (UTC)I'd tried various ways of pretending not to feel the cold. Visualizing warm surroundings, "thinking warm thoughts," and the like. Those were never effective and often seemed to make it worse. So at a loss for anything more sensible sounding I started trying the opposite, and eventually figured out a mental technique that did work, and why it worked. I called it "Resist Cold" (I was an avid D&D player at the time) but it's not the way one would usually think of resisting something. It's really more like "Accept Cold."
My technique is to focus on feeling the physical sensations of the cold. It's valuable information provided by your senses about your current surroundings. Try to experience it as truly and thoroughly as you can. The feel of the temperature, the movement of wind against your skin, the cold of the ground through your feet, wetness from rain or mist or melting snow, all of it. At first, I had to really concentrate hard on this, but by experiencing the cold entirely as information about the world, I wasn't experiencing it as a painful condition of myself. Especially, and this is where the concentration comes in, you're separating what you feel physically from all the emotions you might be feeling about it: resentment about the circumstances that are causing you to be in a cold place (damn train is late; gotta shovel this snow at the crack of dawn; cheapskate employer sets the thermostat too low); fear (possibly subconscious and instinctive) that the cold will kill you before you can reach safety; bad memories of other times you've been cold; self-recrimination that you didn't choose a different plan or a warmer outfit; distraction and unbalance from trying to face away from every puff of wind. Concentrate on how the cold actually feels instead, which is much easier to tolerate. If you know any of those insufferable people who stride through subzero wind chill with their jacket open and flapping in the wind while saying things like, "ooh, feel that breeze!"... chances are they're applying some version of this same approach.
What does "I feel cold" mean anyhow? What it should mean is that you feel that your surroundings are cold. But what it often means instead is that you feel yourself as being in a stressed condition due to your own physical and emotional reactions to your surroundings being cold. It's true that inescapable cold conditions can be dangerous and hypothermia is a real thing with serious consequences, but if you're dressed reasonably for the weather you're not going to suffer frostbite or hypothermia from having to wait for a bus on a cold windy day. Most of the time you don't need to feel cold in that second way. Concentrate on the first way until it becomes your normal way of perceiving cold conditions.
Generalized, this approach does work on other kinds of pain or discomfort too. It's a bit more difficult to apply to heat at first, because heat (unless it's really extreme) doesn't create strong immediate external sensations to focus on. But once you've experienced and practiced the underlying concept of detaching sensation from emotion, it will work. Be cautious, though; in many people overheating can reach harmful levels without them feeling it much.