tandempower

I think you mentioned something about cognitive tricks to get yourself to adapt to the heat a few posts back. I notice a lot of cognitive patterns that affect how we perceive temperature. I notice, for example, that the preference for heating and cooling are related to a more general attitude toward natural states as something to be transcended. It's like the feeling of being safer the further up off the ground you are, or the further you are from the edge of a forest. So some people feel better when they're getting more medical therapy, taking medicine or having surgery, because it makes them feel like something is being done to change their natural state, which they subconsciously/cognitively perceive as inferior to a state of artificial intervention as superior. This is cognitively relative, because you can also have a perspective like mine (and others) where you view natural organic processes as being more evolved than artificial mechanical procedures that humans do, so I'd much rather have my body functioning naturally than to be taking medicine or having surgeries, etc.; though I know there are situations where those artificial interventions are necessary because your bodily health is so compromised by infection or trauma that it's not going to be able to heal on its own, or if it does it will heal in a deformed way.

Anyway, I try to utilize this cognitive preference for artificial interventions by telling people to think of the natural temperature in terms of the corresponding artificial version of it. E.g. you can think of summer heat as abundant free winter heating, as if you had a heater so powerful you could blow enough heat outdoors to raise the temperature up into the 80s or 90s or whatever it is. You can think of it like those hand-dryers that blow hot air, but on a huge scale. This probably wouldn't appeal to people much, but it sort of creates the cognitive sense that the natural seasonal heat is a temporary thing that's going to blow away to reveal the winter cold lurking behind it soon enough. It puts a different perspective on summer heat to think of it as temporarily free heat and 'get it while you can!'

I tell people the same thing about winter cold in the south where a lot of people are really pathetic when it comes to acclimating to the cold. Some people on this forum laugh at me when I say I wear a ski mask when it's in the 20sF, but I am probably one of the toughest people in my area in this regard. A lot of people have the heat on as soon as the outdoor temp drops into the 60s, which I find ridiculous. All summer they were paying an arm and a leg and depleting planetary energy reserves to refrigerate their houses, and suddenly the moment the heat is gone, they miss it and want to replace it with artificial heat. They'll complain about the cold and I'll remind them how they long for it during the heat of summer. Cognitively, you think about the natural temperature differently when you frame it in terms of some other season when you were longing for the time of year that you're farthest away from in the seasonal cycle. I guess that's just a way of saying the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.