Tips to prevent yourself from getting cold

If you’re feeling cold, you long for somewhere warm. Warmth is relaxing and can also help relieve aches and pains. When it’s cold your muscles contract, limiting your mobility and maybe causing tension in your body. We’ve put together a few great tips to keep you feeling warm and cosy, even through the cold winter months.

Dress in layers

Dress up warm, preferably in layers. Wearing several thin layers on top of each other provides better insulation. It also means you can adapt to different temperatures over the course of the day. Your face is particularly susceptible to the cold, so don’t forget your scarf and gloves. If you tend to get cold hands you should wear mittens: they trap more warm air than gloves with individual fingers.

Exercise

If you’re in the cold, stay active rather than standing still. Moving around gets your circulation going. If you’re waiting outdoors for a bus or train, for example, you can wiggle your feet up and down or walk a few steps. Climbing stairs also helps prevents you from getting cold. If you’re exercising outside in the cold, remember to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. This enables the air to adjust to your body temperature.

Hot drinks

A hot cup of tea or coffee is nice and warming. It warms you from the inside, and warms your hands as well. If you want to warm up even more, try adding a dash of hot chilli or ginger to your drink. But be careful: alcohol doesn’t protect you from the cold! It might make you feel warm for a short time, but actually it limits the flow of blood to major organs and accelerates your body’s fall in temperature.

Warm and cold

If you want to get through the winter more comfortably it helps to toughen up by taking alternate hot and cold showers or going to the sauna and plunging into cold water afterwards. Switching from hot to cold makes your blood vessels contract and expand alternately, which makes it easier to tolerate fluctuations in temperature.

Children

Children's sensitivity to temperature is different to that of adults. While parents stand around and shiver, little ones tend to move much more, for example out on the playground, and they even sweat in the process. To see if a child is actually too cold, you should lay a hand on their forehead or touch their hands. In any case, dressing in layers makes sense for children as well. They can then peel off a couple of layers before running around with their friends, and then put them back on again afterwards so that they aren't exposed to the cold and cold viruses while in a sweaty state.

26.10.2022