BBC News have written an article called "Staying Warm; What does an unheated room do to your body?"
A healthy male journalist was connected to medical monitors and the impact on his body documented as the room fell from a cosy 21c to 10c-the average winter temperature of an unheated room.
It's interesting, but it's bland data without context and lived experience, so let me tell you what it's actually like to inhabit a space that's not warm enough...
2. At first you can brave it out as a challenge. You may seek new and functioning heaters of one form or another like lighting a fire or getting hold of an electric heater.
If you can find heat, then the temperature goes up and the problem is solved.
Every kind of heat requires a fuel and (excepting a bonfire) most will also require some form of equipment. For many this winter there is no affordable fuel, let alone money for equipment.
I've lived that reality more than once...
3. When the drop is gradual you may acclimatise for while before you experience feeling "f'in freezing" (FF) but if heat ceases suddenly you'll be FF in hours.
FF seems to be a primal force, like hunger. Even when you think you aren't thinking about seeking heat, you are.
When you're FF for a while, you consciously notice it less after a while. You realise you are still FF but you don't realise what a slow minded, slow moving creature you'll seem. This happens well before you're shivering...
4. As you slow down you make mistakes. If the corner of a table sticks out now is the time your thigh will find it, even if you can see.
Why can't you see? Soon after FF happens you'll have dug a hat out of a drawer and you'll be wearing it so low on your brow as you pull it down all around that it'll cut into your vision just a little bit. The head parts of your thickest hoody will cut the sides off too. Your glasses will steam from your breath, even with a scarf round your mouth...
5. You'll hurt.
Your fingers and toes will be in both sharp and dull pain at once. Your ears nose and lips won't feel great either.
Wherever you are least insulated by clothing will feel cold, for example, in skinny jeans this may be your thigh. If you wear a dressing gown, your upper chest.
Your new bruises will seem to take forever to heal and feel deeper somehow and worse than they ought to.
You'll be uncomfortable on purpose to avoid switching positions into a cold patch of sofa/bed...
6. You will eat more, or at least you will feel compelled to, provided food is available. You will crave hot "filling" foods and any appreciation you usually have for light meals or cold dishes will decrease as your body cries out for fuel to keep you alive. Your body will push you so hard to eat you may gain lots of weight.
If you can't feed yourself well enough you will drop weight. If you are experiencing weight loss in the cold things are already going too far. You need that insulation...
7.Your sleep is going to be impacted.
It's uncomfortable to breathe cold air any time (it freezes your airways, which in some ways feels like burns actually) but it's worse at night for a combination of reasons:
- You can't really wear a scarf or mask anymore.
- You aren't awake to be aware the temperature is falling so you wake up too late and when you are already fully FF.
- Night time temperature is lower.
- Your muscles don't relax comfortably in a FF state, it's like anger or stress...
8. Hygiene.
No one wants a bath or shower when their home is FF.
In normal circumstances after a winter walk you might shower to warm up but if your home is FF the hot shower or bath competes with the FF air which feels horrid in a blotchy way, then your body temperature plummets, even if you dry yourself fast.
Bathing means intensified suffering.
More clothes means more skin cells, germs, sweat, etc. In days or weeks you're likely to develop skin problems like chaffing and athletes foot.
9. MOULD.
MOULD EVERYWHERE.
(That is the whole toot.)
10. Your social circle and support system may well break.
Think about it- you're being boring staying indoors, you're ravenous, dressing like the Michelin man, preoccupied with temperature, unhappy, moving awkwardly from the varied impacts on your muscles, your skin is not looking great and you have cut down on baths/laundry.
(Why laundry? Because the one warmest thing you own is all you'll want to wear you'll try to wear it for days and you'll be sleeping in your second best thing)...
11. Don't expect your health to clear up overnight once you have heat again.
If I had to suggest a typical aftermath of having been FF for a spell it would be abdominal pain/ organ pain, pins and needles in your extremities, athletes foot, the flu and a bit of a rasp, bruises like a Dalmatian, a slide toward depression and weight gain.
No biggy then 😱
12. I'll just leave you with these figures:
"More than one in five of the UK population (22%) are in poverty– 14.5 million people.
Of these,
8.1 million are working-age adults, 4.3 million are children and 2.1 million are pensioners."
@RoadsideMum You can reduce this by hanging a thick but breathable cotton sheet from the ceiling over the bed. Keeps more warmth in, without suffocating you.
Find joist in ceiling, near to head end of bed. Screw cup screw into it. Put stone into middle of bottom side of sheet & tie end of string round it from top side. Cover top half of bed with sheet. Pull string up toward hook as high as you can without lifting sheet corners. Tie in place.
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