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Enjoying the warmth and cold of late autumn

I love when the clocks go back in the autumn and I can have an extra hour in bed. It feels like a small gift, a permission to snuggle down and rest, to luxuriate in the warmth and comfort of my duvet. Strangely, I also love the moments on an autumn morning when, wrapped in my dressing gown, I step out into the cold half-light of the garden to open the chicken coop. There is something about the sudden tingle of cold on my skin, and the sharpness of the air as I inhale, that makes me feel suddenly alive. I take a moment to stand on the back step and drink in the scents of cold, damp woodland and look up at the stars as they fade into daylight. Often there is a blackbird singing, or chattering out an alarm as the cat winds round my ankles. Returning from the chicken run, I hurry inside before the cold begins to chill my body. The house suddenly seems so much warmer.

How trying to stay warm can hinder our healing

Back in the days of illness I spent so much time huddled under my bedclothes that the extra hour when the clocks changed meant very little. I began every day by checking my temperature, which stayed resolutely low, reflecting my sluggish metabolism and struggling thyroid. I often felt cold to my core, and would pop a small hot water bottle in the waistband of my trousers to boost my temperature. I swathed my neck in scarves and wore layer upon layer to hold in the heat. On one memorable occasion, I found a strangely squashy patch on my hip and realised with horror that it was a huge blister, an inch across. I was so detached from my body that I had not felt the intense heat of my hot water bottle, or the pain of the burn that it caused. That was an alarm call that really got me thinking about how I managed my body temperature.

This came at around the time I read an interesting article about the body’s need to experience variations in temperature. The author argued that our modern comforts of central heating, hot water on tap, warm cars and cosy clothing have created a situation in which we rarely experience real cold. At the same time we have slipped into sedentary lifestyles, spending hours sitting at our computers, barely moving and so generating very little heat. As a result, the delicate feedback loops that constrict our peripheral blood vessels to retain heat, and boost our metabolism to generate more, have very little to do. Like any system or muscle in the body, if we don’t use it, we lose it. Our bodies forget how to keep warm.

Reading this, I was reminded of just how much warmer life is now than when I was a child. In the winter I would wake to frost on the inside of my bedroom window. I learned to keep my clothes close to the bed, so I could grab them and dress under the covers. The only warm rooms in the house were the kitchen and the living room (when the fire was lit in the evening). Trips to the bathroom were brief and bracing. In the depths of winter my feet froze as I waited for the school bus, which often had no heating either. My body had plenty of feedback to strengthen its ability to maintain a stable temperature. I naturally shivered and jumped and swung my arms to warm myself up. As an adult, my response to cold had become avoidance, immobility, layers upon layers, and a turning up of the thermostat.

Embracing the cold

After finding that painless burn, I began playing with temperature and noticing how my body responded. In the morning, I deliberately got up and dressed slowly, noticing the feeling of the cold air on my skin and the ripple of goosebumps. I finished each shower by gradually turning down the temperature to the bottom. Each day I stretched that time of bracing cold a little longer. I was amazed to find that I came out of those showers feeling energised and significantly warmer. My body was remembering how to boost my internal furnace and redirect my warm blood away from my cold skin. It was also registering the contrast between cold shower and warm bedroom.

Sitting at my desk, or on the sofa, I began noticing the urge to turn up the heating or add another blanket when I felt cold. I began to recognise my coldness as a message from my body that I had been immobile for too long and needed to move. Even standing up slowly and doing some simple stretches brought a flush of warmth. Once upright I kept the momentum going and headed to the kitchen for a warm drink. Gradually, as one small part of my whole recovery process, I began to regain my body’s ability to self-regulate my temperature and to feel less challenged by the arrival of autumn.

The final shift in my internal thermostat came when I moved away from a place in which I had felt chronically unsafe and stressed, back to Scotland. Ironically it was a move that often prompted people to ask how I would cope with the cold. (For those of you unfamiliar with Scotland, who may picture it as an extension of the Arctic, we do have lovely sunny warm days. The Gulf Stream means that there are palm trees growing on the West Coast even further north than the Clyde.) That baseline body temperature shift brought me within ‘normal parameters’ for the first time in decades. It signalled the lifting of a chronic dissociative state that I had been in for most of my life, a freeze fear response that shut down my circulation and metabolism. But that is a story for another day.

All of these changes, that now enable me to walk comfortably through a frosty garden in the October dawn, originated in a dawning awareness that there were different ways of understanding and addressing my coldness. I got curious, and playful and risked getting cold to find ways of keeping warm.

Top Tips

• By taking your temperature regularly in the morning you can get some helpful insights into what is happening with your metabolism and your thyroid in particular. Taking it in the morning helps get a more accurate picture as it changes through the day, particularly in response to exercise. As women, our temperature changes through the monthly cycle, but should be between 36–37 degrees C.
• If you have been taking your morning temperature for a long time and are seeing no changes, stop. As I wrote couple of weeks ago, it’s easy to become fixated by the numbers and distracted from your body’s internal messages.
• If you struggle to keep warm, try noticing when this happens and how you respond. Noticing opens the possibility of changing how you respond.
• Get curious and playful, take a risk with doing something different and see how your body responds.

If you would like to find out more about my recovery, or my work supporting others seeking recovery,  visit my home page or About Alison page