As I’m writing this, I am not practicing what I’m about to preach. I’m sitting in my third-floor, south-facing home office after noon on the second day of yet another major heat wave. For those of you who don’t live in our general area, the west coast of British Columbia is known for a mild, temperate climate, with dry and warm but not hot summers. During an average summer, our daily high temperatures are usually a very comfortable 20 to 25°C or around 68 to 75°F. Usually, we don’t get much rain in the summer, most days are sunny with some cloudy periods and just warm enough to go swimming outside in various lakes, rivers, and public pools. The nights are usually cool and refreshing. This is probably why most of us have no central air conditioning. Many of us are rethinking that after a horrendous heat wave, call a “heat dome,” descended upon us in late June. Temperatures where I live reached around 42°C, or nearly 114°F. Those of us without air-conditioning were sweating it out in our unbelievably hot homes. Hundreds of vulnerable people actually died because of the heat. Now, we are at the start of another heat dome, not nearly as intense as the previous one, but hot enough: perhaps as high as 36°C for a couple of days.
What I’ve noticed about coping with heat is that two strategies/skills are particularly helpful.
First, as with coping with pain, prevention is much more important than alleviation. If you experience pain, you probably know that it’s important to take medication before the onset of pain. You want to get ahead of it rather than try to catch up with it. The same probably goes for pain related coping strategies, such as mindfulness, relaxation, self-talk, support-seeking, and so on. It’s helpful to make these activities part of your regular routine so that you have a strong foundation and can reduce your vulnerability to pain and improve your chances of coping well with it.
I discovered personally that the same applies to coping with heat. If I wait until I feel overheated, it takes a lot of effort to cool myself down, and I am prone to overheating once again. If, however, I take preventative steps, I can usually stave off the feeling of being overheated and stay relatively comfortable. Yesterday evening, for example, I wasn’t particularly warm in the house, but I knew it could be a warm night, so I soaked a T-shirt in water and sat in front of a fan reading my book before bedtime. Although it was warm last night, I was quite comfortable and had a very good sleep. In contrast, if I wait till I’m hot and try to cool myself down before bed, I often wake up in the night perspiring. I’ve found that, when it comes to heat, an ounce of prevention is certainly worth more than a couple of pounds of water poured over my head.
Second, the mindfulness skill in DBT called “effectively” can be very helpful. My normal go to strategy in coping with it is to do what I described above: soak a t-shirt and simply wear it around the house until it dries, and then soak it again. It is incredibly effective, yet walking around with a wet T-shirt on is not conducive to socializing, having important meetings over Zoom, etc. I keep trying to get my family members to use this strategy, but they have all (except my mom) refused. They don’t like the idea of feeling a wet t-shirt on their skin, think it’s too much trouble, don’t want to sit on the couch and get it all wet, and the reasons for not doing it go on. They might even think they shouldn’t have to do it. And yet, it’s incredibly effective. When it comes to coping with heat, pain, or really almost anything else, I try to remind myself to do what works rather than what I want to do. That’s the skill of “effectively.”
You certainly don’t have to use the wet shirt technique. In fact, I’m pretty sure I could get in trouble for trying to convince people to do so! But, I would encourage you to think about strategies that work for you to cope with the heat we’re going to experience over the next few days, and to use them preventatively and proactively. OK, now I’m going to practice what I’ve been preaching: Even though I don’t want to move my computer to the basement and work down there this afternoon, I’m going to do it anyway. ~Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.