If You Are Having Trouble Getting Rid of the Heat Outside, Turn Off the Air Conditioner.
You won’t like it, but your air conditioner actually prevents your body from coping with the heat outside. If you want to be more comfortable outdoors during the hot summer months, you need to cut back on your AC use.
If you can’t win, join. If you want to feel more comfortable in the heat, scientist Stan Cox, author of Losing Our Cool , invites you to become one with the heat. According to the Adaptive Comfort Model, your ideal comfort temperature depends on the temperature you have recently been exposed to. If you are always in an AC blast room, you can go outside as if you were caught in an oven. On a psychological level, your body makes the air hotter. Cox explains:
If we feel more warmth, we can tolerate more warmth. So, if it’s 70 degrees outside, we may be most comfortable in the 70s. But by the time it’s 90 degrees outside, we can feel as comfortable as in the 80s.
It’s like stepping out of a cold pool and stepping into a warm hot bath: it will be much hotter there than if the pool was heated. So if you want to make the most of the summer and feel less miserable going out, you need to ditch the air conditioner and let your body get used to the heat. Decrease or turn off the air conditioner at home and drive with the windows down. You may not be very comfortable at first, but after a while you will get used to it – and save some money in the process.
Too Much Air Conditioning Reduces Your Ability to Deal With Heat | Science about us