Keeping Cool
Tips to achieve mental and literal coolness
Happy Friday, HSP Parents.
After missing a recent much-anticipated vacation due to illness, I’m excited to be attending a pool party this afternoon with friends and a music festival this weekend with my partner (and my teens if they’re free).
What are your plans this weekend? Is it summer in your part of the world?
Emotional Cool:
Many a parent’s dearest wish is to remain calm, cool, and collected while facing conflict or adversity.
This isn’t easy of course (if it were, there would be no such thing as “anger management”). Achieving a zen state can be especially difficult for Highly Sensitive People as our nervous systems are often on overdrive.
But, it’s worth the trouble. Regulating our own emotions goes a long way to helping our children feel calm, centred and confident in their own skin.
Study after study shows that parents, guardians and teachers have an important role in illustrating how children can understand & regulate their emotions and then decide for themselves how to react to troubling situations or disturbing news.
With levels of anxiety rising in children and teens, it’s important that we all do our part to understand ourselves, our emotional responses and demonstrate this knowledge for our kids.
Literal Cool:
I received this press release on managing body temperature and, even though the tips are tried & true, with levels of heat and temps rising at a frightening rate, I feel it’s a good reminder for all of us:
The Physiological Society – an association of health scientists – have set out some helpful advice to help you stay cool. But they also carry a word of warning - cooling off too quickly can be fatal.
1. Avoid all forms of heat, including exercise
Exercising in the heat puts extra stress on your body by increasing muscle blood flow and your body's core temperature. The increased demand for skin blood flow in the heat can, especially if combined with dehydration, compromise muscle blood flow, reducing oxygenated delivery to the muscles and causing heat exhaustion. The heart also has to work harder to maintain circulation.
2. Stay hydrated
In hot weather it is important to reduce the risk of dehydration. Hydration maintains good cardiovascular function and helps your body sweat. This is essential to maintaining a normal body temperature. If you are hydrated, your urine will be a very pale straw colour pale. If you do not drink enough fluids, your urine will be darker in colour as your kidneys try to save as much water as they can.
3. Wear sunscreen to avoid sunburn
Any exposed part of your body, including earlobes, scalp and lips, can burn. Sunburn compromises skin circulation and sweating and can therefore limit the body’s ability to get rid of heat. In addition, the ultraviolet radiation absorbed by the skin from sunlight can also damage the genetic material in skin cells, increasing a person’s risk of skin cancer.
3. Artificially cool yourself with a fan
When we are hot, we sweat. Sweating helps us to control our body temperature because when sweat is evaporated into the air, it cools the skin. Fans speed up this evaporation process and increase convective cooling, helping us to maintain body temperature. You can further enhance evaporation cooling by wearing light and lose clothing and misting your body with water.
5. Immerse your hands in cold water
Our hands have a high surface area-to-mass ratio and specialist blood vessels in the fingers that have high blood flows in the heat making them ideal areas for exchanging heat with the environment. When hands are immersed in cold water, heat can be quickly lost from the body and lower body temperature.
The organization also included a video on what to do if you or your child falls into cold water. Quick tip: float - don’t fight the cold water.
Here’s to staying calm and cool, readers.
Yours in peaceful parenting,
Lisa