Do Frigid Temperatures Make You Wish For Hibernation?

• Blog author, Cynthia Ross Tustin.
• Avid Retirement Explorer
• Do frigid temperatures make you wish for hibernation?
• Posted Monday, January 10th, 2022
• The other day, I posted on Instagram about how I’m grateful that retirement allows me to stay inside in the winter. Curled up with an enjoyable book, by the fire is heaven to me. I’m a Canadian who doesn’t really like winter. I’m also not a huge hockey fan, despite having seasons Leaf’s tickets; and Tim’s isn’t my first choice for a cup of coffee. Please don’t deport me.
• A very special thank you to Feedspot! For naming me #35 on their list of Top 45 Canadian Retirement Blogs in 2021!

Staying warm inside, and avoiding the frozen outside, is an easy personal choice for me…and others like me. You know who you are! Indoors by the fire with a book is just my equivalent of the “wish for hibernation”. The Scandinavians have a word for my form of hibernation, it’s called hygge.  It means a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment.

But they embrace the cold! I just do everything in my power to ignore winter. What if you could avoid it altogether, without having to be a snowbird?

That’s Today’s Question – Would You Hibernate if you could?

That’s the question for all of you today. If hibernation were a legit possibility for humans, would you hibernate through January, February, and March? My answer is a “firm maybe”. But that’s because I still can hear my late mother’s voice in my head saying, “you should never wish time away.” Of course, I was seven, and wanted summer vacation to hurry up. And then now there’s my FOMO to deal with. Asleep for three months. What was I really going to miss?

But I digress. You should know that people are really working on this hibernation stuff. I’m not talking about crazy people building their own cryotube in their garage so they can freeze their heads after they die. I’m talking about real science. I was researching the words hygge and hibernation via the source of all knowledge (Google. All hail Larry Page, just in case you’re secretly reading this right now!); and came across numerous medical and scientific research papers. Honestly, where else could an avid retirement explorer reconnoitre during a cold, COVID January?

Real Science, Not Heads In Freezers

It’s hard not to take something out of Oxford University seriously. I’d say it’s a credible source. I doubt they’re freezing heads in the quad. Neuroscientists here are studying animals that can induce a state of torpor, to hunker down and avoid the winter months. They’re looking at it from the perspective of long-term space travel. 

The gist of all of it is that we’re getting closer for humans to hibernating like bears and squirrels. Science has lots of good reasons for looking into it, beyond my dislike for winter. Space travel jumps immediately to mind. Long voyages to distant solar systems aside. The reduction of a person’s core body temperature is valuable in extending the “golden hour” trauma centers need to save critically injured patients. But even the layperson knows the value of an icepack on a freshly sprained ankle. Scholars and engineers alike are looking at how valuable hibernation could be for reducing overall inflammatory processes in the body. As well as other disorders with a link to thermoregulation, like insomnia.

Thermoregulation

What separates you and I from the bears and the squirrels is thermoregulation. Here’s what I learned from an article in The Atlantic, written by James Hamblin in his interview with Dr. Kelly Drew.

At its most basic level, hibernation, “is body-temperature regulation. Dropping the body’s core temperature induces a low-metabolic state of “torpor,” in which animals require almost no food. Most of the calories we “warm-blooded” animals burn go into maintaining our body temperatures—our basal metabolic rate. The squirrels Drew studies, for example, curl up into little balls and plummet from 99 degrees to twenty-seven. This drops their basal metabolic rate by about 99 percent.”

“Humans, unfortunately, seem to have a stubbornly fixed set point: 98.6 degrees. Apart from minuscule daily fluctuations like a night-time drop that coincides with sleep, our temperatures only change as an indication of peril—fever or hypothermia.” As human beings, a few degrees (either way actually) can mean the difference between health and imminent death.

Spoiler Alert

Spoiler alert, hospitals have been chilling us during heart surgery (like transplants) for years. You should also know, if you’re considering hibernation for a rest; that you won’t wake up refreshed after a good solid nap. When you’re chilled in a surgical setting, you’re unconscious. Significant difference. You’re anesthetized, not asleep. That’s how they overcome the body’s natural mechanism to shiver to generate heat…paralysis.

Visit the links for your own exploration. Thermoregulation, and our inability to tolerate limited core body temperature changes might be the physiologic reason we no longer hibernate (yes, there is some science that shows our early ancestors may have hibernated).

But my money is on FOMO, the fear of missing out, as being the real reason. I think we’re hard-wired with a desire not to miss out on things. My mother was right about not wishing time away. Our understanding that we all have a finite amount of time to enjoy our lives is what makes us truly human. And willing to put up with frigid temperatures.

Hard pass on my wish for hibernation. Big yes on hygge, the fireplace and an enjoyable book!

Cheers,

Cynthia

I acknowledge that the land on which I live is the traditional territory of the Wendake-ionwl,  Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ , Mississauga, and Haudenosaunee peoples.