The upcoming summer is sure to be here soon, promising warmth, fellow feeling, and happy memories. However, for you and your family, it is important to stay cool. With global temperature slowly increasing, and the effects of earth warming here to be felt, it’s important to know how to best overcome this and live your life in a relatively unimpeded way.
Over and above the standard methods of ‘staying cool and protected from the sun’ which you can read from a million blog posts saturating the internet, this article will hope to get a little creative and bring you methods you might not have expected that can serve you well in your daily life, as opposed to a quick cooling fix.
Without further ado, here is the advice you need:
Rest
Resting is the ultimate in cooling. It’s simple and requires little explanation. Limit your most active hours such as completing chores or tasks to the early morning and late night, when the temperature is sure to have cooled. It’s much easier to overheat when struggling with difficult or monotonous tasks in the day, so if you have a weekend free or days off of work, make sure that you spend the day relaxing and the evening sorting out your prior responsibilities.
Carports & Verandahs
We all know that sinking feeling experienced when entering a car that is plainly too hot to be enjoyed. The stuff nature and smell that emanates from a dashboard that is too hot, plus the closed nature of the car can mean entering one feels like entering a hot oven. It’s for this reason that it’s cruel to leave pets in a hot car without the window open.
However, you can suffer from the same difficulties when entering a car. In order to keep a car nice and cool, install a carport, which is a handy and beautiful looking overhead shelter with a long lifespan. This can maintain the shade over your car for multiple hours a day, making your vehicle a refuge from the sun when heading out to take care of your daily errands or commute to work.
Along with this same logic, verandahs also offer the stable and reliable shelter necessary, but as an extension to your porch. Quality carports and verandahs serve as a great place to entertain guests and eat food outside during those stuff summer evenings. Implementing these can also increase the value of your property significantly, and that’s something that everyone can appreciate.
Blackout Curtains
During those hot nights, you might find that opening a window isn’t enough to keep the heat out. Luckily, there are methods for overcoming this. Blackout curtains will not only prevent the piercing summer heat from entering your room, but it can make restful sleep easier to achieve thanks to the thermal shielding properties of the fabric in question. Blackout curtains are intrinsically useful when trying to provide your property with the insulation it needs throughout the day, keeping a room cooler for longer.
Cotton Sheets
Gaining a restful sleep is the most difficult thing to do in summer. In winter, it’s easy, so long as you’re adequately covered by blankets. In summer, even the smallest amount of overheating can mean you lose hours of your much-needed sleep, and this can feel terrible, and have a knock on effect towards your social life, work life and general well-being.
Switching up the sheets of your bedspread from a heavy linen to a light cotton will allow it to breathe easier, and will keep your bed from absorbing the heat quite as much, even if you’re not using your covers. Also, placing a fresh towel on top of your pillows to prevent any excess perspiration from leaking into the pillow itself can help tremendously in giving yourself that deep sleep you have earned.
Grill
Ovens raise the temperature of the house, no matter its size. For this reason, using an outdoor or portable grill to cook your food on the worse of nights can help you to cool off, and also gives you access to much healthier and arguably tastier food. Luckily, most food items can be grilled, so it’s not as if you have to go without during your cooking hobby.
Eating outside can also be of a significant benefit to you. When you eat, your body temperature is raised as it tries to digest and burn the energy necessary to do so. That’s right - digesting takes up calories and energy! In this instance, it’s best to give yourself a good rest after eating a hearty meal, because any over exertion here can put too much of a tax on your system. Use your best wisdom here.
Naps
Think about how your pets respond during the most challenging and heated days. They sleep! If you have the capacity to and your schedule allows, consider taking a simple nap that allows you to completely miss the hottest part of the day, and experience with fresh vitality the relaxed nature of the cool evening. Just be sure to follow the cooling sleep hygiene guidelines laid out previously. You might also install a fan in your bedroom, and invest in memory foam earplugs to block the sound in order to fall asleep with the most ease.
Meditate
Meditating will not only allow you to settle the disturbed thoughts that arise when you’re annoyed at how warm it is (this is a humorous point, but you’ve likely experienced this annoyance,) but will allow you to lower your bodies temperature thanks to how stress evaporates, lowering cortisol levels.
Solidly meditating with a schedule allows you to stoically approach the difficulties you might be experiencing, giving you that real sense of complete and total harmony with your environment. This is easier said than done, but you’ll be surprised at how much easier the summer is to contend with when you’re only focused on the heat currently affecting you, not the worried thought that you might not get sleep or be able to relax well enough.
These unique tips will allow anyone, from across either hemisphere, contend with the worst of the heat in their family home.
