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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3356 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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How To Shower Right

How To Set The Temperature

If the water is painfully hot, it's too hot. When you shower with water hotter than a fever (>105F), you scald the "horny layer" of skin, leading to dry, chapped or cracking skin which doesn't provide the natural antiseptic barrier of whole, unbroken skin. You shouldn't need moisturizer on your back after a healthy shower.

Dry skin is a great place for bacteria to enter the body. You may be able to eliminate unnecessary back acne within a week.

How To Breathe

Your nostril hair is a great air filter for keeping dust and germs out of your lungs. However, when you're breathing high concentrations of warm water vapor through your nose, all of what previously got caught in the filter gets sucked right down. Blow your nose before you shower, and breathe through your mouth during the shower. This can keep you from getting many colds. I have gone much longer between colds since stopping breathing through my nose during showers.

If you have a cold, still breathe through your mouth. This can keep a head cold from becoming a chest cold. Never suck that snot backwards.

How To Shampoo

Shampoo is mostly a detergent. Detergents work as surfactants. They lower the surface tension of water, making it less likely to stick to itself and more able to bind with oils and soiling particles. The first batch of shampoo you use on your head should not foam up. That's how you know it's working: the soap is sticking to oils, not making bubbles.

Rinse and repeat with a smaller amount. This should foam up, indicating cleanliness.

WARNING: If you're breathing through your mouth, you may get some shampoo in your mouth. Spit it out. Swallowing hair-cleaning surfactants will give you physical diarrhea (as opposed to germ-caused diarrhea) as surely as drinking a single drop of Dawn dish detergent dissolved in a cup of water.

How To Dry

Have you ever noticed how one side of your towel is fluffier than the other? Use the fluffy side first.

The cut strands on the fluffy side are where water will end up eventually, through a purely mechanical process. The whole fibers on the smoother side wick the water away to the fluffy side. If you use the smooth side first, the fluffy side will already be damp if you flip it.

Hang your wet towel up with the fluffy side out, for faster evaporation.

Your Turn

Do you have any useful showering or bathing tips?

The hedonic trap while showering is where you spend a superfluous amount of time showering because you don't want to change from being pleasurably warm to damply cold. How to avoid it? Here is one way: do not always shower your whole body, but only the parts that actually require it. How often do you need to wash your back? Possibly never*! This efficient way of showering usually entails washing the face and wherever there is lots of hair. Since only a portion of your body is wet, the discomfort of being cold and wet is minimized, and there is less warmth to sacrifice.

I got this idea after hearing about Aella.

*Except after sweaty workouts, in which case I recommend cold showers.

Ordinary (non-conditioner) shampoo seems to work just fine as a body wash, and is much cheaper for some reason.

A more interesting how-to would be on long hair care. Because as a man with recently grown long hair, I didn’t learn shit about it as a kid and it took several years to figure out how to maintain it.

As I’ve always had short hair, I’d be interested in learning your tips and tricks (and seeing exactly how much easier I’ve kept my life). Are you planning a similar post in next week’s Wellness Wednesday?

For sure you should be squeegeeing off your skin with your hands before applying the towel.

Also, /u/Interversity of the subreddit pilled me on the wholesomeness of briefly using a blow dryer on one's body after toweling to really just get rid of the excess moisture. But this is an advanced technique and I usually don't.

The blow dryer is something I tried, but now that I have two dry towels in one, I no longer need to.

My useful showering idea is to not do it too often. Using soap and shampoo every day used to fuck up my skin and I achieved near flawless skin just by showering every other day and being judicious with soap and shampoo.

I have the dry earwax and no body odor genes though so ymmv.

Ideally if your diet and general health is in check you shouldnt turn into a skunk after skipping showers.

Might be entirely pseudoscience but I believe the overuse of chemicals to not smell bad diminishes your bodies ability to not smell bad without them.

Is this necessary? SneerClub would have a field day seeing this posted on TheMotte.

Within the same second that the photons from the title hit my retina, before I could finish scrolling down to the bottom of the post, my inner monologue had already voiced the words "Aella on suicide watch."

"Holy shit, a thread about showering," he laughed in gasps, each mountainous heave puffing a cloud of Cheeto dust into the dark room. Stubby fingers ponderously wiped queso off on his hairless moobs before knocking aside enough Mountain Dew cans to reach the crusty keyboard. "Time to destroy their community with le epic sneer for my fellow clubbers."

Exactly how I imagine it.

Clarification: they did, or they might? I’ve edited it to be far blander than when I tiredposted it.

They might.

Thank you for the feedback and the reminder we are quite public-facing herein.

Did you know this about towels?

Sneerclub has a field day no matter what we do. Best to just ignore those losers.

That said, I also agree that this is a weird topic. @DuplexFields, I think you're way overthinking showering my dude.

Comments edited down to be less sneerable. But hot water causing bacne is still knowledge I wish I’d had twenty years ago, and knowledge I am happy to impart.

To be honest I keep the water in my shower pretty hot (not like painfully scalding hot, but certainly somewhere near 100 degrees), and I've never had acne issues from it. I imagine it's one of those things that varies from person to person.

I was taught to turn it up to where it was painful and turn it down from there, and stand in it until I got used to it. I had no idea I was reducing the effectiveness of my skin as a barrier to germs. Now I go with as lukewarm as I can stand in winter, and tepid in summer.

Disagree. If not here, where? I'm in my mid-30s and still occasionally pick up on some new optimization for routines like this. This is precisely the community, and precisely the thread, I'd expect to find such insights.

Well... nowhere, to be honest. I'm not really upset by it or anything. If not for the sneerclub mention, I would've just moved on without commenting. But yeah, for me personally I think there's no benefit to worrying about getting to optimize showering. It's a simple task with not much to it, and there's no need to make it more complex than that imo. If you're getting something out of it, you do you of course.

My shower has a tankless water heater. I have a problem where if I turn it too low (cool), the water heater trips (some kind of self protection circuit) and the water becomes cold. I have to reset the water to max hot, wait for the heater to reset, and then try to find the comfy temp again. It's almost impossible to find a temperature that isn't too hot. What should I do?

EDIT: apartment management is no help haha

Have you tried running a drizzle of hot water in the sink while you shower? It might work.

I'll try and let you know.

All my ideas have been ruined by your edit because they depended on the fact you could tinker with the heater.

I can tinker with the heater if I'm careful not to get caught. It doesn't seem to have any controls on it, but there are some valves controlling flow in and out.

I thought about undervolting it. Also, something is weird with your setup. Is there no mixer tap the mixes the water from the heater with regular tap water?

Yes there is a mixer. Usually with a tankless water heater, all the water is flowed through the heater and there is a knob to control the temperature. This one is different, it is in a closet (not accessible while showering), and it uses a mixer tap to control the temperature and pressure.

Huh. Then I have no idea what's going on. If there's a mixer tap, you should be able to get all the way to 1% hot, 99% cold water without tripping anything.

Are you sure about that? The heater has to have some flow through in order to turn on.

Yes, but even a little flow should be sufficient to trigger it.

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