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It’s not just in your mind. There’s a reason why early summer heat is hard to take.
A few days ago, I was standing on a subway platform in New York City, feeling faint from heat. Ninety-degree heat here is never ideal. Don’t even get me started on the smells.
I shifted in my plastic Birkenstocks, sighing in discomfort. My husband stood a few feet away from me in perfectly good spirits. He’s much more of a sweater than me, so perspiration was collecting on his forehead. And yet he remained content.
“What’s wrong with you?!” I barked, glaring at him. “Why are you so comfortable?”
He shrugged and stepped a foot away.
The truth is I usually run cold, a fact for which he teases me when I’m bundled in fleece in 60-degree weather — but, when the temperatures rise high, he also simply doesn’t mind the heat as much. He claims it’s because he grew up in Washington, D.C. during swampy summers without air-conditioning in his bedroom, so he’s accustomed to humidity. But standing there, holding my nose and dreaming of crystal blue pools, I began to wonder about other factors at work.
Why does one person feel insanely hot while another is perfectly fine? Why are hot days in early summer so much more jarring than later, when we’re accustomed to them, in…
