Why some young people wear shorts, even when it’s cold outside
Higher metabolism and optimism explain why some wear shorts, even when it’s cold outside
Morning temperatures may be hovering in the 30s in the Boston area, but signs of spring are all around: singing birds, budding daffodils and, yes, people — especially young people — wearing shorts.
As quick as the more warmly dressed among us are to judge, those young people in shorts may have valid, scientific reasons for being comfortable while going bare-legged, Northeastern University experts say.
On average, their higher metabolic rates generate more heat than their elders, and their generally superior cardiovascular fitness also makes it easier for them to tolerate the cold, experts say.
The hearts and blood vessels of young people respond faster to the cold, pulling blood away from the skin to protect their core temperature “more efficiently than older cardiovascular systems do,” said Joshua Merson, director of Northeastern University’s extreme medicine program.
Stephen P. Wood, an emergency medicine provider and program director for Northeastern’s adult gerontology acute care nurse practitioner program, adds, “Younger people, especially adolescent males, tend to have higher resting metabolic rates. They’re essentially running a hotter engine.”
Ruhan Bhakta, a fourth-year student at Northeastern University, put on a pair of shorts on the first official day of spring, March 20, when the morning temperature was still in the freezing range. “I’m always in shorts. Twenty-five degrees is my cutoff,” Bhakta said.
Northeastern Global News, in your inbox.
Sign up for NGN’s daily newsletter for news, discovery and analysis from around the world.
This is the case even though the average high temperature at his home in Mumbai, India, is 92 degrees in March. “It’s ironic. We talk about it all the time,” he said, adding he jokes that he stores the tropical heat in his body.
However, Sarah Spelsberg, a physician and part-time faculty member in Northeastern’s extreme medicine program, is not so convinced. She said when young people break out the shorts in early spring, it is more “a matter of perspective” than physiology.
“After a long, cold winter, even a small increase in temperature can feel dramatically warmer simply because our brains are comparing it to what we’ve just experienced,” Spelsberg said.
The term for this phenomenon is thermal allesthesia, which means that how pleasant or unpleasant the temperature feels depends on your current body temperature, rather than an impartial scale, Wood said.
Editor’s Picks
“When February gives way to a relatively mild March day, the brain genuinely registers it as pleasant warmth, not just as a cognitive trick,” Wood said. “The shorts come out not because of denial, but because of genuine neurological recalibration.”
It may be why 60 degrees in March feels different than 60 degrees in October. “Our perception of temperature is highly relative,” Spelsberg said.
There’s physiology, perspective and even psychology.
Part of the appeal of shorts may be a reaction to parental injunctions and a celebration of the fact that students in college, for example, feel “free and independent and can leave home without somebody running after you with your scarf,” said Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern.
The shift toward longer daylight hours signals the start of a new season and time to start wearing fewer clothes, she said. After the unusually cold winter in the Boston area this year, warmth and sunlight can prompt people to feel they have to make the most of good weather “because who knows when it might happen again,” Rodgers said.
Still, there are limits to when shorts are genuinely not a good idea.
“On a college campus … they are probably fine,” Merson said, citing relatively short exposures and the safety of nearby buildings. “Where it gets more serious is in the outdoors. The same confidence that is harmless crossing campus can quickly become a serious problem on the hiking trail,” he said.
“A 20-year-old who hikes in jeans and a light layer because ‘I never get cold’ is the patient I worry about,” said Wood, adding that wilderness medical literature is full of cases of hypothermia in young, fit — but underdressed — individuals.
Drinking alcohol also presents a risk because it blunts the shivering response, which is a person’s primary involuntary heat-generating mechanism, he said.
