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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.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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?

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

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.