We Turks are a chronically cryophobic nation. We shun cold drinks believing they’ll make us ill, we shy from open windows thinking air drafts will send us to our doom, we loathe cold water in a shower or at the beach, we believe going outdoors with wet hair will cripple our constitution, we crank the heat up in our offices and homes and gaze with horror at those who dare venture outside unless stuffed into five layers of clothing. So what is the origin of our irrational obsession?
First of all, there’s our love of all things easy, our love of keyif (roughly translatable as "a pleasurable state of idle relaxation"). Contrary to Europeans or Americans, who generally have cultures in which hardship and overcoming obstacles are welcomed and even sought after, we have a culture in which all things soft and easy are relished instead. The fewer obstacles there are, the better for us. If someone is working on something we say ‘kolay gelsin’ (may it be easy). We are all too fond of indolence, and anything that stiffens the body, stimulates the system and gets the heart going is considered an annoying and unwelcome nuisance – and the cold is the greatest nuisance of all to our sense of keyif. (1)
Another reason we fear the cold is because of ridiculous old wives’ tales we learn from our mothers. Right from the earliest years Turkish kids are actively ‘protected’ from the cold, as if it were a dangerous menace that must be averted at all costs. We’re taught from a very young age that instead of learning to strengthen and inure ourselves to unpleasant things by facing them and thereby developing immunity to them, we should always avoid those things instead. And so we continue putting on layer upon layer of clothing and popping antibiotics like they’re tic tacs as we get sicker and sicker all the time because our immune system is kept weak from over-protection and pampering.
Our strange national obsession with the cold can be fully summed up in the microcosm of a bus ride in winter. First we’ll close all the windows, even though we’re all packed in like sardines and thus more than warm enough thanks to our collective body heat and excessive clothing. Yet we still close all the windows because we actually believe that feeling a breeze on our faces makes us ‘cold’ (we’re also anemophobes after all), merely because of the simple disparity in temperature felt on one part of the body vis-à-vis the rest of the body. The discomfort of feeling the breeze itself will thus be misconstrued as ‘being cold’ in general, and so the window will be promptly shut (or never opened in the first place) with the automatic knee-jerk refrain ‘üşüteceğiz’ (we’ll ‘catch cold’). And yet we fail to realize that closing all the windows makes us all the more susceptible to getting infected, because it provides the perfect stuffy and static environment for microbes to be breathed and coughed and sneezed out of one respiratory tract and into the other. And so when we finally catch an infection and get sick we say we ‘caught cold’, even while we continue to assume we’re protecting ourselves from ‘catching cold’ by closing the windows. So we actually believe it’s the cold itself that makes us sick, not the contraction of germs that our fear of the cold facilitates. In other words, we’re getting sick because of our fear of the cold!
Another belief we have is that the more clothes we have on, the warmer we’ll be, unaware that we’re actually restricting the blood flow in our body and thus making ourselves even colder. Then, when we get colder because we have too much clothing on, we react by stiffening and tensing our bodies, which makes us colder still, to the point where we now start shivering and our teeth start chattering. Include the fact that most of us are already cold just from fearing the cold even before we’ve left the house, and you’ll see that our phobia verges on a crippling hysteria.
So what should we do to combat the cryophobia? 1) dress lighter – a good jacket with one layer underneath is all you need, 2) take a cold shower every morning, it’s good for you, 3) don’t overheat your office, home or car, instead wear a sweater and keep the heat low, 4) let your face and neck be exposed to the cold, it’s invigorating, healthy, and you don’t get sick from having a cold face and neck (really, you don’t), wear a beanie on your head if it’s really cold, 5) for goodness’ sake, OPEN A COUPLE OF WINDOWS ON THE BUS! 6) don’t take antibiotics unless you think you might be dying, 7) remember, mother DOESN’T always know best, 8) drink more water (you don’t realize you’re dehydrated in winter), 9) learn to enjoy the cold, it’s good for you, 10) keep your body loose and stop being such a whiny little baby.
(1) For more on this topic go to The Art of Keyif
