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Comment by noiseman | Hacker News Reader

> As Kim explained to me, if you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep.

Does alcohol actually warm you up? I thought it did the opposite.

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It dulls the senses and temporarily increases blood flow around a lot of your skin where temperature is monitored, which makes you feel warmer. So it could make a bad situation seem better than it is, could also lead to hypothermia because you've tricked your brain into thinking it's warmer than it actually is.

Also, alcohol typically has a misconception of improving sleep. In some situations, maybe, but it tends to give you a lighter sleep and leaving less refreshed if you consume a lot.

Yeah, so I'd rather have 5 hours of light sleep than try to fall asleep for 2 hours and then wake up 4 hours later. Alcohol helps. Just not long term.

According to Mythbusters it warms your extremities by cooling your core.

Which is the reverse of what you body tries to do since it has a greater chance of killing you.

But a natural consequence of the fact that we only detect heat on our skin; we have no real way to measure our own core temperature without tools.

I interpreted this as drinking alcohol so that you could sleep even if the cold would have made you too uncomfortable normally. It's not always adaptive obviously (you could freeze to death, etc), but the idea is that the alcohol allows you to sleep when you would otherwise be kept awake by discomforts that cannot be fixed tonight, and the night of full sleep will serve you better.

It's a vasodilator, but over time it will actually cause your core temp to drop.

The point probably is that there are certainly homeless people who drink less than I do, so I really shouldn't be the one to judge people for it.

I once heard a homeless liaison explain it perfectly, "When your climbing into a wet thicket of Scoth Broom to sleep; you might want a nip."

it cools you down, but you feel warm in the process

It feels like it's making you warm. It doesn't make much sense from calories per dollar perspective though, so not a great example of valid decision making by homeless people.

I wonder how much experience the people who downvoted this have with sleeping rough in a city.

If that's the quality of advice from Kim or from the article, it's best to disregard it.

Drinking alcohol when you're cold and don't have access to shelter is dangerous: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/how-drinking-alc...

It's not advice, they are explaining why people make "bad decisions" like this.

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