Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

This may be true for many people, but I haven't found it true for me.

My wife and I reverse the stereotype of married couples and thermostats: she was raised in an area of the world that never got below 10C in Winter, and thus no buildings ever had heat. In the Winter you just put on more clothing. I was raised near the Canadian border; so our houses were always reasonably warm. She'd prefer the thermostat at 15C. We had sort of negotiated to keep it at 19C.

When I started working from home due to the lockdown, however, I had no choice but to turn up the temperature in the room I was working in: At 19C, sitting still all day, even wearing long underwear, woolen socks, and a very warm top, my feet got cold enough to get numb, in spite of my torso being almost hot enough to sweat.

Maybe if I found the right clothing, my legs would keep my feet warm again. But the "torso warm therefore extremities warm" is definitely not true for me.

EDIT: Just to be clear, my goal was to contradict the specific claim that I quoted, not to contradict the general idea of wearing more clothes. I've tried a couple of different solutions with the equipment at hand (like hot water bottles and thick socks) and not found them effective. The heat is already controlled on a per-room basis, so an additional electric heater would probably be a lot more wasteful than just turning up the temperature by one degree. I've been looking at woolen "boot slippers" online and looser-fitting garments. I'm sure I'll find a solution -- but all of these additional measures prove that "just keep your torso warm" is not always enough.

In theory each radiator has a regulator valve that allows you to moderate the amount of steam flowing through it. In reality these valves are all painted over/corroded/never worked in the first place, and all radiators run at full blast. It was not uncommon to see apartments with open windows in January to help regulate the heat produced by the radiator. Tenants didn't care because they didn't pay for the gas directly, although it was obviously built into the rents, and the land lords never wanted to spend the money to upgrade these old buildings, since the excessive usage of gas was built into everyone's rent and the upgrades were not.

Then again, given the age of those windows there probably was very little difference between them being open and closed anyways.

This problem was fixed when I moved into a new construction apartment which had a minisplit to heat/cool the living space. Until I found out that mini-splits have the same issue heating as ACs occasionally have in very hot summers; they can't provide any heat once the ambient temperature gets colder than the exterior coils (since it's literally an AC running backwards). That was a bad surprise.

There's no such thing as bad weather; there's just being incorrectly dressed for it.