That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
nytimes.com
That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
1–10 of 251 posts
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#2Not discussed is how the author's hyper-vigilance impacts his life in the form of stress. Stress kills.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#3For those equally concerned, there are "shower chairs" that you can get that greatly reduce the risk of falls. Since my SO had her amputation it was the only way she could take a shower. However I've found it to be pretty convenient as well.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#4Not discussed is how the author's hyper-vigilance impacts his life in the form of stress. Stress kills.
Its possible to be careful and unstressed. I avoid caffeine. I don't even think about it any more; I just don't choose drinks containing caffeine.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#5A handy technique for evaluating situations is this: how many mistakes am I away from death/injury? If I drive without a seatbelt, I've put myself 1 accident away in many cases.
My Scouts are young, and love to climb things. I tell them, I know you're strong and skilled. But a loose rock or slippery foothold puts you at risk anyway. So wear the harness - now it takes two mistakes to kill you (e.g. loose rock + badly rigged harness). The risk goes down drastically.
So put some non-skid floor mat in your shower, or a chair as advised in this thread. The mis-step no longer carries the same risk.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#6Not discussed is how the author's hyper-vigilance impacts his life in the form of stress. Stress kills.
The author has already made it to age seventy-five. As he writes in the submitted article, "My hypervigilance doesn’t paralyze me or limit my life: I don’t skip my daily shower, I keep driving, and I keep going back to New Guinea. I enjoy all those dangerous things."
I think the author has actually made a very sound point, statistically speaking, that often incremental improvements in dealing with the little things has as much impact on health outcomes as heroic measures to deal with the big risks to health. All around the developed world, mortality from all causes is steadily declining at all ages,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
and most of that decline in mortality (and consequent increase in life expectancy) has come about from incremental reductions in risk. Changing engineering standards for highway construction reduces risk of injury and of death from car crashes. Simple checklists can reduce the risk of surgical complications.
http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/en/
http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d...
A girl with my daughter's birth year in the United States has a better than even chance to live to be 100 years old,
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/1/e000128.full
just from an accumulation of incremental improvements in health in the developed countries. The little things matter. We don't have to worry about the little things. Indeed, we can celebrate that so many little things are taken care of for us by societal changes.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#7Strangely not mentioned at all, so I'll put it here: Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, his most famous work. It addresses the question of how and why European societies were able to advance themselves so much farther ahead of all other civilizations. There is also an excellent four-part series streaming on Netflix.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#8Reminds me a lot of Nassim Taleb's focus on payoff/cost (expected outcomes) vs probability. If the possible costs are high enough, it makes a lot of sense to take precautions. Hardly rocket science - seat-belts, hand-rails, smoking etc.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#9Not discussed is how the author's hyper-vigilance impacts his life in the form of stress. Stress kills.
I think hyper-vigilance is a poor choice of words. It's more a habit of thinking than a constant state of conscious alertness. When you become aware of a hazard, it takes conscious effort to avoid putting yourself in the way of that hazard.
To take the author's example of sleeping in the jungle under dead trees, when you first become aware of the hazard, you have to stop and look at your campsite before deciding whether or not to pitch a tent there. Eventually it just becomes part of your background processing when checking a spot, and you would pass up an otherwise nice spot without stopping to think why. If asked, it might take you a moment of looking the spot over before realizing that it's because of the dead tree sitting over it.
If you think about it, it's a lot like developing good practices in coding. What at first is something you have to think about quickly becomes second nature. For example: why do you (possibly hypothetically) use curly braces around a single line block following an if statement in a C-like language?
Several reasons if you think about it. First, so that you can't forget to add them in when you need to add another line. Second, because it makes it unambiguous which if or else if an else belongs to if you have a big nasty chain. You don't spend a lot of time thinking and stressing about those reasons every day, but having the habit protects you anyway.
Re: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer
#10Oddly, I'm not sure why one would not consider skipping the daily shower if you had these concerns. Though, I realize that is a highly personal decision. (Meaning that personal influences matter a lot. I've known folks who would go without a shower for upwards of a month with nobody noticing. Others, if a day was skipped it was obvious.)