Foreword: Next month I’m hosting IndieWeb Carnival with the theme “No way!?” I dug up an essay I originally wrote in October 2020 as homework for my English tutor Deb. Like my psychedelic truffle experience in Amsterdam, it was a writing exercise that stuck with me. Below is the translated and expanded version, with some thoughts added from today.
Today I learned something that shattered my entire worldview. Cold doesn’t cause colds.
I’d always believed that getting cold was what made you sick. Why else would people get more colds in winter?
A few days ago, my girlfriend1 casually said, “Colds aren’t caused by being cold, you know.” I argued with her for ages. Almost bet her money on it. To me, this was like someone telling me one plus one doesn’t equal two. I would’ve bet months of salary to defend “one plus one equals two.”
How could cold not cause colds? The sickness is literally called a “cold”!
So I asked my landlord, who happened to be a doctor. Then I Googled it. And I was wrong.
I was the fool. Wrong for nearly 30 years.
Colds are caused by viruses entering your body. If you put someone in a virus-free room and dropped the temperature, they wouldn’t catch a cold. (Real hypothermia is a different story entirely. That’s not a cold. That kills people.)
Winter makes colds more common because:
- Cold air lowers the temperature inside your nasal passages, and rhinoviruses replicate faster in cooler conditions
- Your nose’s first line of defense is mucus. Cold air plus indoor heating dries it out, giving viruses an opening
- Less sunlight means less vitamin D, which weakens your immune system
- Everyone crowds indoors, sharing stale air and doorknobs
So “cold” isn’t the root cause. It never was.
Growing up, my parents and everyone around me told me that getting cold would make me sick.
Getting sick felt terrible, so “cold” became one of the scariest things in the world.
“Wear more layers.” “Don’t kick off the blanket.” “Don’t walk around barefoot.”
In my mind, “cold” and “sick” were permanently fused together.
To avoid getting sick, I always prioritized staying warm over washing my hands. Handwashing seemed important in theory, but my family never enforced it. It was just something you did halfheartedly, a quick rinse under the tap. No wonder I kept getting colds back to back. And my parents would say I just had a weak constitution. Wear more layers.
Everything makes sense now. I had my prevention priorities completely backwards.
My cold-prevention priority list looked something like this:
- First: wear warm clothes
- Second: keep the blanket on
- Third: don’t eat cold food
- Then… wash your hands, I guess
My parents didn’t know any of this. But they were both college graduates! And I had a master’s degree, yet I didn’t even know this basic fact.
It felt so obvious, so perfectly logical, that I’d never once questioned it.
My parents taught me this. And their parents probably taught them the same thing.
I wonder how many people worldwide believe this myth. If they’d prioritized handwashing instead, how many fewer colds would they have caught?
If cold doesn’t cause colds, why is the illness called a “cold” (“I caught a cold”)? Why not just call it rhinovirus? (According to Google, rhinovirus is behind more than half of all cold cases.)
This made me start questioning a lot of things I’d always taken for granted. Better late than never. I decided to demote “staying warm” in my priority list (though staying warm is admittedly more comfortable) and put handwashing back where it belongs.
Postscript (May 28, 2026):
The title “cold doesn’t cause colds” is a bit too absolute.
More accurately: cold isn’t the culprit, but it does make you more vulnerable. Viruses are the culprit. Cold just raises your odds. Staying warm is fine, but you don’t need to be terrified of cold.
Still, I like that the title is memorable. Like a mantra.
Cold doesn’t cause colds. So stop being afraid of the cold.
In the manga Chainsaw Man, devils in hell grow stronger the more people fear them. The Tomato Devil is weak. The War Devil is strong. I think if there were a Cold Devil, it’d be one of the most powerful devils in Asia.
Here’s a fun fact: the word “cold” for the illness dates back to the 15th century, when people in Europe genuinely believed cold weather caused the sickness. Diseases were classified by hot, cold, dry, and wet. And since cold makes you sniffle, shiver, and feel miserable, “cold causes colds” was a perfectly natural conclusion.
Rhinovirus wasn’t identified until 1956. By then, the word “cold” had been in use for nearly 500 years. Of course everyone kept using it. So I’d bet the Cold Devil is no pushover in the West, either.
What’s interesting is that Chinese developed the exact same concept independently. The Chinese word for catching a cold, “著涼” (literally “touched by cold”), mirrors “I caught a cold” perfectly, yet the two evolved separately through their own observations.
There are probably many more words like this in everyday life that no longer fit reality, waiting for us to notice. And who knows, maybe scientists will one day discover that cold really does cause colds after all.
But ever since learning that cold isn’t the real culprit, my “cold resistance” stat skyrocketed.
I stopped layering three shirts and two pairs of pants. After switching to my uniform, I got rid of a mountain of Uniqlo heat-tech undershirts and down jackets.
For a while I got really into Wim Hof and started taking cold showers below 5°C. This would’ve been Mission Impossible before. Back when I was terrified of cold, asking me to take a cold shower was like asking me to cut myself with a knife.
Later, when we were caring for our baby, a pediatric dermatologist told us something that stuck with me: “Cold hands and feet don’t mean the baby is cold.” Only core temperature matters.
Cold showers, walking outside in a t-shirt during winter, cold hands and feet. Most of the time, none of it made me sick. Each experience reinforced the mantra: cold doesn’t cause colds.
COVID actually taught a lot of people about cold prevention. Now I rely on frequent handwashing, wearing masks in crowded places, and not touching my face. My yearly cold count has dropped dramatically.
My cold-prevention priorities now look like this:
- First: wash your hands
- Second: use serving chopsticks at meals
- Third: wear a mask in crowded places
- Then… stay warm, but only enough to keep your core temperature comfortable
Think about it. My parents, my grandparents, and I were all misled by this myth for most of our lives. Generations of people afraid to kick off blankets, afraid of a breeze, afraid to walk barefoot on the floor.
The funny thing is, when I told my parents all this, they still didn’t believe me. That’s okay. Staying warm does help you catch fewer colds, after all.
I just wish they could stop being so afraid. That they could let go of the Cold Devil that’s been haunting our family for generations2.
