I also live in Japan. Here people bathe in the evening, while I'm finding it hard to shake my habit of taking a morning shower (spend the whole day dirty? ick).
This means if it's raining, we'll have clothes drying in the bathroom, which I'll then need to move out to take a shower. Whether it makes sense to then put them back in to the now wet bathroom with the dryer running I'm not sure.
Japanese bathing habits might reflect their different genetics: https://medicalchannelasia.com/less-body-odour-in-south-kore... (“Several studies have shown a strong correlation between the ABCC11 gene variant and East Asian populations. Research conducted by the Journal of Investigative Dermatology found that 80-95% of Koreans and Japanese carry this gene variant. In contrast, only about 2% of Europeans and 3% of Africans possess the same variant. This genetic difference helps explain why people from South Korea and Japan tend to have lesser body odour.”). It’s possible that they are less likely to have bacterial activity overnight result in body odor compared to other populations.
This is also the dry earwax gene, which makes a certain intuitive sort of sense.
It dramatically reduces the amount of lipids in sebum, which is what odor-producing bacteria in the armpits feed on. It's also a recent mutation which has been highly selected for, despite being recessive. Comparable to lactase tolerance.
If you shower in the evening before bed, how dirty do you get while sleeping? The alternative is rolling around in your bed all night with all the grime of the day.
My hair doesn’t look presentable at all if I don’t clean it in morning. It gets all greasy and dark (I have blond thin hair). I never saw an Asian with that problem before, they can just wake up, wash their face, and walk out.
On the other hand, before I visited China, I never imagined getting so dirty that I needed to shower before bed, or I would be rolling in dirt. The dirt really gets on you in dusty Beijing. It wasn’t what I was used to from the states at all.
Full shower in the evening. I stick my head in the shower in the morning to get my hair wet and wash my face. Otherwise my hair looks like an anime character.
I guess it depends on whether the primary contaminant you're worried about is dirt from outside (in which case you want to wash in the evening to keep your bed clean as you describe) or sweat (in which case you want to wash in the morning to avoid smelling sweaty while interacting with people).
For me, the latter is much more a concern - I sweat overnight and so want to be clean in time to start interacting with people. If I do physical activity, or it's a hot summer day, I might even shower in the morning and evening.
I find this interesting… I grew up in a Latin family and learned to shower at night. I rationalized it as, not going to bed dirty, and you aren’t going to get dirtier just sleeping anyway.
I’m simply way too greasy of a person to shower at night. I’d rather sleep through the part where it’s built up the most, not waste the first 8 hours of being less greasy when I’m sleeping.
I suppose different genetics in different regions might play into that.
I’m in the habit of a shower in the morning and a quick rinse shower before bed. Idk why people limit themselves to grooming only at a single point in the day.
Depends where you're from. I'm from Australia and lived through a period of extreme water shortages called the Millennium Drought[0]. During it, the water catchments for most of my state were alarmingly close to dry. We started collecting water from showers and using it on the garden, the government sent out little five-minute hourglasses with suction cups for everyone to put in their shower, and several families in my local area had to have tankers of water brought in to refill their rainwater tanks.
My uncle's family kept visiting from America and taking 20 minute showers, which would have been totally fine if they were still in Vermont but used an incredibly high amount of water. He eventually installed a shower timer so his tank wouldn't run dry.
In such conditions, water costs more than mere money. Yes, you can probably afford to shower twice a day, but that would require you to bring in a tanker of water from an already drought-stricken reservoir. Water takes on a moral cost as well as a financial one. There's a famous passage from Dune: "One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men." Australia is not quite Arrakis, but in a water shortage extra showers start to feel like an Arrakeen date palm.
Currently our home's AC is out which has resulted in two showers/day due to the heat. Post exercise is going to at least be a hot rinse.
The irony (pun semi-intended) is my wife has gotten fond of at times hanging clothes in the bathroom during a shower to help remove wrinkles. No, Ironing is better but it's a little less ceremony as well as increasing the overall utility of the water you used in the shower.
> you aren’t going to get dirtier just sleeping anyway
I don’t shower to wash off dirt; I shower to wash off my own body’s excretions. Which definitely do happen while I’m sleeping (and more so, in fact, because body temperature rises during sleep.)
I can shower, dry thoroughly, get straight into bed… and still, the next morning, I’m sticky from sweat; have BO (that deodorant won’t mask); and my hair is now stuck moussed by my own overnight scalp oils into looking like Goku.
You have that backwards. “People maintain a fairly consistent body temperature during the day which drops at night by around 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. However, some people still feel hot at night due to their unique body composition, sleep environment, something they ate or drank, or other medical reasons.” https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-faqs/why-do-i-get-so-h....
Critically your body intentionally lowers temperature including changes to skin capillaries and sweating, it’s not simply lowering temperature from not moving. So you can wake up sweating even if things where fine when you went to sleep.
Maybe technically true as a matter of biology in isolation, but mostly not in practice — specifically due to that "something they ate or drank" part. The basal body temperature reduction that happens at night really isn't relevant for anyone who consumes any amount of caffeine during the day (which is most people), as when caffeinated, the BBT shift downward at night isn't accompanied by a complementary upward shift in comfortable/tolerable air temperature. Rather the opposite.
Caffeine, as a cholinergic, constricts peripheral blood vessels, and reduces bloodflow; and as a diuretic, it also reduces interstitial-fluid retention in peripheral tissues. These effects combine to decrease your skin temperature (or rather, to make your skin temperature less reflective of your core temperature and more reflective of the ambient air temperature); while very slightly increasing your core temperature (and blood pressure! Which is one reason caffeine is bad for your heart!)
Most of your heat-sensing nerves are in your periphery, not in your core. So caffeine, by making your skin cooler, makes you feel cooler (even though your basal body temperature goes up!) to which your body responds by sweating less (even though caffeine, as a cholinergic, would force you to sweat in great-enough amounts. See: SLUDGE syndrome.)
Most people don't drink caffeine after a certain time in the evening; and so at night, whatever caffeine was in their bodies has a chance to flush out — which then suddenly allows bloodflow, blood pressure, and interstitial fluid to wash back out to their skin and extremities — and with that comes an increase in skin temperature, "hot" qualia, and triggered sweating from signalled overheating (i.e. the same reason you sweat from spicy food even though your BBT isn't increasing.)
I definitely heat up in the evening when laying down. I may need socks + woollen socks through the day, but it's socks off time during the evening movie. And sleeping time means full-body heating, which my partner really appreciates.
With my partner we have complementary heating systems. I get warm in the evening when they are cold, and they warm up after eating which does nothing for me. The difference is radical.
I guess partly due to this I would never spend a day without a shower in the morning. I've never been sick enough to skip a morning shower, even in a high fever (or especially then I guess, due to sweating more than usual). The dirty feeling is just too much to bear.
You feel the sensation of warmth because your body is trying to cool down. It does so by raising the temperature of your skin so more heat is dumped into the environment. This is part of the reason why drinking can lead to hypothermia. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1811578/ “Alcohol is a dominant cause of death in urban hypothermia. Drinking alcohol gives a pleasant feeling of warmth.”
Try taking your core body temperature using a thermometer rather than relying on perceived temperature.
Sounds logical. I don't mind which mechanism is behind it, but the ability to heat up any sleeping spot to a comfortable temperature for two is feature I quite like.
Yeah, body temperature falls when you sleep. In fact, that's one of the tips give to insomniacs to help them sleep - have a bath at night, preferably with cold water.
In my family, parents showered in the morning and kids showered at night.
I tried switching after moving out but didn't find it nice for the same reason you mention, getting the bed all dirty with whatever sweat had accumulated over the day.
As a fellow night sweater, I got a forced air blower and special sheet that distributes the air for my bed and it’s been life changing. It took a week or so to get used to. It’s temperature and speed controlled. Check out BedJet.
Haha, I know exactly how you feel. I too often wondered about the optimal timing for clothes reinsertion... at least the dryer unit is pretty good at drying out the shower which seems to help with mold, so even if you're not using it for clothes it still serves a purpose.
How does that work? If you wash in the evening and go to bed you do not wake up dirty. Unless your bed is a pigsy I suppose, but then the solution is different.
This means if it's raining, we'll have clothes drying in the bathroom, which I'll then need to move out to take a shower. Whether it makes sense to then put them back in to the now wet bathroom with the dryer running I'm not sure.