For the third week of the Earth Moth Challenge, my goal was to take cold showers and to make them shorter. So far this has been the most difficult challenge by far because it has been difficult to convince myself to make the water cold when I am still tired and just got out of a warm bed. Another challenging aspect was that I would sometimes simply forget that I was trying to complete a challenge because it takes a little while for me to wake up completely in the morning, and I usually shower as soon as I get out of bed. The way that I found to stop myself from forgetting was writing “cold shower” on the palm of my hand in marker or pen each night before going to bed so that I would see it when I woke up in the morning. This worked fairly well and helped me get into the habit of paying attention to the temperature of my shower. As I stated previously, it was very difficult to convince myself to follow through with this challenge, however I did find one strategy that helped quite a bit. This strategy was to start the shower out warm when I first got in, and then within the first few minutes slowly turn the heat down until it was all the way cold. While this could be considered “cheating” on my challenge, I do not think I would have followed through with the challenge if I had not done it, and taking showers that are cold almost the whole time is still much more environmentally sustainable than keeping it hot the whole time.
After completing my challenge this week and seeing how difficult it was, I believe that my week four challenge will be much easier. While walking up ten flights of stairs multiple times per day is certainly not an easy task, I much prefer physical activity to simply being cold, so it will be much easier for me to do.