Forty degrees was long a Mediterranean number — something you knew from a holiday in Andalusia, not from your own summer. That has changed. Germany, Austria and Switzerland now experience hot summers regularly, with desert days beyond 35 degrees and nights that barely cool down. That makes the most obvious question the most important: what really helps in great heat — and what do we only believe helps? The short answer first: not the cold shock, but even, clever cooling.
The heat has arrived here too
The benchmark was set by the summer of the century in 2003: a heatwave estimated to have caused around 70,000 additional deaths across Europe, and in which Switzerland measured its record still valid today — 41.5 degrees in Grono. It did not remain an isolated case. In 2013 Austria broke the 40-degree mark for the first time (40.5 degrees in Bad Deutsch-Altenburg), 2015 brought the next heatwave of the century, 2018 an extremely dry drought summer. On 25 July 2019 the German all-time record finally fell: 41.2 degrees in Tönisvorst and Duisburg-Baerl. Since then hot summer has followed hot summer — 2022, the current summer of 2026 — and the weather services agree that heatwaves are becoming more frequent, longer and more intense. What is really treacherous is not the daily maximum but the night: tropical nights in which it does not cool below 20 degrees deprive the body of the recovery phase it depends on — and that makes long heatwaves more dangerous than a single hot day.
What the heat does to the body
The human being is an astonishingly good refrigerator — as long as it can sweat and give off the heat. In heat the circulation pumps more blood into the skin, the evaporating sweat cools, the heart works noticeably harder. If the air becomes too hot or too humid, the sweat no longer evaporates properly and the core body temperature rises. Precisely here it becomes delicate — especially for older people, small children, pregnant women and everyone with cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. And for everyone else's circulation when several tropical nights in a row cancel the nightly regeneration.
Myth check: what cools — and what only seems to
Astonishingly many “heat tips” are well-meant half-truths. The underlying principle is simple: sudden cold achieves little, even cooling a great deal. Here are the most common reflexes and what research says about them.
| The reflex in heat | What really helps |
|---|---|
| An ice-cold shower | Cools only briefly — afterwards the body heats up against it. A lukewarm shower cools more lastingly. |
| A fan in a hot room | Above about 35 °C of dry heat it only blows warm air at you. With a damp cloth or a fine mist in front of it, it works again. |
| Windows open all day | Close and darken during the day; ventilate right through at night and early in the morning. |
| The ice-cold drink downed in one | Drink spread over the day and rather lukewarm; with heavy sweating add a pinch of salt or an electrolyte drink. |
| A cool beer for refreshment | Alcohol and caffeine dehydrate. Water, spritzers or unsweetened tea are the cleverer choice. |
| Sport in the midday sun | Move exercise to the early morning or the late evening. |
The pulse-point rule
Whoever wants to cool down quickly and with little effort does not cool the whole body but the places where the blood flows close beneath the skin: wrists, neck, temples, the insides of the elbows, the backs of the knees, the tops of the feet. A cool — not ice-cold — cloth or a jet of water at these pulse points cools the blood flowing through and thus, bit by bit, the whole body. This is ancient knowledge, incidentally: the cold arm and knee affusions and the water treading of the Kneipp cure start exactly here, long before there were cool packs.
The sauna trick (yes, really)
It sounds contradictory but is well documented: whoever regularly exposes the body to controlled heat and cold copes better with real heat. Sauna-goers and people who practise ice bathing train their heat regulation — the body learns to sweat earlier and more efficiently and to keep the circulation stable (specialists call this heat acclimatisation). That, however, is an effect for the whole year, not an acute tip for the 40-degree afternoon: in the middle of a heatwave the infusion in the Finnish sauna belongs in the early morning — or should be postponed entirely. Whoever saunas regularly in winter, by contrast, demonstrably gets through the next summer more calmly.
Cool places of longing: escaping the heat
The most elegant cooling is still to travel to where the heat does not arrive in the first place. Four worlds suggest themselves — and all four are fully grown wellness landscapes, not emergency solutions.
- The uplands. A few hundred metres of altitude and plenty of forest lower the temperature noticeably. The Bavarian Forest, for instance, rarely stays above 28 degrees in summer — cool woods, clear cirque lakes and a spa for the evening.
- The Alps. Altitude is the most reliable air conditioning. In Tyrol the nights sink into a restful range even in high summer, while the lowlands still glow.
- The sea. On the North Sea a breeze almost always blows, and the stimulating climate of wind, salt and cool moisture is cooling and therapy in one.
- The lake. A jump into cool water beats any fan: more on this in the natural bathing lake glossary and in the topic field wellness by the lake.
When the heat becomes dangerous
We are a wellness portal, not physicians — and heat stops being a wellness subject when it tips over. Warning signs such as dizziness, headache, nausea, muscle cramps or confusion are to be taken seriously; heatstroke with hot, dry skin and a high fever is an emergency (112 in Germany and Austria, 144 in Switzerland). Keep a particular eye on older relatives, small children and everyone who lives alone. What applies where today is given daily by the heat warnings of the German Weather Service (for Austria GeoSphere Austria, for Switzerland MeteoSwiss) — and the best package against the heat remains a cool place, enough water and a slower pace.