Can’t tolerate extreme temperatures (especially cold), but have a fairly high tolerance for physical pain compared to what’s normal I think.
And I am INFAMOUS for needing sunglasses. Whenever I’m visiting my folks, they know it’s the thing I’ll complain about if I’ll be in the sun and my mom will usually have bought sunglasses just for me.
Random source is random:
If you spent a lot of time in the outdoors/elements as a kid, you're going to be a lot better at handling adverse environmental conditions.
I spent my childhood wearing shorts and sandals to school, even when it was literally freezing outside (never really got much below freezing though). I also think that 15 C is comfortable inside temperature because half the houses in New Zealand don't have good insulation and heating, if any. I also never need sunglasses; I never wore them as a kid because I wore prescription glasses instead.
I handle direct pain fairly well too, because I grew up with two older brothers, one of whom enjoyed hitting me to the point that in retrospect I'd classify it as sibling abuse. I also spent a lot of my adolescence and university years doing physical work in kitchens and on building sites. Injuries such as burns, bruises, and cuts don't really bother me. Loud noises don't bother me either, from a combination of power tools, using firearms without adequate protection, and spending too long in front of large speakers in nightclubs and at festivals.
People who haven't grown up handling particular discomforts and conditions will be less willing and/or capable of handling them as an adult.
I definitely spent a lot of time in the cold as a kid. During walks in the forest during winter I would play with streams, building dams etc, even though the stream was starting to freeze over. I also didn't wear much clothing compared to others during winter. My gf did no such thing.
But my point was that my gf can't stand being cold. I don't enjoy it, but I don't mind being cold. It's not pleasant when you start to lose sensation in your limbs, but I can deal with it fine. My gf can't stand 3 seconds outside in -5C without at least five layers of insulation from top to toe.
On the other hand, I perceive I'm much more sensitive to light and temperature. Indeed I literally can't hold her coffee cups, drink hot drinks and soup, or hold microwaved meals because of pain overload which she can without thought. And I assure you this isn't because of conditional exposure or anything on her behalf to harsh conditions, she's a relatively delicate creature.
Growing up, I often wondered whether there's just a greater deal of variation in pain and sensory perception in the population than generally accepted. I remember watching people jump into cold pools during swimming carnivals, and I had to seriously wonder whether those people were experiencing what I was experiencing, because, while I'm being a bit melodramatic here, you might as well ask me to consider putting my hand in a fire, and some of these people I swear were amidst revelling in it...
I don’t get it.
You are correct, and it's kind of insane to me how much of a "baseline" there is to what "tolerable temperatures" feel like. You start to notice this a lot living in a place with radical temperature swings. If gets up to 35F in February, I can wear a T-shirt. When it first drops to 45F in October, it feels like the arctic.
I'll happily go outside down to -5 C/20 F weather outside wearing shorts and a warm jacket, as long as it isn't too windy.
It's probably a mix of gender-related biological differences, personal differences, and cultural differences. Is it cultural that women are expected to keep going (taking care of children and household) in the face of discomfort, pain, injury and/or illness? Or are they biologically better equipped to do so?
A common (not pain-related) claim used to be that women are better at multi-tasking than men, but as I understand it, that turned out to be caused by cultural expectations, with women culturally expected to manage multiple things at once while men were allowed to focus on a single task. Similarly, other aspects we think of as biological have turned out to be nurture rather than nature.
But there's also likely to be many biological differences that haven't been sufficiently explored yet. As the article points out, research is often done primarily on male mice (and male people), ignoring the possibility that things might work differently for women.
watch out for cataract
But she's significantly worse at dealing with cold, heat and high brightness. One thing is that her body may be worse at regulating temperature, but she can't stand going out in the cold even for a few minutes unless she's dressed like she's visiting one of the poles.
Me on the other hand have little problem handling the discomfort of being cold or too hot. I also have no issue handling very bright sunny days without sunglasses, while she cannot.
Writing this it seems tempting to view it in an evolutionary perspective... giving birth is a very painful event one must endure, and when hunting it certainly helps to keep pushing even though you're too cold or too hot... or maybe it's just the way the two of us are wired up.