I Promise I Don’t Smell!

Hazah! My waterproof watch arrived last week and so the challenge begun! After taking on the challenge of shortening my showering time in an effort to make a change towards a sustainable behavior I thought, “this is never going to work.” I shower to release stress after  long day, it’s like a therapeutic thing. I shower to wake myself up in the morning. I shower for many reasons but one I cannot forget is well… I like to be clean. I think it is somewhat  of an American norm to shower, get rid of the days filth, refresh and rejuvenate! One thing I’ve

realized within this last week is that just because I shower for longer periods of time does not mean that I’m any cleaner then I technically would be with a decent length shower.

When I told my friends I was shortening my shower time, to them it sounded as if I was just not going to shower at all (some of my friends were also okay with that idea). As I started to look into the environmental affects showering has on the Earth I was surprised to find that scholastically, there’s not much written on it. What I did seem to find was a lot of individual blogs that interconnected the behavior of showering and the negative externalities that come with this behavior.

My intentions for changing my shower behavior was to change the affect that it has on the most obvious and related resource, water. I thought that by showering less I could possibly give another fish the opportunity to live! What I stumbled upon was that showering not only interconnects with water supply but has some not so obvious harmful affects for the Earth.

We don’t realize when we shower that the beautiful lovely soaps we use, not only contain harmful chemicals but, these chemicals end up in our water and marine ecosystems. These chemicals are inevitably harmful to us too. I once read that if you would not eat the soap you use, applying it to your skin might not be the wises idea. This website I found  has a lot of useful information to the negative environmental affects of our showering products and maybe how to try to avoid them .(Mercola) Although the intentions of the website is to market soaps I found very useful the information provided, things that otherwise I do not think about when I shower.

As I went through my week I surprisingly found it easy to reduce my shower times. The biggest reason for this I must attest to my busy schedule. I haven’t had the time to shower, but I promise I don’t smell. As I continued to search for articles on showering I found another one having to do with our ever so loved hot showers. (Atteberry) I started off this challenge with a goal, and an incentive and can honestly my incentive to change has grown.

Citations

Mercola. (n.d.). “scrubbing yourself clean and purging germs… but at what cost to your health?”. Retrieved from http://bathcare.mercola.com/

Atteberry, J. (n.d.). Are long, hot showers bad for your skin?. Retrieved from http://health.howstuffworks.com/skin-care/cleansing/myths/hot-showers-bad.htm