I’m not sure if “turning white/pale” is an exaggeration or if people actually do turn pale in certain situations. I’ve never witnessed it myself, anyone here who has?
In: Biology
Fear causes blood to rush to other parts of the body, draining out of your face and leaving it pale. This is part of the fight or flight response.
Yes, it’s the blood draining from your face to your heart as a reaction to stress. It’s easier to see in lighter skinned people, and it’s pretty subtle regardless. So you’d need the right person and the right events to witness it.
Yes, absolutely. I think it’s less common than turning red, but it’s sort of just the opposite effect.
Substances that are vasoconstrictors will cause this effect. One such substance us adrenaline which is released when we’re scared or stressed. Our bodies are trying to direct blood to essential functions as part of our “fight or flight” response.
I get really bad motion sickness and when I’m about to hurl, I turn white as a ghost. For reference, I am of Italian descent and have a decent tan. When I go pale you’d think I was a ginger.
Not sure why I go pale, but it happens.
As others have said yes it’s true; it happens when people feel faint or are in shock, etc.
And it’s also an example of a medical symptom that is based on having a white or Caucasian skin tone as being the ‘standard’. Many medical symptoms like being pale (“pallor”), having blue lips (cyanosis) or sallow skin (yellowing due to illness) or different types of rash presentations, look very different on different skin tones, but the ‘norm’, or diagnostic criteria, in western medicine is how they appear on white people. So lots of conditions and symptoms get missed in people with other skin tones because they don’t look like what the physician is expecting/was taught to look for.
Mental distress such as fear, panic, shock, etc. activate our sympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight or flight response. This system, as the name suggests, prepares our body for either fighting off a threat, or fleeing. Some of the changes that happen during this process are increased heart rate (tachycardia), elevated blood pressure (hypertension), increased breathing frequency (tachypnea), widening of the respiratory tract to allow more air to pass (bronchodilation), widened pupils to gather more vidual information (mydriasis), decreased urine production (oliguria/anuria), increased glucose production in the liver (hyperglycemia)…
One important thing that happens is the redistribution of the blood flow. That means that our body takes blood away from organs that are not important for us to survive the threat and puts it into organs that can help us survive that threat. In this way, our body decreases the blood flow of our GI tract, urinary tract, reproductive tract etc. and increases blood flow of our muscles, lungs, and so on. Two things are important to note:
1. The decreased blood flow in the “unimportant” organs is still high enough that these organs can survive, i.e. the organ will not die from lack of blood flow because these organs still receive a minimal blood flow necessary to its survival.
2. Two organs exempt from this kind of redistribution is our heart and our brain. In no physiological circumstance will a body ever take blood from these two organs to give to other organs.
To answer your question, one organs that loses a big chunk of its blood supply is our skin. All the little arteries constrict and lower the amount of blood passing through our skin, also directing it to our muscles. As less blood passes through our skin, it appears paler and colder.
So, in summary, when we are scared, our sympathetic nervous system redistributes our blood from organs that do not need it (skin, GI, kidneys) to organs that do (muscles). This decreased blood flow through our skin makes it appear paler and colder.
I hope you got the general idea, but if you have further questions, please feel free to ask.
Yes. Part of the adrenal response to stimuli, be it physical or psychological – i.e. flight-or-fight response. Seen it happen in all sorts of circumstances – from witnessing horrific accidents, delivering bad news, dealing with death and more.
It’s happened to me before, my partner at the time said my face rapidly went white before I started stumbling and had to put myself on the ground
Yes, but I have thin skin and I’m pale so I feel like it’s extra visible when I have nothing backing up my skin tone. You can literally feel blood draining from your face with the drop in blood pressure.
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