I’ve always been told that shivering/teeth chattering when cold is supposed to help our bodies warm up. However, I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve been cold enough to shiver and have also noticed a positive difference in my body temperature after the shivering started. So why do we still shiver if it doesn’t help all that much? Or does it help but in a way we cannot really feel?
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Yes, it very much helps. But it can also be subtle. It is perhaps easier to notice if you are sitting still in the cold vs. moving around and doing something physical; you will notice you warm up when you exert yourself, right? That same thing happens when you shiver, just your body won’t reflexively shiver except when you are getting really cold.
Shivering helps keep our core body temperature up. Think about the last time you did heavy work and really exerted yourself. Your body started to sweat to cool down because flexing muscles generates heat. Shivering is just the body automatically flexing muscles over and over again to warm up the blood flowing into the heart.
Now you don’t feel warmer because the warming effect is mostly in the blood moving into your chest. Blood flowing out will get cooled as it reaches the extremities. We feel heat and cold in the nerves closer to the surface of our skin. So while the blood flowing to our core is slightly warmer, we’re still losing heat through our skin and the nerves sense that as being cold.
It does help. Think of going for a run. afterward you are hot (and sweety). thats because you were using your musles and making them work.
Shivering is the same, your body makes fake work for your musles to do so they will make some extra heat.
You dont feel this because you dont really feal your own body tempetature very well (atleast not conciously), just the rate at which heat is leaving through your skin, which hasnt changed.
Shivering is actually a really effective way for mammals to keep warm. It was really important for humans too, until we developed clothes and fire.
This is gonna be an oversimplification, but it’ll get the core idea across. Your muscles can generate heat when they contract, in addition to their neighbors and their neighbors’ neighbors and so on till you’re a walking furnace. When it gets cold, you shiver to wake up and force your muscles to contract. If you’re in a cold environment, you’ll keep getting cold unless you move somewhere warmer or you make more heat.
This is why your core muscles like your abs and chest sometimes start contracting and “shivering” on their own when you get really cold. You might not be able to voluntarily control them, but they’re trying to generate heat to protect your organs from freezing.
Finally, you start getting really cold blood vessels in your skin that t disengorged, aka they get more open and blood rushes to the surface. Not shivering entails that your muscles stop moving. That’s how you die in the cold.
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