eli5 How does your body raise and lower it’s own temperature?
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Sweating! We sweat and the evaporation of that cools you skin which then helps cool your blood.
Our body naturally produces heat as part of metabolism. Every cell does it. Usually the problem is too much heat, so our bodies developed systems to shed it, like the networks of blood vessels in our skin and sweating. Most of the time, to combat cold, all our body needs to do is restrict this cooling. But if you need extra heat, some of our cells need to work overtime. That’s what shivering essentialy is, doing “useless” work for the sake of generating heat.
it’s like this….
there’s a few things happening.
* we’re basically giant thermos’s of nails and flint. anything we consume is gasoline. Since we’re alive, there’s already a spark so anything we consume is burned away, adding more fire.
* additionally, all the nails and flint is constantly rubbing each other, causing a lot of sparks, adding to the heat
* but, we’re not just dumb giant thermos’s… we’re cheaply made thermos’s. The thermos walls are always leaking through the cheap materials it’s made of, letting heat leave from inside.
* Even though we’re cheaply made, we do have some ‘smart’ features… if we really get hot, then the thermos will start to leak on command, and the heat is able to escape much easier.
Just by living, our cells is consuming material and producing energy & heat. our bodies operate ‘best’ at a certain temperature so we also have skin that allows heat to be pulled from our bodies when it’s cooler than our core temperatures. At rest, we feel comfortable.
If we get too hot by excercising or by the outside temp being hotter than ‘comfortable’, then we’ll start to sweat. Sweat is a liquid and it allows for better exchange of heat from out bodies to the air outside.
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