Thinking about this while I sit in 20 degrees heat sweating my ass off. Like shouldn’t anything under 37 degrees feel cold to us?
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To maintain the body temperature, do maintenance procedures on the body or perform physical work, we constantly produce energy and radiate it to the environment. This can only happen if there is a temperature differnece or we sweat and evaporate the water. Evaporation can’t happen if the air is too moist and can’t accept any more water.
Feeling hot at 20° ambient would require unusual circumstances like having eaten a large hot dinner or some medical condition.
This has been asked many times. Do a search.
Your skin temperature is not the same as your body temperature. Typically it will be much lower than your body temperature. The range of comfortable levels depends on how hot our skin runs which can be affected by activity but is going to be significantly lower than your body temperature. Lower ambient temperatures cause more heat transfer from your body and higher ambient temperatures will reduce the heat transfer.
The other factor is humidity. Your body regulates its temperature further by sweating, and the sweat needs to evaporate in order to have a cooling effect. If the humidity is too close to 100% relative humidity, your sweat no longer evaporates and you just get hot.
We don’t feel heat by how hot it is.
We feel heat based on if our skin is gaining or losing heat.
Our body may have a warm internal temperature but your skin’s surface temperature is closer to ambient.
So if you encounter some hot air that warms your skin or a blanket that prevents your skin from losing heat as easily, your nerves sense any increase in heat energy buildup as “warm”.
Even if it’s just a few degrees warmer.
Because your body actually produces a lot more heat tham 37.5 degrees, and relies on environmental cooling to keep you from cooking in your own skin. The warmer the environment, the more work your body has to do to stay cool, so it provides that uncomfortable feeling to get you to find a more efficient spot to cool itself.
Maybe you have Thermoregulatory Fear of Harm Mood Disorder or FOH for short. One of the main symptoms is overheating at ambient temperatures others find comfortable. Got mood swings or adhd like symptoms, being chronically overheated could be the cause.
Your internals run at that temperature, not your skin. Your body is always in a balancing state of producing heat internally and bleeding it off to the environment. You bleed off your internal heat energy over time as it dissipates out to your skin. Hot and Cold are actually a measure of whether your skin bleeds that heat off faster than it dissipates out of your body. This is about whether what your contacting with your skin conducts more heat away from the body faster than your body replenishes it.
So your sitting inside and its 20 degrees Celsius. Touch something metal that’s obviously 20 degrees Celsius(sitting inside just like you). It feels cold because metal conducts heat VERY well and so you shed heat energy from your skin(some temperature above room temperature) to that metal object(room temperature) much faster than heat is dissipating out to your fingers. The same is true with water, it will absorb heat from you so fast it will feel cold and even 15 degree Celsuis water can kill you by lowering your body temperature too fast. Water is particularly dangerous because as a liquid it envelopes you and touches every square inch of your skin.
Conversely the air around you is a poor conductor of heat energy, air pockets are actually great insulators. Consider regular fiberglass insulation, the pink stuff you see in home insulation applications. It’s the fiberglass doesn’t do much for insulation, its the billions of little air pockets it makes. This is actually why we have body hair, it minimizes air’s natural movement over our skin and allows you to retain body heat(feel warm) in cold air because the heat lose from skin to air is really really small, especially when the air doesn’t move around. Your body heats up the air immediately surrounding your skin, but if that air doesn’t really move away and get refreshed, you stop shedding heat pretty quick, even though the outside air could be quite a bit colder.
This is why you can feel warm in the sun even when its cold out, but as soon as the wind picks up and blows the air around your body it feels cold again. It’s why a fan can make you feel cool even though its just circulating air that’s all the same temperature. It’s also what “wind chill” is, which is a silly way of trying to quantify how much colder the air will feel, even though its still just the same temperature.
Humans don’t run at 37.5, it’s between 36 and 37. 37.5 is close to fever and is a typical temperature for pneumonia.
Because the human body generate a lot of heat and is in constant need of cooling in order to maintain that ideal temperature of 37,5C. In order to cool off, we need to transfer the heat we generate to something else, like air.
Air at 30C is gonna be less good at cooling us than air at 20C, for example.
Water is better at cooling than air, which is why an air temperature of 20C is comfortable, but feels a bit cold in a swimming pool.
Wind will affect how cool we feel. That is because without wind, the air right around us will absorb our excess heat, get hotter, then stop cooling us. Wind replaces that now hot air with some fresh, cooler air, ready to absorb heat.
Another factor is humidity. While the air around us can absorb some heat, we possess a more effective cooling method: sweat. Water inside our bodies absorb the excess heat we produce, then that water is pushed through our skin to evaporate in the air. Thus the air absorbs both heat from us, and water from us. If the air is humid, it won’t be able to absorb water as well, which causes our sweat to stay on our skin, which is when we get covered in sweat that’s unable to evaporate.
Because you lose less heat in 25 degrees than you do in 15 degrees.
Your body produces heat and it has to go somewhere to stay on temperature. If that somewhere isn’t heat transfer via skin you start to sweat and voila, you lose heat again.
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