This just happened to me today and I was instantly really hot and sweating. I’m curious why this happens and what causes it.
In: 6
Adrenaline gets dumped in your blood dilating blood vessels in your body, including your skin, in preparation for fight or flight. This makes you feel hot.
When you start to panic that is an indication that your body has entered into a “stress response.” In biology, this response is called a “sympathetic nervous system response” or SNS response. This is sometimes known as the “Fight or flight” response in adults or the “Fight, flight, or freeze” response in kids. This internal state is a chemical soup of hormones that is rapidly telling your body to do specific things that would be helpful if you were being attacked. Those things are:
* Decreases the blood supply to the skin.
* Downshifts the digestive tract (stomach and intestines) and the bladder.
* Increases heart rate and blood pressure.
* Increases the size of your pupils to let more light into your eyes
* Directs more blood flow to the muscles and brain.
* Increases your blood sugar by decreasing your pancreas’ ability to produce insulin.
* Lowers your immune response.
Each of these changes serves specific purposes if you really needed them in an emergency situation, but unfortunately, you can get this stress response from things that do not involve an attack. Things like being late for an important meeting, traffic, working for long periods of time, having a shitty job, having a loved one that you are worried about, institutional racism, etc, etc. The more your body is in this SNS response phase the *easier* it is for your body to default to that phase on a daily basis. This frequent (chronic) state is unhealthy in the long-term because it encourages your body to have high blood pressure, remain constipated or have periods of IBS, get infections or sick easily, become diabetic, and have inflexible blood vessels that lead to heart disease, etc, etc.
You are feeling hot because the blood that was in the outskirts of your body (your skin) was moved very quickly to your muscles and head. You are sweating because that extra blood to your muscles and increased heart rate produces heat and your body doesn’t want to get overheated in a crunch situation so it keeps you cool through water evaporation (sweat drying on the surface of the skin).
If any of these anatomy and physiology explanations need further clarification, let me know.
To me personally, its a fight or flight type of situation. I ain’t no expert of course but I have had this situation many times.
It can come from many scenarios such as
-You in combat sport, when you realise you start losing points and time is almost up. Basically panic starts to kick in and your body goes into turbo mode to start giving the smackdown or you will lose. You will loose sense of time and tiredness for a short period of time.
-You witnessing someone getting robbed, murdered, shot or being attacked near you. This can easily trigger your fight or flight sense, you senses are heightened and you become very focused on what’s happening near you.
-You not doing housework and then hearing your parents on the way home.
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