Most of the time when I get sick, my body temperature goes up, which make me feel hot/burning up obviously, but why does sometime I feel cold and even have cold sweat?
In: Biology
When you’re sick, your body might feel cold because it’s trying to fight off the germs. Your brain tells your body to raise its temperature to make it harder for the germs to survive. This is called a fever. But while your body is heating up, you feel cold because your normal body temperature hasn’t caught up yet. It’s like when you first get into a cold swimming pool and you feel cold until your body gets used to the water.
Your nervous system is used to your skin being a certain temperature to be able to gauge the temperature of things around you, including the air. When you have a fever your skin temperature goes up and so you’re getting a falsely high “normal”, and ambient temperatures now feel artificially colder in comparison.
That’s one of the ways fever works.
There’s a tiny organ in the brain called the hypothalamus, which is called the “thermostat” of the brain. Some infectious diseases produce molecules called pyrogens which circulate in the blood and eventually reach this thermostat. In response, the hypothalamus raises the “default” or “desirable” body temperature. So now the normal body temperature feels like hypothermia and the body tries to warm itself up by shivering and making you want to wrap up and drink lots of hot tea. Eventually, when the necessary temperature is reached and the immune system can begin firing on all cylinders, the body begins to vent a lot of unnecessary heat, so you start blushing (blood next to skin sheds heat) and wanting to take a cool bath.
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