Why do we sweat when we get really scared? It doesn’t seem to have an advantage to me. Also, cold sweat really smells. If your enemy can smell that you’re scared shitless, doesn’t help with surviving, right?
In: Biology
When you enter flight or fight mode, your body will quickly heat up. Sweating helps to regulate your body’s temperature.
Its part of the fight or flight response embedded in our sympathetic nervous system. During stressful situations (any kind of stress), adrenaline and cortisol is released to enhance the function and stability of the many processes related to the fight or flight response. eg we sweat when stressed to pre-emptively increase heat dissipation (the main purpose of sweating) to offset the increased metabolic activity required for flight or fight responses.
As for evolutionary reasons why its persisted, I’d wager that the benefits and protections offered by the fight or flight response overall offer a higher chance of survival than the negative olfactory (smell) effects of sweating
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Bodies re-use a lot of the same chemical messengers to do things, sort of like how you can use letters to write lots of different things. This is controlled both by release of the the messenger, and by the presence of receptors, things which receive the message–if the messenger is your postman, for example, a house can’t receive a letter if there is no mailbox.
One of the chemical messengers released in the “fight or flight” response does a LOT of things, but it gets flooded everywhere at once instead of well-being well-controlled. This may have some benefits for survival (for example, better cooling as you run away). It doesn’t matter how you smell if you can get away from a predator, for example.
It should be mentioned, however, that sweating is pretty rare in the animal kingdom. Primates and horses sweat all over their body, and some other animals sweat in select areas, but it’s likely that, in general, its benefit for survival really only applies to certain situations and life histories. Primates and horses both engage in behaviors that allow them to flee or hide from predators, and both had ancestors which survived in jungles and other hot areas where cooling and being able to hide in the forest (both by sight and by smell) had a bigger advantage for survival.
Because your body is anticipating heavy exercise, which will raise your temperature. Sweat you put out now is sweat you won’t have to work on later, when you’re either fighting or running for your life.
When your sick your internal body temp is super high which causes the sweat to feel cold on your skin. Technically sweat is the same temp. Your skin is also a little more sensitive since your not having a high heart rate and other factors
“The evolutionary theory behind why stress sweat smells so bad is that it’s believed the odor triggers an alert response in our brains,” Hafeez said in an email to CNET. “When humans smell this type of perspiration, we can tell it’s the physical response to a mental concern, like fear or anxiety.”
“This stench alerts the people in the area that there is something scary happening here that we would not like to be a part of,” she says.
[Sauce](https://www.cnet.com/health/personal-care/why-stress-makes-you-sweat-and-how-to-stop-the-stink/)
Adrenaline causes you to sweat. Sweat doesn’t smell, it’s the bacteria that grow, multiply and die within it that smell.
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