When our body temperature is high, why do we feel cold?

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I was recently sick and my body temperature was 38.6°C. It felt like I was in a refrigerator.
So, why do we feel cold when we have a high body temperature? Shouldn’t we feel hot instead?

In: Biology

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

so, your body does temperature measurement based off of relative temprature between the environment and your skin. when your hotter, everything around you feels colder.

however, in the case of sickness, its mostly phycological. The brain is trying to trick itself into getting even hotter so as to burn out the sickness.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your body always has a set-point temp that it’s trying to get to.

* When your current temp is above the current set point, you “feel hot” and get the urge to do heat shedding behaviors like removing clothes, having a cold drink, etc.
* When your current temp is below the current setpoint, you “feel cold” and get the urge to do heat-seeking behaviors like putting on clothes and blankets, having hot drinks, etc.

When you’re sick, your body raises the set-point temperature. It’s like turning up the thermostat setting. With the setpoint raised, your current temp will be below the setpoint, so guess what you feel cold and start doing heat-seeking behavior to get even warmer.

**TLDR:** Your *actual* temperature doesn’t matter, if it’s below the current setpoint you feel cold. With a fever, your body raises the setpoint (on purpose, to make you give yourself a fever).

Anonymous 0 Comments

So this is kind of backwards. When you’re sick you don’t feel cold because your body is hot; your body gets hot because you feel cold. Your mind tricks your body into feeling cold so that it goes into overdrive heating you up, in an effort to kill off whatever is making you sick.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The body works kind of like a thermostat, in that it has a set temperature that it wants to be at. Just like a thermostat, when it gets hotter or colder than it wants to be, it starts doing stuff to get back to the temperature it prefers, like shiver to produce heat when it’s too cold, or sweat to cool down when it’s too warm.

When we get sick, however, fighting the infection is more important to the body than staying at the temperature it usually prefers. It also knows that becoming hotter will help fight the infection. The way it gets hotter is that it increases the set point of the thermostat, which in effect makes it work to become hotter by tricking it into believing that it’s freezing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You have a part of the brain (anterior hypothalamic nucleus/preoptic area) that acts as a thermostat and maintains a temperature “set point”. If you are colder than the set point, you will shiver, feel cold, stop sweating, and your skin will get less blood flow. If you are hotter than the set point, you will feel hot, sweat, and your skin will get more blood flow.

When you are sick, immune chemicals (like TNF-alpha, IL-1B, IL-6) affect the thermostat to increase the set point. Now your body temperature of 36C or 98F is colder than the set point, so you will feel cold. If you have a fever and take a fever reducing drug, the set point drops down and now you feel hot and start sweating.

Anonymous 0 Comments

To put it simply, your body works to maintain its body temperature. When you get a fever because you’re sick, your body works harder to stay at a higher temperature.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A fever is basically your body getting hot to kill the infection before it kills you. If you thought you were hot, you would do what you could to cool down, which is the opposite of what your body is trying to do. So your body continually tells you that you’re cold, to make you try and warm up helping kill the infection.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Part of the reason you get the “chills” where you actually feel cold and shivery is because that rapid contracting and relaxation of the muscles actually helps raise your body temperature, like a mini workout where your body gets warm cause your muscles are working hard. 

Anonymous 0 Comments

A body temperature increase decreases the effective frequency of the body’s filters. At temperature increase assume rate kinetic increase static comparative differential to human high exertion and cold weather. Thus, there is an increase of signal frequency which decreases the effective frequency of the filter. At a body temperature increase there is effective wounding and loss. Thus, paradoxical coldening happens where the lost signal causes hallucination of cold signal similar to how actual cold or high exertion can trigger cold.

Your specific issue is related to stuxnet infecting you which has caused your center rate to increase which is a sidechain vurnerability. When a virus has compromised your life process than there is a possibility of actual rate increase which may cause clothes to function worse in providing warmth, as this vurnerability is a direct rate increase of the body to near the maximum, where you will have viral infection artefact due to the high temperature of body process. As well, there is direct overclock which is a part of the virus which had effected you.