you’d think it was the opposite, no? but every time we get a fever we start freezing.
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We feel how the outside compares to the “target” temperature within our body. If outside conditions make you cool down from the norm, you feel cold, if they make you overheat, you feel hot.
When you get a fever, your body produces special chemicals that change the target temperature for your body. Your brain compares this new higher level with the current state of affairs and goes “oh crap, we’ve almost frozen to death, we need to heat up FAST” and you feel cold.
We don’t actually have a sense of temperature, we have a relative sense of temperature. If the environment is hotter than body temperature when we feel hot, if it’s lower we feel cold.
Your nerves don’t sense absolute temperature. They sense energy transference. So if your body temperature is elevated you’re going to feel that more compared to the air temp. Same is true if you have a normal body temp, you’re going to feel the cold intensify as the difference increases. If you engineered some circumstance where your body temp was 90 degrees and the air was 100, it would feel the same as of your body temp was 100 and the air was 110.
Two different things –
1) The sense of “cold”, as in plunging your hand in ice water, is really a sense of the flow of heat. If our body is *losing heat* we sense cold and if we’re gaining heat we sense warmth.
That’s different from …
2) Our body has an internal thermostat that regulates our metabolism to burn X calories per second to generate our core body temperature. It’s generally set to around 98.6F in a healthy person. If a person loses enough heat to drop their core body temperature to say, 98 or 97.5 the body’s thermostat senses this and says “WOH! Ramp up the metabolism team, we need heat!” So you start shivering and you feel “cold” (I’m trying to describe the feeling of “being cold” as being different from the sense of “the wind is cold” if you’re following me) In the case of fever the body is *turning up* it’s thermostat from 98.6F to maybe 102F. That’s a 3 degree difference and similar to if a healthy person’s core temp drops to 95F. The body FREAKS OUT, that’s way too cold! So you start shivering and trying to heat up ASAP. So even though you are *hotter* than normal your body still considers itself *cold* compared to where it wants to be.
That’s why you *feel* cold when you have a fever, you’re body literally thinks you’re hypothermic and reacts accordingly.
Our nerves can only feel a certain temperature range.
Anything outside of that is just bad/pain.
When you feel something (like water) passed a certain temperature your body says “ouch/bad”. That pain signal is often referred to as “cold”
You don’t actually feel temperature, what you feel is the heat transfer to or from your body and your surroundings.
That’s why putting on a jacket makes you feel warmer. It’s not warmer than the surrounding environment, but you’re no longer having heat flow from your body because the insulation lets you retain more of your body heat.
The greater the temperature difference between you and your surroundings, the faster the heat loss will occur. So if you have an elevated body temperature, you feel more heat loss in a room than you usually would simply because heat leaves your body faster.
This is also why women feel the cold more. They have a higher basal body temperature, so they are bleeding more heat into the surrounding air than the more cold blooded men around them.
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