why do we feel cold when our body temp goes up?

Question

you’d think it was the opposite, no? but every time we get a fever we start freezing.

In: 7

Answer 1

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.