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This is an aside, but as a native of winter cold: shivering is an excellent strategy to avoid death, but it’s a terrible strategy for actually feeling warm. (Better is moving, relaxing, and massaging the ears/hands/feet to promote blood flow.)



Sort of makes sense to me. From what I understood from the wiki [1], you can compare the temperature regulation (very) roughly to a thermostat: There is a "target" temperature that the body "wants" to reach and a "current" temperature that the body senses it currently has.

If "current" is higher than "target", the body invokes several mechanisms to bring the temperature down, such as turning up sweat production and making you feel hot; if "current" is lower than "target", it does the same to raise the temperature e.g. by shivering and making you feel cold.

(Fever also works by changing the target temperature of that regulation system, which is why you feel cold at the beginning when the target was raised to the fever temperature and hot at the end when it was lowered back to the normal body temperature)

So it makes sense to me that shivering doesn't make you feel warm, because both, the feeling and the shivering are efforts by the body to raise the temperature.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation_in_humans


Easy upvote.

I think there’s something else mentioned on that page that is a major contributor to feeling cold: redirecting blood flow away from the skin and in to the muscles (/organs)


> shivering is an excellent strategy to avoid death, but it’s a terrible strategy for actually feeling warm.

Sounds like an excellent survival strategy - saves you, but leaves discomfort so you have an incentive to get somewhere safer.




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