I know I’m not the only one who has been sitting in a group of people, and I shimmy out of nowhere from the cold chills. It gives me a reason to giggle that almost everyone says, “ Whoah, cold chill” right after so that everyone knows you’re not shaking for no reason. Don’t you hate the attention it brings even though it is so relatable? It might trigger the question of what a cold chill is and why our bodies do it.
If our bodies sense a decrease in body temperature to maintain homeostasis and regulate the temperature, they will start an involuntary movement that signals our muscles to contract and relax, increasing our internal body temperature.
Most of the time, our body does this just to increase our temperature if we are in a cold room. Have you ever had “goosebumps”? You know, whenever you are cold, those little bumps on your arms rise up, and the hair on your arms stands up. Comment down below if you all call it something different where you live. The hair on your arms stands up because a small muscle attached to our hair follicles called arrector pili muscles contract, causing the hair to stand up and the skin to be pulled taut. Interestingly enough, when this muscle contracts, it traps air between the erect hairs, which causes thermal insulation, causing us to retain heat, therefore increasing warmth. Cool design, right!?
I also didn’t know that leprosy can damage this muscle, disrupting its function and preventing the hair follicle from standing up.
You may shiver due to the sympathetic nervous system’s “fight or flight” portion of the autonomic nervous system. For example, If you swim in very cold water, the sympathetic nervous system shunts blood to your internal organs. The majority of blood would go away from your extremities and go to the trunk of your body to protect and perfuse your heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and brain. We can live without our fingers and toes but not with our vital organs.
Fever induced chills
Other times you might remember shivering are when you are sick and have a fever, also called pyrexia. It is really neat that our body requires us to have a fever for cells to produce heat shock proteins (HSP). These proteins activate your immune response. The higher temperature also damages the foreign invaders in the body, therefore fighting the illness.
This is why it is important not to take a fever-reducing medication like acetaminophen right away but to let your body do what it is made to do.
I thought it would be interesting to include the four stages of a fever here:
- The Prodromal stage is the period of time between the appearance of first symptoms and the development of the fever. This is the time you are most likely spreading your germs everywhere because you don’t necessarily feel sick. You might just feel tired, so you are still up and going to events. This is when you are sick, but you just haven’t realized it yet.
- The chill stage is when you start shivering, and someone might ask you, “Do you think you have a fever?” You are hot to the touch, but rather than shedding layers, you are bundling up in blankets because you are so cold.
- The Flush stage is when cutaneous vasodilation increases blood flow to the skin. This is when you become too hot and begin to sweat. I usually throw the covers off at this stage. You sweat because your body is trying to cool down. Growing up, I knew this as your fever breaking.
- Defervescence is when the temperature finally drops!
Sun shivers
I’m sure you have the same tell-tale sign that I have for realizing I have had a little too much sun. Usually, if I am sunburned, I know because I am more sensitive to a cold room than usual and constantly have cold chills. This is because when your skin is sunburned, the body dilates your blood vessels, sending blood to the skin’s surface to help repair the damaged skin cells. This results in heat loss. To compensate for this heat loss, your body shivers to contract muscles and raise body temperature. Homeostasis is super neat!
Chills from Beauty
There are also other times when we experience cold chills, maybe at the crescendo of a beautiful song, an unexpected harmony, or a remarkable story or statement. I have definitely experienced cold chills in these moments, but why? This reaction has less to do with us being cold, sick, or sunburned and more to do with neurological stimulation. People have coined this experience with the term “Frisson,” which is the French word for shiver (pronounced like FREE-son). This involuntary response occurs due to the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. We have talked about dopamine so many times on the blog. It is a very important player in our life. I will link here the most recent post that talks about dopamine if you are interested – https://wonderfullymade-kmk.com/what-happens-in-parkinsons-disease/
In short, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is a feel-good hormone related to reward, pleasure, and motivation. We have a spike of dopamine when we check something off our to-do list, achieve a goal, eat good food, see the one whom we love, or hear something beautiful. We have stimulation in these neurosynapses when we hear something beautiful said, sung, or displayed. It causes a psychological, physiological, and emotional response.
The Lord’s Kindness
It is so kind of the Lord to ingrain in us this connection to creation and the beautiful things he gives us. Think about it: we could have no pleasure in his creation. But he designed us to have enjoyment in the things of Him, even down to a neurological level. How kind of a Creator. He did not make us like mindless, unemotional robots; he created us in a personal way with individual desires and traits.
Lord, thank you for allowing us to have so much joy in our lives through the beauty of your creation. I pray that moments like this will lead us to praise you for how intentionally you have designed us. Thank you for being so personal with us, Lord. You are The Great Almighty God. To you all, praise and Glory, Lord. Amen.