Changes in your body temperature, the outside temperature, or your emotional state can cause sweating. The most common areas of sweating on the body include:.
Not sweating enough and sweating too much can both cause problems. The absence of sweat can be dangerous because your risk of overheating increases. Excessive sweating may be more psychologically damaging than physically damaging. Your body is equipped with an average of three million sweat glands.
There are two types of sweat glands: eccrine and apocrine. The eccrine sweat glands are located all over your body and produce a lightweight, odorless sweat. The apocrine sweat glands are concentrated in the hair follicles of the following parts of your body:. These glands release a heavier, fat-laden sweat that carries a distinct odor.
The smell, referred to as body odor, occurs when apocrine sweat breaks down and mixes with the bacteria on your skin. Your autonomic nervous system controls your sweating function. This is the part of your nervous system that functions on its own, without your conscious control.
When the weather is hot or your body temperature rises due to exercise or fever, sweat is released through ducts in your skin. It moistens the surface of your body and cools you down as it evaporates. Sweating is normal and occurs regularly in your daily living.
We've probably all been there. You just feel like something spicy! While you know your mouth isn't actually on fire, what you may not know is that your brain is actually getting tricked into thinking you're overheating. It's why, pretty soon, you'll probably be sweating bullets.
As it turns out, the culprit of this so called "gustatory sweating" is capsaicin, the active ingredient that makes many spicy foods spicy. Capsaicin interacts with temperature-sensitive nerves responsible for detecting warmth in your mouth.
This interaction tricks your body into thinking your mouth is literally hot, even though it's not. Regardless, your body tries to cool you down the best way it knows how — sweating! But since this sweat may not feel like it's actually helping tame the fire drill in your mouth, you may be temped to turn to a beverage or other food item to help cool your mouth down instead. It's also important to mention here that the process of metabolizing food, in general, can increase your body temperature.
So, even if you're not eating something spicy and even if you're not hot, you may find that eating a particularly heavy meal might induce a light sweat — hence the term "meat sweats. How sweat cools you down Sweating gets a bad rap, and, sure, it is sort of gross. But, none of this explains why we sweat even when we're not hot. Why we sweat when we're nervous Whether it's your first day of work, a first date or a stressfully close sporting event , I'm sure we've all experienced the sweaty palms and underarms that come along with being stressed, scared or nervous.
There are 4 million of these glands all over the body — everywhere but the lips. The eccrine glands on the foreheads, palms and soles of our feet are connected to emotional signals as well as temperature changes. This is why we get sweaty palms before giving a speech. How does sweating actually cool us off? Water released from our pores evaporates, cooling our skin and releasing heat. This requires understanding a bit of molecular chemistry.
If the liquid water increases in temperature, the average kinetic energy — energy from the movement of the different water molecules — also increases.
If it reaches a certain temperature, the fastest moving molecules will move so quickly they can jump out of the pool, taking their energy with them. This technical explanation is essentially another way of saying that as the wind blows, in addition to heat from our bodies being directly carried away by the air aka convective heat transfer , water evaporates more quickly.
Along with water, we release salt and nitrogenous wastes, like urea. While it may seem efficient to dump these unwanted materials out with our sweat, it actually reduces the efficiency of evaporative cooling. This is due to a concept in chemistry called colligative properties. They are a property of solutions that depend on the number of dissolved particles in the solution. For example, colligative properties cause a boiling point elevation.
The temperature required to change molecules from a liquid phase to a gas phase increases. All that salt in our sweat just gets in the way of the water molecules that are speeding up and trying to turn to gas.
Keywords: acclimation; cholinergic; eccrine; evaporation; heat; perspiration; sweat gland; thermoregulation. Abstract In humans, sweating is the most powerful autonomic thermoeffector. Publication types Review.
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