Ways Your Body Cools Itself
If you suffer from excessive perspiration or the night sweats, you need to understand the natural tools your body has to cool itself. Once you understand these basics, you will better be able to better grasp ways to enhance these natural functions to achieve greater comfort. For example, if you suffer from night sweats, you can exploit radiation by wearing lighter more breathable materials to bed and using similarly light and breathable materials for your bed sheets.
The first and perhaps most obvious way your body eliminates heat is through radiation. You literally just radiate heat from your skin. An obvious way to see this in action is to simply measure the temperature under a blanket before you get in bed and after you have been under the covers for a few minutes.
The second method is conduction. Think of conduction like a heating pad. You conduct heat from your body to anything it is touching. One common example of our body’s conduction is how our face warms our pillow. I’m sure at some point you have turned over your pillow to get that nice cool side — the side to which we haven’t yet passed our body heat through conduction.
Women suffering from hot flashes or guys suffering from night sweats in men could use a cool product called the chillow to exploit conduction to cool them while they sleep.
And the last method I will describe in this post is convection. This is a simple matter of letting air that passes over our skin lift the heat from our body and float away. Some people confuse this with radiation, but to better understand the different think about how cool you feel when you turn a fan on you. You can sit and radiate your heat without fan, but when you kick-in convection by blowing a fan at you, you experience and almost immediate cooling sensation.
By better understanding how our bodies cool themselves we can help it along with little enhancements to its functioning and our comfort.
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