do you have cold hands and feet all the time I'm gonna explain how that works
hey I'm Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to get as healthy
as possible by understanding how health works then make sure you subscribe and
hit that bell so that you don't miss anything so some people tend to have
cold hands and feet even though their body core is feeling warm they're not
really freezing they just have cold hands and feet what's that all about
well if you're cold in the core if your whole body is cold that's a metabolism
problem that's an energy problem and I made another video to explain that but
if your body is warm and your hands and feet are cold that's a circulation
problem so what is it that warms the hands the thing that warms the hand is
blood and if your body core temperature is somewhere around 98.6 degrees then
the blood is supposed to be close to that by the time it gets to the hands
it's gonna cool off a little bit but if your body is 98.6 your hands are
supposed to be around 90 to 92 to 93 degrees that's a normal reduction in
temperature on the way out to the hand but a lot of people when they feel that
hands are cold their hands can be like 78 or 80 degrees even in a room where
it's 72 I've had people with a hand temperature of 74 their hands are just
barely warmer than the room and what that means is there is very very little
blood getting into the hands and the same thing of course with the feet so
what is it that regulates how much blood is getting into the hands and feet and
there is something called vasoconstriction so you have blood
vessels that have muscles in them in the larger blood vessels and they can
tighten up that's called vasoconstriction or they can relax
that's called vasodilation when they relax
that allows more blood into the periphery into the smaller capillaries
the finest blood vessels that we have in the hands and toes so then obviously the
question becomes if the vasoconstriction keeps the blood from flowing into the
hands what causes vasoconstriction and the
answer is stress and more specifically it's something called a stress response
when you have a stress response then your body changes your physiology and
adapt to a stressful situation to an emergency of some sort so let's just say
that you had a bear or a truck or something attacking you are coming
toward you fast now your body needs to ramp up it needs to rev up everything
and you're gonna increase your heart rate you're gonna increase your blood
pressure and the way that body does that is the heart pumps harder and the blood
vessels constrict so that they're tighter and now the blood can move
faster through the blood vessels so that there's actually more blood getting to
the muscles that are gonna get out of the way and save you so in an emergency
this works really really well but if it's not a true emergency if you're just
feeling uptight if you just feeling tension then you're still maintaining
the vasoconstriction but you're not having an emergency so your heart isn't
pumping faster or harder so now a normal heart output against that
vasoconstriction means that the blood is actually slowed down it's prevented to
get to the periphery instead of getting there faster so the same response works
two different ways depending on how intense that stress response is and if
you have more of the moderate chronic low level stress response then you're
getting the the cold hands and feet with our vasoconstriction instead and then
the next question is what is it that regulates the stress
response and that is the frontal lobe your cortex the brain and especially the
frontal lobe so the better the frontal lobe is working the better it can
inhibit or turn off that stress response so by practicing relaxation exercises
you can reduce that stress response and you're getting a little bit of
activation of that frontal lobe at the same time when you're relaxing the other
super powerful way to activate the frontal lobe is called exercise and with
exercise you're getting a little bit more it's not instead of relaxation they
work wonderfully together but it does a few more things additionally so when you
exercise you obviously increase your circulation because your heart rate goes
up and you need the blood to do the work but one more thing happens have you ever
noticed if you go out for a walk on a cold day and your hands are cold when
you start and then 10-15 minutes later they're still cold but then somewhere
around 20 to 30 minutes all of a sudden the hands just get warm and they feel
really warm and it's almost like you can take your gloves off and they still warm
that's because it takes 20-30 minutes for the capillaries to open up for the
the finest circulation to open all the way up and once it does on a regular
basis something really cool happens it's called angiogenesis and that is a fancy
word that means making new blood vessels so what that means is your body is
always checking how things are working and if you need more of something it up
regulates it makes more it increases the capacity to produce that product that
effect so if you have more peripheral circulation on a regular basis your body
is gonna make more blood vessels so you can support that blood flow if it
happens a regular basis how cool is that and a
third thing happens with exercise because you're going to move and
movement is the primary stimulant for incoming information to the brain and
especially the frontal lobe the cortex so with exercise you have three benefits
that all contributes to keeping your your hands and feet warm the first is
exercise increases circulation second it increases angio neo Genesis making new
blood vessels and third it activates the frontal lobe which can turn off the
stress and control the vasoconstriction so the two ways are exercise and
relaxation exercises breathing exercises and we have a video on that also so give
those a try and let me know how it works if you have some good results please
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