Always Feeling Cold? It Could Be A Sign Of Cold Intolerance (2024)

FAQs

Always Feeling Cold? It Could Be A Sign Of Cold Intolerance? ›

Hypothyroidism: This condition occurs when your thyroid gland does not make enough thyroid hormone to regulate your metabolism and body temperature. With hypothyroidism, your body slows down to conserve energy. Your temperature drops, making you even more sensitive to cold.

If you suffer from cold intolerance, you will feel cold, even on a warm day. It's worse than just feeling chilly, often causing symptoms such as cold hands and feet, stiffness, numbness and/or tingling, burning sensations, painful fingers, toes and joints, and your skin may look white and pale or flush red.

You may get cold easily due to certain health conditions, including anemia, dehydration, or vitamin deficiency. Treatment can depend on the cause. Everyone's body has a slightly different reaction to cold, and some people feel cold more often than others. This is called cold intolerance.

If a person's body always feels cold, this may be due to a medical condition, such as hypothyroidism, Raynayd's phenomenon, or anemia.

Vitamin B12 deficiency:

Vitamin B12 is important in the production of red blood cells and the transport of oxygen. Because our bodies cannot produce red blood cells, the lack thereof results in vitamin B12 deficiency anemia. This lack of vitamin B12 may often lead to chills and feeling cold.

Cold agglutinin disease (CAD) is a condition that makes your body's immune system attack your red blood cells and destroy them. It's triggered by cold temperatures, and it can cause problems that range from dizziness to heart failure. It's also called cold antibody hemolytic anemia.

Hypothyroidism can slow down metabolism, leading to a drop in core body temperature. As such, some people with low levels of thyroid hormones may feel cold all the time or have a low tolerance to the cold. This feeling of coldness can persist, even when in a warm room or during the summer months.

Can low vitamin D cause you to feel cold? Instead, vitamin D deficiencies typically result in rickets and other bone deficiencies. [10] While these conditions can lead to feelings of coldness, they don't seem to play as direct a role in thermoregulation as the B vitamins.

Move Your Body

Go for a walk or a jog. If it's too cold outside, hit the gym, or just do some jumping jacks, pushups, or other exercises indoors. Not only will it warm you up, it helps build and keep your muscles, which also burn calories and make body heat.

People with heat intolerance may feel hot when others feel comfortable or cold. Heat intolerance causes may include conditions that cause dysautonomia, which affects the autonomic nervous system. They may also have an unusual response to heat, such as intense sweating or anxiety.

Why am I cold all the time and tired? ›

Anemia. When you are anemic, your body doesn't have enough healthy red blood cells (hemoglobin) to carry oxygen, heat and nutrients throughout your body. In addition to being cold, other symptoms include shortness of breath, dizziness, irregular heartbeat, pale or yellowish skin and exhaustion.

A slower metabolism causes women to produce less heat so they tend to feel colder. “It's simple physics,” says Boris Kingma, PhD, a thermophysiologist, at The Netherlands Institute for Applied Science (TNO). “If you lose more heat than your body produces, your body temperature will go down and you will sense that.”

Being active is one of the best ways to keep the body warm naturally in any season. When you exercise, your body burns calories, which are units of energy. This stored energy is converted to heat, which is why your body heats up. Exercise also helps increase blood circulation and makes you break a sweat.

When vitamin D levels are low and the body isn't able to properly absorb calcium and phosphorus, there is an increased risk of bone pain, bone fractures, muscle pain, and muscle weakness. In older adults, severe vitamin D deficiency (levels less than 10 ng/mL) may also contribute to an increased risk of falls.

Scientists say there are several reasons. Some people are born with special genes* to deal with below-zero temperatures while, for others, exercising in the morning and having good blood circulation* helps keep them warmer on chilly days. Some children never want to wear pants, jumpers or jackets when it's cold.

A nagging cough and runny nose might mean you just have a plain old cold…but not all the time. Often, colds can be the precursor to other, sometimes more serious illnesses such as bronchitis, pneumonia, sinus infections and COVID-19. Here are 3 ways to tell if your “cold” might be something else.