Andrew Huberman· PhD
Most of your heat escapes through your face, the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet.
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Most of your heat escapes through your face, the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet.
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So I mentioned before that you want to cool the palms or the bottoms of the feet although that's a little harder to do or the face but not so much that the blood vessels constrict because then you won't be able to pass cool into the body because those pipes got smaller and therefore you can't pass cool into the body.
It'll at least decrease your heat loss, your rate of heat loss as you're going to raise the issue a little later, I know, and that is our natural portals for heat loss. So you can think of the natural portals for heat loss as our air conditioners, okay?
So as it turns out that if you are to cool the palms of the hands, the bottoms of the feet and the upper half of the face, you can more efficiently reduce core body temperature for sake of offsetting hyperthermia and for improving athletic performance and maybe even cognitive performance.
So the two key themes again are understand that baseline circadian rhythm in temperature, and understand that the best way to cool the body is going to be by making sure that something cold contacts the bottoms of your feet, the palms of your hands and the upper half of the face. Ideally all three if your goal is to lower core body temperature quickly, and again, just cooling off the back of your neck or the top of your head or your torso with a towel is going to be the least efficient way to lower core body temperature and might even increase body temperature under certain conditions.
What I'll tell you, and we'll get into this in more depth later, is that if you really want to cool down quickly and efficiently, you should leverage particular portals, meaning particular sites on your body where heat can leave your body more readily and where cooling can have a dramatic and fast impact on your core body temperature, can even save your life if you're going hyperthermic.
Ideally what you do is you use some warm object or warm fluid to warm the bottoms of their feet, their hands, and the upper half of their face. Of course not so warm that you burn those skin surfaces.