Health Quotes Dr. Tracy Zaslow: How to Regulate Your Body Temperature When It’s Freezing Outside

Some People Are Impacted By Cold Temperatures More Than Others

There are a few factors that go into how cold you feel, including your age.

“In particular, the elderly and the very young have more trouble controlling their body temperatures and lose heat more easily,” Zaffer Qasim, MBBS, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at Penn Medicine, told Health.

Certain medical conditions, like hypothyroidism and diabetes, can also impact how cold you feel, Qasim explained. Even some drugs like blood pressure medications, sedatives, and psychiatric medications, can raise your risk of feeling cold.

“There’s a lot of side effects of medications that can change your metabolic rate and change how blood flows through your blood vessels,” Daniel Bachmann, MD, an emergency medicine physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, told Health.

Additionally, having a low body fat percentage raises the odds you’ll be impacted by cold weather. “It’s less of an insulating layer for body heat,” Tracy Zaslow, MD, a sports medicine specialist at Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles and a team physician for Angel City Football Club and LA Galaxy, told Health.

It’s worth noting that there’s a “wide range of normal” with body temperature.  While 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is viewed as average, some people regularly run much cooler than that, Zaslow explained. If you’re one of them, you may be more likely to feel the cold when exposed to it. Having a slower metabolism can also impact how sensitive you are to the cold.

“Some people have a higher metabolic rate—how fast or how you burn energy—and that’s how you burn heat,” Bachmann said. “That will influence your sense of being cold or warm.” Finally, everyone has a physiological and psychological response to the cold—meaning, how you feel the temperature and feel about it.  “The body’s interpretation of cold varies,” Zaslow said. “Some people are just more sensitive to it than others.”