Cold Hands And Feet - Should You Worry?

Hello Health Champions. Cold hands and feet can be a nuisance, but are they dangerous? Are

cold hands and feet an indication of some other underlying problem. And if you're one of those

people who are always looking for the quick answer, the quick fix, the answer is to stick your

hands and feet in a bucket of warm water. It's guaranteed to work every time. But if you're

looking for a little bit more long-term solution there's a few more things we need to understand.

What is cold? First of all Darkness doesn't exist and disease also doesn't really exist.

So if we look at it the following way you can't create health by covering up disease any

more than you can create light by covering up darkness your go into a dark room and you

try to cover up the darkness and it's not going to get light, because darkness is the

absence of light. And if we understand that - that it's not a physical entity in the universe,

then health is the same thing. Health is a function. Health is the presence of appropriate

function. Disease is the lack of appropriate function. So when we're talkin about cold, the

first thing to understand is that cold is nothing more than a lack of heat. Heat in the

body comes from energy production. So just like a furnace just like a fireplace, every

cell in your body can make energy. They can take fuel and they can oxidize it and they

can turn it into energy that we use for movement and heat. But if it seems like we don't have

enough heat then it might be that we have a damaged basal metabolic rate. That our base

level of furnace is just set too low. And that could happen for a number of reasons. Some of the more common

are yo-yo dieting, excess exercise, and restricting calories. So if we yo-yo diet, we're telling the body that you'd

better be prepared. There's going to be times when there's a lack of energy so you

better prepare and store a whole bunch of extra energy so that you have some for those

times of lack. And if we combine all these and we have excess exercise - if we're telling

the body that I'm not going to give you a whole lot of fuel but I'm going to use up

a whole lot of fuel in exercise, then your body also senses lack. And if we especially if

we combine this with restricted calories. And we've seen this with something called a Biggest

Loser the TV show where all the people gain the weight back except maybe one, because they

lowered the basal metabolic rate by as much as 7 - 800 calories per day. So we have to start thinking like the body.

What's the purpose of the body? What's the goal of the body? How is the body thinking? How is

the body going to respond and interpret this? A second reason for low energy production can be

anemia - meaning lack of blood. When your red blood cells are low in number or low in hemoglobin,

which is the oxygen carrying compound, then we can't bring the oxygen to the furnace.

This fire needs a lot of oxygen and the fire in your cell needs a lot of oxygen. And if we

don't have enough oxygen, then we can't produce energy. So anemia is a chronic lack of oxygen

delivery. And a third very common thing is called hypothyroid. Thyroid is your thermostat.

It's what sets the heat production, and if you're hypothyroid, that means underperforming

thyroid, then your thermostat is set low because that's system isn't working right. And this

energy production isn't relating specifically to cold hands and feet but it's an underlying

factor because if you don't have any central heat if you don't have the central heat production,

it's very difficult to distribute that heat into the hands and feet. So if your energy

production is low that's going to make you much more likely to have cold hands and feet

as well. And the way you know is that if you have a low overall energy production typically

you'll feel cold all over. And once we have produced some energy now we need to distribute

it we need to have a system to circulate it and that's what the blood is. The blood carries

everything, the nutrients, the oxygen, but also the heat. And the core of your body is the warmest.

Your typical core temperature is going to be 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius

And just as a ballpark figure, if you're in a room that 72 degrees Fahrenheit, which is

about 20-21 degrees Celsius, then your hands would be around 90°, give or take. 85 to 92,

something like that. But if it drops a whole lot lower than that, it means your heat distribution

,your circulation is restricted. And do you have poor circulation from things like diabetes

because the tissue swells, interfering with circulation. We can have neuropathy. We can

have something called peripheral artery disease And this is where there's just debris that

is build up plaque buildup in the arteries mostly fatty plaques and blood clots and things

like that. And if you watch them like videos than you know that this plaquing in this neuropathy

are primarily the result of diabetes. But we can also have poor circulation from things

like nicotine which is a chemical from smoking and we can have poor circulation from stress.

And this brings us to what we're going to talk about in some detail because this is

the single biggest factor for most people. And this relates to something called regulation.

You have to understand that the body is assessing the distribution needs, the circulation, the

need for blood in all the different body parts every second. Because moment-by-moment your

body is determining where is the blood needed the most. So it distributes it on purpose and

the way it does that is with vasoconstriction which means to tighten up blood vessels and

with vasodilation. And in this context dilate is not a strategy for a long life it is vasodilation

which means to expand and relax blood vessels. So in every blood vessel there are multiple

layers and one of the main ones called the tunic and media is muscle so the body can constrict

based on nervous impulses from the brain how much to constrict or relax this blood vessel.

So large blood vessels have a lot of that but even small tiny blood vessels called

arterioles have muscles in them so that they can constrict and dilate. And even on

the way out into the capillaries there can be a single muscle cell surrounding the entrance

to these capillaries so it can regulate the blood flow that way. And of course the ultimate goal

of the body is survival and that means to take care of the critical systems first. We

have to take care of the brain and the vital organs in the core. We have to keep the heat and the

resources and the oxygen going to the vital organs. And if we have to compromise and sacrifice

a few things along the way then so be it. And your hands and feet can function for quite

a long time even if they get cold but not the core so much. So if we need to keep the

heat and the resources central, then we create peripheral vasoconstriction. We tighten up the

blood vessels so that the blood stays out of the hands of out of the feet and we keep

that heat in the body. And the body uses two different systems to accomplish this. The sympathetic

nervous system causes constriction and the parasympathetic causes dilation. And we'll

come back and talk about these more. So how does fight - flight affect blood flow? Fight

flight is an emergency response. It's when you're under attack and your body mobilizes resources

to get out of there. So your heart, your pump, is going to use the maximum amount of

force. You're going to use a huge amount of force. As much as you can come up with and

the blood vessels, the tube size is going to be relatively large, but not too large because

if you pump a lot of force, pump a lot of fluid, but there's no resistance then there

is no speed so the blood vessel is going to tighten up against this force and that creates

a tremendous speed as well as a significant volume. So we can deliver a lot of blood to

the body parts that need it. The opposite of fight flights, and sympathetic, is relaxed and

parasympathetic activity. And they're never completely on or

off their just relatively turned up or down. So when we're relaxed, we don't need the heart to

pump a whole lot. It's going to pump slower and with less force and the blood vessels are going

to be relaxed. They're going to open up and allow a steady flow. Now even though they're

relaxed, they're not going to be as big as during a fight flight, because during fight flight

there's a tremendous amount of pressure forcing the pipe open because it's elastic. And as

a result, we have a significant amount of blood flowing but there's much much less speed because

there is not such an urgent need. But here's where it gets interesting, and this is where

most people suffer with the cold hands. And that's from chronic stress. From a chronic

sympathetic, low-grade dominance. So now we have a little bit more heart pumping maybe

than during the relaxed. Probably about the same but maybe a little bit more however because

we're stressed the body puts a lot of tension, it constricts these blood vessels. And if we

can stretch a blood vessel but there's not a tremendous force pumping through that blood

vessel, now that blood flow turns into a trickle and in some cases it gets shut off completely.

And one of those extreme conditions is called Raynaud's syndrome so here we have people

with very, very cold hands especially when they get stressed, because their body over

react to this stress to this stimulation. And if a room is maybe 72° these people will

have maybe 72.5. You can barely detect the difference between the fingers and the room

temperature. Because there's virtually no blood flowing through. And as a result you will often see color changes,

like you see these fingers are completely white, almost like a corpse. But here's the interesting

part if you go look up cold hands and feet and the causes, very often they're going to

say that Raynaud's is a cause of cold hands and feet and that's not true. There was someone

called Raynaud's who study people with cold hands and feet and he noticed certain patterns

and he saw that some of them have really cold hands and color changes so let me call that Raynaud's

syndrome. That is not a cause. That's an observation that's a label. So now people go to the doctor

and they say "I have really cold hands what could it be?" and they said they could be Raynaud's

syndrome. And then people have their designer label and they go home and they feel reassured

because now they know "what it is." But it didn't really change anything, because the label is

not the cause. It's like you take a look at a car and you notice certain attributes and certain

looks and then you say -" Ah, this is a Ford" so you slap a label Ford on the back of it.

But the label didn't create the car. The label didn't make the car work or do anything it does.

It's just a label for recognition of certain characteristics. What these people do have

other than a label is they have extreme constriction because of extreme sympathetic activity. And

this is part of an extreme autonomic dysregulation. Their bodies are really, really bad

at balancing out the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Their bodies are really confused

and really stuck. But then you also see in these articles on cold hands and Raynaud's,

they called us harmless. So let's take a look at that. And what regulates all this is called

your ANS autonomic nervous system it has two branches, called your sympathetic and your

parasympathetic. The sympathetic tends to speed things up. The parasympathetic tends to slow

things down but the important thing to understand is that this is like a scale, like a see-saw.

They're tied to each other and whenever one goes up the other goes down. It has to be that

way. It's like you're driving a car you can't speed up and slow down at the same time. It's going

to be one or the other. So when one goes up, especially sympathetics, when we have something

drive, like an urgency driving the sympathetic, it will turn off the parasympathetic to some

degree. And the sympathetic is responsible for increasing heart rate, for increasing blood

pressure through this vasoconstriction that we talked about. It increase is cortisol because

an emergency you're going to need more energy and cortisol raises blood sugar so you have

more acute energy available. It also anticipates that you might get injured, so if you start

bleeding it would be a good thing to have some more clotting factors on hand so you

can close that wound quickly. And if you're going to start healing it after the injury

then you need some inflammatory responses for that acute inflammation. So sympathetic

is involved with increases in all of these. So over all, the sympathetic is concerned

with urgent things and with short-term success. The parasympathetic is concerned more with

long-term success. So things like cell based immunity, something that's really important

for infections and viruses like Covid. Digestion - your digestive tract only functions under

parasympathetic influence. Reproduction, erectile dysfunction, infertility, being able to carry

a child to term, It's all supported by the parasympathetic nervous system. And healing

and DNA repair are also under parasympathetic influence so you understand that anytime we

have stress with increase the sympathetic and automatically we decrease the parasympathetic

that would seem kind of significant right and this is the mechanism by which stress

is involved with every disease process known to man. So coming back to the question if cold

hands and feet are harmless. I would say no, because if we understand that cold hands and

feet are related to an over-active sympathetic and this system is what drives everything

about your health, I would say it's very significant now if you have cold hands and feet it does

mean that you have an over-active sympathetic nervous system. It does not necessarily mean

that you have all of these because there's a lot of variability between the different

pieces. Next question we want to answer is should you worry about cold hands and feet

and the answer is obviously - absolutely not. Never. Because when you worry you increase

your sympathetic activity and you further worsen this imbalance of everything that we've

been talkin about. Instead you should have a plan on how to never worry. And should

you be concerned we'll maybe a little but really what I'm getting at here is that you need

to start appreciating your body's signals. It's trying to tell you things. And your job is

to learn enough that you understand what it says and what it says in this case is that

you do not need or have a designer label. If you went someplace to a medical establishment

they might come up with something like oh you are suffering with "Peripheral digital

hypo-thermo-genesis syndrome" and you ask what does that mean and they say Well it means

you have cold hands and feet. It means you're not making enough heat in your hands and feet

but obviously the label is irrelevant because it's just describing what we already know.

And if you start understanding what your body signals are telling you, you start understanding

that it's an adaptation. That overtime your body response to something in the environment

and if this thing goes on for a long time, the body develop a more and more stable response.

A more habitual response until it's a habit that's pretty much stuck. And that's what most habits

and most adaptations are. But if you understand that it's an adaptation, now you can undo it.

If you understand what caused it then undo those things and your body will undo the adaptation.

And here's how you fix it - how you undo it. One really smart thing to do is to wear more

clothes. So even if you're not feeling super cold. If you're sitting in a room with bare

arms and legs and your body senses that we'd better preserve some energy here, then it's

going to cause vasoconstriction to pool the heat to the core to the trunk.

And then you are going to have cold hands and feet even if you don't feel really cold.

So wearing a little more clothing is actually going to lessen that sympathetic response.

And that's why we feel nice and relaxed when we're warm.

And if you have things like peripheral artery disease and diabetes, if you've been watching this channel,

you know that they have a lot in common, because they are both part of metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.

So the way to deal with that, if your insulin is too high you have to stop eating things that trigger insulin,

which is frequent meals and high carbohydrates

So if you go on a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, or higher fat, lower carbohydrate, higher fat.

And you do some intermittent fasting, which simply means you don't eat every minute of the day. You restrict your time

window and you eat maybe once or twice or maybe even three times a day but you do it

during a shorter period of time. Now you will improve that metabolic situation and give

your body a chance to clean that up. If you have a low basal metabolic rate and for hypothyroid

that's a little trickier. There's not really a single quick fix because there's so many

different variables a lot of this is going to be damage done over decades to the metabolic

set point and hypothyroid is very often an autoimmune disease so doing all the things

we talked about on the channel are going to be necessary. They're a good foundation but it

may not still be enough. There may be still some toxicity and some immune issues, some variables

that you need some help with. So do all the things you can and then look for a qualified

practitioner that might be able to assist you further. And then we get to the main part of

this video which is about the regulation and the way that you improve your body's ability

to regulate the balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic is to build a better brain.

I called a BBB. It stands for both blood-brain barrier but in this case with talking about

build a better grain. And the brain needs certain nutrients from food so you want to make sure

you get enough of the essential amino acids, enough essential fatty acids, but then we're

talkin about the stuff people miss. They don't understand what drives the brain. And the number

one thing is movement so if you want a strong healthy brain you want to move more. And I

put exercise in parentheses because moving doesn't have to mean that you have a scheduled

time in the gym. It just means you do something on a regular basis you walk a little extra

you run up the stairs you wave your arms a little bit from your pumping gas. All of these

things increase receptor activation is going to drive the brain it's going to activate

it and give it something to do. Then you want to reduce stress, increase relaxation because

in addition to movement this is another thing that increase is the activity in the frontal

lobe and helps control stress. And you do this relaxation primarily with breathing exercises

because that's going to change the sympathetic and parasympathetic pattern. When you breathe

in your fire some sympathetic your heart rate goes up. When you breathe out your heart slows

down and he can only do that if the sympathetics back off and the parasympathetics kick in. So if you're

stressed, you're always going to be breathing too fast. You're going to be breathing shallow and fast.

But if you relax and pay attention to your breath and you give it about 5 seconds in

and 5 seconds out. Not a deep, forceful breath but a very, very slow and gentle breath, then

you going to balance the sympathetic - parasympathetic. You're going to allow a window for your body

to start sorting this out. And then if you get even better at that and you want to go

to the next step then meditation is about calming your mind at deeper and deeper levels.

And most people don't really appreciate the power of this last part because they over

expect what it's going to do for them in a few days or in a week, but they underestimate

the under appreciate what he can do for them if they do this regularly for months or even

years. If you look at this guy and we assume that he's a world-class violinist how did

he get to that point? It's called neuroplasticity. so the first time that he picked up a violin

and played, it probably didn't sound a whole lot like music. Not even the first weeks or

months, but he kept at it and over years it sounded better and better and better. And in

his brain and nervous system the synapses, the wiring changed. It rewired to make his

skill automated. And if he keeps it up for a decade and he practices hours a day before you know it,

the violin is just an extension of his mind. It's happening on automatic, on autopilot.

And you don't have to spend hours, but if you spend 10, 15 maybe 20 minutes if you want to get

into the meditation, and you do that regularly, you do it most days, then in six months you

will have built an automated skill to the point where stress can't touch you. Whatever

happens in the environment your brain just handles it because it's so good at it. And

I don't think you can appreciate how much impact that could have on your quality of life

and your health. And by the way it'll warm your hands and feet too. If you enjoyed this video

you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the

body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications

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