Don't have your heating on at home yet or on setting just above 0 degrees cold? Freezing! Does that make you have to go to the bathroom more often? That's because of this.
That you have to pee more often when it's cold because of your body's reaction to that cold. 'Your body tries to retain heat by squeezing the blood vessels in the skin,' knows Hein Daanen. He is a professor of exercise physiology and researches the effects of heat and cold on people.
Warm blood normally flows through the vessels in your skin. Part of that heat is transferred to the environment. Daanen: "If those vessels are constricted, hardly any blood flows through your skin. The warm blood stays mainly in the central part of your body.' That's where things stay nice and warm.
The body wants to get rid of high blood pressure
Because of that reaction in the blood vessels in your skin, the resistance in those vessels is higher. Daanen explains what happens then: 'Your heart has to deliver a higher pressure and work harder to pump all that blood through. Your blood pressure gets higher.' That can have unpleasant consequences if you have weak veins.
To reduce that pressure, your body draws the fluid from your blood. As the volume of blood in your veins decreases, so does the pressure. 'With high blood pressure, your kidneys excrete that excess fluid,' Daanen continues. 'You notice that too: when you're in the cold, you have to pee more often.'