Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, there, brain stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. So you're sitting at a large table in a conference room with several of your colleagues, or maybe in a crowded classroom. Soon your manager or teacher will call you to the front of the room to give a presentation. All you can think about is how nervous you are. Your heart pounds, you feel tense, and now there's that unmistakable wetness under your arms.
Why does feeling anxious about something like public speaking make your under arms so sweaty. Anxiety can evoke a body response called fight or flight, your body's way of readying you to deal with a potential threat. While public speaking isn't really a threat, the lower part of your brain, which controls basic body functions, doesn't know that. Ultimately, you can blame your hypothalamus, a part of the autonomic nervous system, for your anxious sweating. When faced with a stressful situation.
It tells your adrenal gland to release dozens of hormones, including epinephrin or adrenaline. Epinephrin is responsible for putting your sweat glands to work. The idea is that your body will need to remain cool and slippery during your supposed confrontation. Not everyone has the same fight or flight responses. Some of us sweat mostly from our apocrine glands when we're anxious, such as those in the armpits in genital areas, while others sweat more from the ecrine glands found on the
rest of the body. Ecrine sweat is bad enough because it can mean sweaty palms, but in addition to potential pit stains, apocrine sweat can make you smell bad because it's full of protein and fatty acids. This makes it prime fuel for bacteria that live on the skin, which eat your sweat and excrete the stinky compounds that we know as body odor. Anxious sweating can be a vicious cycle. Worrying about whether others can see sweat or smell body odor on you may make you feel even more anxious.
For most of us, the fight or flight response that occurs when we're anxious goes away fairly quickly. We calm down as we warm up to the stressful situation, or at the very least, we feel better once it's over and we can better control this anxiety through repeated exposure to it. The more practice we get, the less scary it seems. But some people have an extreme reaction to anxiety, including excessive, under armed sweating that can last for hours.
A stronger antiperspirant can help deal with the sweat, but sometimes an anxiety disorder is at the root of the problem. If sweaty symptoms never seem to ease, don't worry. A doctor can help fund a therapy that works for you. Today's episode was written by Shannah Freeman and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other bodily topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.