Strange Defense Tactics
Sneezing 10 times in a row or feeling hot and cold when you're sick might be annoying, but it's just how your immune system works to protect you. Most of the time, you'll feel miserable, and it's those unpleasant reactions that actually help heal you. From deliberately raising your temperature to trapping unwanted microbes in sticky mucus (gross, right?), your body's natural defenses rely on an assortment of surprisingly bizarre tactics.
1. It Deliberately Gives You a Fever
When you're feeling unwell, your body doesn't heat up because you're sick. In fact, your immune system actually tells the brain to raise the temperature, creating conditions that may hinder certain pathogens while helping the protective response work more effectively.
2. It Makes You Shiver to Heat You Up
Those chills you get when you're ill? When the brain raises the temperature during a fever, muscle contractions such as shivering help generate more heat until you reach that newly set target. That's why you can feel like you're freezing even under three blankets—it means your temperature is heading upward.
3. It Makes Your Nose Run
A constantly runny nose can be irritating, but all that fluid has a defensive purpose: mucus helps trap particles and microorganisms before they can get farther into vulnerable tissues. You'll use up plenty of tissues, but it's a good sign your respiratory tract is actively trying to clear itself.
4. It Forces You to Sneeze
Similar to runny noses, sneezing is essentially a clearing mechanism that's triggered when something irritates sensitive tissues in your nose. That loud ah-choo helps remove particles from the upper airways—you don't want them to stay there, after all. Unfortunately, this protective reflex can also be pretty annoying during allergies.
5. It Makes You Cough
Coughing, too, helps clear mucus, irritants, and foreign material from your respiratory tract, making it one of the body's essential defenses. It's not just your immune system that triggers it, though; you'll cough excessively as well when trying to expel food that's gone down the wrong pipe.
6. It Makes Your Tissues Swell
Swelling around an injured or infected area might look scary, but that's just because inflammation changes local blood vessels and helps immune cells and defensive molecules reach tissues where they're needed. The redness, tenderness, and puffiness you feel are completely normal.
7. It Can Make You Lose Your Appetite
Everything can taste kinda icky when you're sick, but suddenly having no appetite isn't always because of that. In reality, immune signaling molecules can influence your reduced appetite and general malaise associated with many infections. But good news: it means your defenses are highly active.
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8. It Makes You Want to Do Absolutely Nothing
An infection can make you feel exhausted. That's because your immune signals affect the nervous system and contribute to fatigue, making you suddenly want to cancel everything. Your lack of motivation isn't always just because you don't feel 100%.
9. It Makes Your Whole Body Ache
Besides swelling, you may also experience aching muscles that accompany illnesses such as influenza. The reason is due to the chemical signals released as part of your immune response, which, as we've mentioned, can affect tissues far beyond the original site of infection.
10. It Makes Your Eyes Water
Tears aren't only reserved for crying. Increased tearing can also help rinse irritants, particularly when your inflammatory or allergic defenses are activated. Think of it as your eyeballs having runny noses themselves.
11. It Uses Sticky Mucus as a Trap
Gross as it sounds, mucus is remarkably useful. For one, it helps form a protective barrier to trap bacteria and debris while simultaneously limiting their access to sensitive tissues. Rather than allowing every harmful microorganism to touch vulnerable cells, your defenses use this sticky obstacle first.
12. It Can Make You Itchy
Being constantly itchy can be pretty annoying, but the instinctive reaction actually serves a purpose. Immune mediators such as histamine can activate sensory nerves, and scratching may help rid harmful substances from the skin. Of course, the strategy isn't perfect; prolonged scratching can damage the skin and worsen inflammation.
13. It Sacrifices Infected Cells
When certain cells are infected, your immune system can destroy them to limit the pathogen's ability to continue replicating. This might sound surprising, but from the body's perspective, eliminating compromised cells is preferable to giving an invading organism more chances to reproduce.
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14. It Remembers Enemies for Years
Your immune system is smart: it can recognize microorganisms you've encountered before, even if it was a long time ago. Because of this, it can react faster and more effectively if the same threat appears again. Immunological memory is also the principle vaccines use to prepare your defenses.
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15. It Builds Highly Specific Antibodies
More than just remembering past harmful microorganisms, your immune system can create antibodies to help them further. Without you even knowing, your body knows exactly when to execute specialized responses. Neat, right?
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16. It Deliberately Clogs Your Nose
Runny noses are one thing, but stuffy noses can affect your breathing. How can that be a good thing? But that blocked-up feeling also has a reason: during a cold, the blood vessels inside the nasal passages swell, which helps bring immune cells to the area. Congestion sucks, but at least it means your body is fighting back.
17. It Sometimes Flushes Your Digestive System
No one likes having diarrhea, of course, but this response helps remove undesirable material rapidly. You don't want harmful substances from that spoiled egg sandwich you ate at lunch to linger, after all. Severe or prolonged diarrhea isn't a good thing, though—you'll experience rapid fluid loss.
18. It Can Make You Throw Up
Like diarrhea, vomiting is so unpleasant that it's difficult to think of it as protection. But again: rapid expulsion can be useful sometimes. This is one of several ways your body attempts to remove something it considers dangerous.
19. It Creates Pus
Pus may look gross, but much of it actually consists of immune cells, cellular debris, and tissue fluid associated with the body's response to infection. After these cells die after doing their job, what remains accumulates into the thick fluid you recognize as pus.
20. It Knows When to Stop Fighting
An effective immune response isn't always about attacking harder. Once a threat has been controlled, your body also knows when to stop the fever, the sneezing, the coughing. Without this shutdown process, the defenses that protect you would only end up harming healthy tissue.
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