My wife learned to do this because she was bored in class as a kid.
Can I? Not very well. Can people do it? Yes they can!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tummo
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-changes-temperatures/
My comment here isnt directly related to op but another body control skill besides temp that I can do that I never hear about that I learned when I was bored in class too was to control my hair standing up.
I can also control my hunger/thirst with visualization.
I can control my minds action-reward loop.
I’m kind of just cracked on mind/body control in general lol
I dont have the link anymore but I read something about how our bodies have vagal neurons that allow us to sense inflammation and modulate immune activity as a result so I think we can even manually control immune response.
I play music in my head when I’m bored, I can change it at will to different songs or make up entirely new songs. Boredom can be a powerful thing lol
I genuinely think we waste our conscious time on all the wrong things and that we have the power within ourselves to do things we couldn’t dream of simply because we’re so preoccupied with what our social minds dictate.
I say that as a rationalist and hard core scientifically minded observer.
Harder for me to raise it than lower it, but I do a version of this every night before bed. “None of these thoughts can’t be picked up tomorrow, everything is made better by getting sleep right now, so no further thoughts allowed.” Can usually drop it to near sleep bpm.
If I make myself angry I guess, but I have enough mental health issues as is.
This may be a source of unrealistic optimism when it comes to having better control over my own mental health symptoms but I’ll take it.
Next Dwight Schrute can also teach you to raise and lower your cholesterol levels.
Yes! I can also manually change my heart rate, release cramping muscles, and feel a number of my internal organs through muscle contractions.
This isn’t really a point of brag, I’m just neurodivergent with serious body dismorphia so I had to do a lot to become comfortable in this meat suit.
I think the secret to that revolves around being a little neurospicy. Not that I want anyone to have to be in the hospital hooked to a heart monitor but If you ever are play with it but don’t make it alarm too much. It turns out I could lower my heart rate below what the machine considered acceptable.
It’s a nice little party trick too. When iphones could first detect heart rates, some of my friends were talking about it, so I said that I could slow my heart rate down. None of them believed me, so I got them to measure it. Once it was done I asked them if they wanted it to be faster or slower. They still didn’t believe me, so I did both.
It’s one of those silly little things that isn’t really useful, but can shut your friends up for a bit :p
Oh it’s definitely gotta be because of that. My current record for heart rate is 46bpm before I start to feel faint!
The closest I get is the “release” or “drop” or similarly hard to describe thing that I could do when trapped on a hot bus on hot days that allowed me to handle the heat, but it only worked every so often.
I imagine I was triggering a change in blood pressure through conscious vascular relaxation or similar. Or maybe I was just fooling myself. But it gave a few moments of reprieve from the oppressive heat and allowed a reset before I started boiling again. (Getting off the bus would have meant being out, walking, in cooler air, but under the hot sun for even longer.)
We don’t get hot weather a lot in the UK (even if it is increasing in frequency) and even more rarely have I found myself on a bus during the brunt of it, so it’s not exactly something I have much need or opportunity to practise.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s some kind of control over the “blood runs cold” fear response. That would fit with my psychology, tbh.
Is your wife Dennis?
Yes. Which astonishes my wife again and again when she has cold feet in bed. I then have to ramp up my leg temperature again - I ramp extremities temperatures down for the night.
not only that, but I can control the speed at which my heart beats and can induce adrenalin at will.
I don’t do it anymore though due to heart health from my age.
I can cool right down by being still, when it’s hot.
Can’t do the inverse though, when it’s cold I’m just cold.
Never got the shivs?
Shivering does nothing, rubbing my hands together just makes my arms tired. When it’s not cold just cool, I can exercise (like go run up and down the stairs) and build internal heat. But not when it’s really cold.
When I was pregnant I couldn’t get cold, it was nice, I think that must be how a lot of people feel - I had a heater inside me. I wasn’t really too hot in the summer even pregnant, could still be still and cool, but not too cold in the winter at all.
Yes, I thought it’s genetically because my father told me this life hack (good for getting fever in examination situations, you didn’t study for), Realized later it has maybe something to do with height. Everyone over 184cm (idk how much this is in american cheeseburgers) should be able to do this trick. Source: trust me bro. I forget where my knowledge came from.
No, not directly.
Thats not a thing … probably
Edit~ glad I added probably
Actually, it is! You can generate heat by physical activity or intense thinking, and you can lower it by sleeping but also through calming yourself and breath control. There’ve been studies about monks who have learned to do this, but anyone can do it through enough practice (or you could just work out or sleep, those are the easy ways).
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-changes-temperatures/
The mind can control the body to a disturbing degree with practice, to the point where you have to give cred to cooks who claim all sorts of outlandish shit- of course the people who make the big claims are rarely the same who are capable of performing them but there is for sure something more to be said of the power our consciousnesses than we normally accept.
It only stands to reason (pun accidental) that something as powerful as our conscious minds would hide secrets a more materialistic interpretation of biology does not account for.
For the longest time we thought experiences couldn’t influence our genes, but with advances in genetics that turned out to be false- and at least to me it makes sense, something as intricate and complex as conscience surely has more purpose to our organism than “nice to be able to enjoy life”.
Bio-regulation is a thing but not like what OP is hinting at.
Bro, scientifically validated and reproduced experiments tell otherwise. You and I both are uncomfortable with it, but sadly, the “power of the mind” actually has some serious fucking clout regulating basic biological functions.
At the lowest levels we have placebo, which is so well vetted we have to account for it in every medical situation because it’s so prevalent and has such a significant effect on our biology, and it only gets crazier from there, really.
I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t witnessed her do it yesterday and felt her body temperature change. I didn’t know people were capable of that.
There’s also a key difference between topological temp changes and core temp changes, the tummo Buddhist monk studies are looking mostly at topological changes as a result of core temp changes which look more like metabolic rate changes, one of the key variables they pay attention to is lack of shivering to induce the temp change.
I dont have the link anymore but I read something about how our bodies have vagal neurons that allow us to sense inflammation and modulate immune activity as a result so I think we can even manually control immune response.
People are capable of a lot of manual control over their body but its mostly a result of awareness of the mechanisms and practicing the skill, I think the reason for most people not doing these things but various animals do is because they basically spend all their time being attentive to their body without much reason to distract themselves like us humans.
Beautifully said!
