What causes hot ears?

Nowadays, many people often find that the base of their ears are hot. This may be caused by several reasons, such as frequent excessive exercise or the large temperature difference between indoor and outdoor in winter. Another situation is that when you are too emotional, your ears will naturally turn red.

There are three situations when the ears are hot:

1. After strenuous exercise, your ears often feel hot. This is because when people exercise, their heart beats faster and supplies more blood to the muscles in their limbs. After physical exercise, the muscles need less blood, but the heart beat cannot slow down immediately, so more blood flows to the heart. The skin of the head and ears is very thin and filled with abundant blood vessels. When a large amount of blood flows through the ears, the blood vessels expand and become thicker, and the ears turn red. Because blood has a certain temperature, your ears will feel hot. As the heart gradually returns to normal, the blood vessels shrink and become thinner, the amount of blood on the ears decreases, and the ears no longer become hot.

2. In winter, when we return from the cold outdoors to the warm indoors, our ears become red and hot. This is because the blood vessels in the ear that contract when the temperature is low outdoors expand due to the rise in temperature indoors, and the blood flow speeds up, causing the ear to heat up.

3. Your ears may also feel hot when you are shy, when you are arguing with others, or when you encounter difficult questions in an exam, etc. This is because the cerebral cortex is highly excited or tense, which controls the nerves to cause the skin blood vessels to dilate, the heart rate to accelerate, and the blood flow to increase.