Sweating and Hyperhidrosis

To understand how to combat sweaty armpits and excessive sweating, we first need to understand what causes it and get to the root of the problem.

Sweating is a very normal part of our bodily functions. Armpit sweat and excessive perspiration will occur if you undertake strenuous physical activities. Naturally, you will sweat if you are exposed to hot weather and live in temperate climates. Perspiration is a very normal bodily response to external changes such as stress, heat, being nervous etc.

When we sweat we produce small amounts of sodium, urea, lactate, and various minerals. Of course it is our natural way of ridding the body of these things. Did you know that on average we have over five million sweat glands covering our bodies?

Our bodies will sweat due to the regulatory cause of needing to cool down. This normally happens when we exert ourselves physically or if the temperature begins to get warmer outside. Sweating is also one of the main mechanisms of excreting waste from our bodies. And this is of course why when we sweat it’s not just water that we are excreting. More often than not you will find minerals and salt being predominant in your sweat.

These are all very natural occurrences in our bodies but the problem starts when we start to sweat excessively or an unnatural amount.

Excessive sweating and acute perspiration is widely accepted as a medical condition and if you have this condition, like I discovered, you’re certainly not alone - over 1% of the global population experiences hyperhydrosis - that’s a lot of people. It’s not terribly unnatural either, as once you understand it, it’s just a higher rate of a normal bodily function, which means you’re body is actually doing it’s job.

So if it is a problem, how can we control excessive perspiration? Well we need to know what part of the body controls sweating to start to cure sweaty armpits or any other sweating problem we may suffer from.  Hyperhydrosis is a function of the central nervous system, controlled by the brain -  bear with me folks for getting technical, but the part of our brains that control our sweat glands is called the hypothalamus. Our hypothalamus and the various nerves in our skin are responsible for our anderarm sweat and general perspiration. Now the main concern we face here is that like a lot of our automated responses to environmental and nervous changes, as humans, we actually have no mental control over how much we sweat. Our inbuilt hyperhydrosis system completely relies on our sympathetic nervous system - which makes decisions entirely for itself.

Do understand how we sweat is akin to understanding our stress, blood pressure and nervous levels. In regards to heart rate,  our brains will indicate the speed at which our hearts will beat - And in the exact same way, the nervous system is what tell us  whether or not we should start sweating.

Medical professionals widely cite armpit sweating, head sweating and general excessive sweating (or hyperhidrosis) as a hereditary condition. Basically it’s the same as hereditary obesity and many other medical conditions. Thankfully this can be treated easily.