It's one of those questions that a lot of you have asked: Why do I shiver when I pee? If you haven't experienced this, you're probably wondering if it's even a real thing, or if it's just some big practical joke online. I don't blame you, because urinating and shivering don't seem that closely related. Well, it turns out that shivering after you pee is something a lot of people seem to experience, and it seems to affect males more than females.But nobody really know why it happens. There actually hasn't been any peer-reviewed research on it. 

Now, we're not the first ones on the internet to try to answer this question. If you look around, you'll find plenty of articles giving a few possible explanations. Here's the thing though: lost of those articles are wrong. They seem to be getting their information from a letter-response article written in 1994, which itself was based on a discussion about pee shivers a bunch of people were having in a forum -not exactly a legitimate scientific source. 

So, you might've heard people say that these shivers happen because your body temperature sudden;t lowers after you lose all that warm urine. But that idea just comes from the discussion forum, and it doesn't really make sense anyways -you don't shiver when you vomit, even though that's also a case where you're losing a lot of warm fluid. 

Even the supposedly-official scientific name for the phenomenon, post-micturition convulsion syndrome, was made up someone in that forum. So, remember to check those sources before you believe thing online. 

When journalists have asked excretory system experts about this, they kind of have an explanation: the shivers might have to do with an interaction between to different parts of your nervous system. When you choose to start urinating, you body also lowers your blood pressure. That's the parasympathetic nervous system at work -the part responsible for involuntary processes that are more about resting, like digestion and lowering you heart rate. But peeing also triggers the sympathetic nervous system, which is involved in other involuntary processes like in fight-or-flight response. It's possible that you get the pee shivers when there's an especially string interaction between these to reponses. 

And that would explain why this seems to affect males more than females -when you stand up to pee, your blood pressure will be slightly lower than if you're sitting, which could lead to a stronger interaction between the two part of the nervous system.

But again, there's no research on this so it's hard to know for sure. So, get on this scientists! The world wants to know! 

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