How to manage cold body and cold hands and feet
Sep 01, 2025
Source: Cainiu Health
Dr. Sun Lianqing
Introduction
Wear gloves and thick socks during daily outings, choose shoes with good insulation, and avoid direct contact between bare feet and cold floors. In winter, hand and foot warmers can be used for additional warmth; in air-conditioned or heated environments, avoid prolonged exposure of hands and feet to prevent cold from directly affecting the extremities. Generally, one can enhance warmth for hands and feet, adjust dietary habits, and persist with moderate exercise.
For the regulation of cold body and cold hands and feet, generally, you can improve by enhancing hand and foot warmth, adjusting diet structure, maintaining moderate exercise, trying warm therapy, and keeping a regular schedule. The detailed analysis is as follows:
1. Enhance hand and feet warmth: When going out daily, wear gloves, thick socks, and choose shoes with good insulation. Avoid walking barefoot on cold floors. In winter, warming handbags or foot warmers can be used as auxiliary warming tools. In air-conditioned or heated environments, avoid prolonged exposure of hands and feet to prevent direct cold invasion to the extremities.
2. Adjust diet structure: Eat more warming foods such as lamb, ginger, longan, red dates, and walnuts. Add warming spices such as pepper and black pepper during cooking. Reduce consumption of icy drinks, cold dishes, and cold fruits to avoid cold affecting the spleen and stomach and impairing qi and blood production. Warming the body through diet can help enhance yang energy and improve peripheral circulation.
3. Maintain moderate exercise: Choose gentle exercises such as brisk walking, jogging, yoga, or Baduanjin (Eight Pieces of Brocade), exercising 3-4 times per week for about 30 minutes each session. Exercise promotes overall blood circulation, increases blood flow to the hands and feet, helps generate warmth in the limbs, alleviates symptoms of cold hands and feet, and enhances physical fitness.
4. Try warm therapy: Soak feet in warm water (40-45°C) for 15-20 minutes each night, adding ginger or mugwort leaves to enhance the warming effect. After soaking, dry the feet promptly and keep them warm. Under professional guidance, apply warm compresses to acupoints such as Yongquan (KI1) and Zusanli (ST36). Warm stimulation can help unblock meridians and improve peripheral blood circulation.
5. Maintain a regular schedule: Avoid staying up late, go to bed at a fixed time every day, and ensure 7-8 hours of sleep. Nighttime is a critical period for yang energy conservation and blood and qi restoration. A regular schedule reduces yang energy consumption, promotes blood and qi generation, and prevents irregularities from worsening cold hands and feet and body chills.
Regulating cold body and cold hands and feet requires long-term persistence and should not rely on short-term methods. Daily attention should be paid to whole-body warmth preservation, avoiding excessive fatigue to prevent depletion of qi and blood, which may compromise the effectiveness of regulation.
