We wouldn’t blame you for being skeptical. Can The Personal Climate Control Wristband actually make a difference to your personal comfort? The naturally wary among you may catch a whiff of snake oil. But numerous studies confirm what athletes have long known: cooling the inside of your wrist is an effective way to cool down fast.

In clinical trials, users of The Personal Climate Control Wristband got to sleep 28% faster, experienced 28% fewer hot flashes, and felt a 5°F perceived difference in temperature. What exactly is happening here?

Pulse point of view

Whether you feel hot or cold comes down to both what your temperature is objectively, and how you perceive it subjectively. The Personal Climate Control Wristband works on both.

You know how there are certain points on your body where it’s easier to feel your pulse? Those pulse points, such as the inside of your wrist, have major blood vessels running very close to the skin. So when those points are cooled, they circulate that cooler blood to the rest of the body.

That, in turn, lowers your core temperature. “Significant differences were found in the cooling of rectal temperature” for athletes who wore wrist-cooling bands during recovery, according to a 2018 study. You can’t get much more “core” than your rectal temperature.

Don’t believe the hypothalamus

The benefits you feel can be even stronger. The part of your brain that regulates temperature, the hypothalamus, is especially sensitive to temperature signals from pulse points like the wrist.

If the hypothalamus thinks you’re too hot, or too cold, it triggers physical stress responses. But if you can trick your hypothalamus by sending different signals, it stays calm, and so do you. It’s the same as how you can cool off by soaking your feet, or feel warmer when holding a hot drink. This “thermal perception” can make the difference between comfortable and miserable.

Those combined effects - the physical and the perceptual - are behind the wisdom in the old advice to run your wrists under cold water to cool down. Unfortunately, you can only spend so much of your life standing over a sink. For the rest of the time, there’s The Personal Climate Control Wristband.