You may think you're in control of your bodily functions, but it's a fool's errand to think you can take hold of the reins of the runaway carriage that is your body. Whether you're awake or asleep, there are things your body is always doing, and some of those bodily functions you can't control are very creepy if not out-and-out disgusting. The human body is a pulsating, gurgling mass of life that's constantly degenerating and regenerating itself, which means that at any point of the day you're carrying around a wheelbarrow full of decay in your body. And there's nothing you can do about it.
The ways you can't control your body don't just apply to all the disgusting things going on inside your stomach - the never-ending saga of chaos also applies to your brain. You may think that you can boss your noggin around, but with the number of random neurons firing off in that big grey mass you call your think box, there's no way to know what it's going to do next. After reading about the things going on in your body you can't control, you should worship at the temple of your strange body, reveling in the fact that it is a complicated system that's constantly teetering on the brink of destruction. The only other way to handle this information is running into the night screaming and trying to rip off your flesh - something you may actually want to do after reading a few of these pieces of information.Â
It doesn't matter if you work in a bank, if you're the CEO of a rising startup, or if you work on a farm, your first (and main) job in this world is as a giant brewing mechanism for urine. Your entire body is built to filter liquids through your kidneys, nephrons, and glomerulus - and differentiate the bits of liquid that can be filtered into your bloodstream from the ones that are toxins.
The latter, through this process, get to fill your bladder with urine.
Sebum, an oily secretion of the sebaceous glands, is basically the oil that's coming out of all of your pores all of the time on a daily basis. No matter what you're doing, you're always covered in a thin layer of sebum that's keeping your skin moist and shiny. If you've got too much sebum, you might get some errant acne, but if you've got just the right amount, you're probably a beautiful human that everyone despises (it's the truth). There's really nothing you can do about your greasy skin.
You can cut back on particularly oily foods, but the thing you would actually have to do to change the amount of oil in your skin is to hop in a time machine and convince your less oily parent to marry someone else with a small amount of sebum covering their skin. If your body weren't consistently pumping out skin oil, there's a good chance that all your skin would flake up and break off.
You Don't Need To Be Ashamed Of Those Intrusive Thoughts
Have you ever thought about a cat stabbing your grandmother with a lemon? That's because your brain is a freak, but it has nothing to do with you. When you see a pool of blood in a butcher's shop, and you think about licking it up, that doesn't mean that you have a blood fetish. It simply means that your brain is workshopping the most inappropriate thing that can happen, kind of like a background program that's turning your imagination into a snuff film that you're not meant to see.
The more you focus on intrusive thinking and try not to have these thoughts, the more likely it is they'll become commonplace. So the next time you think about kicking your mom down the stairs while she's rollerskating, just revel in the fact that you probably won't actually do it, and you don't even have to be embarrassed for thinking it.
Your Mouth Is Literally Brimming With Saliva At All Times
When was the last time you were sitting around and thinking about how much spit was collecting in your mouth? If it wasn't earlier today, then you're definitely thinking about your mop bucket of a mouth now. Throughout the day, your salivary glands make around two to four pints of saliva a day.
This usually occurs in the afternoon (it's when you're at your most salivatory), and there's nothing you can do to stop yourself from getting all spitty.
Try as you might, you'll never be able to stop swallowing gobs of mucus all the live-long day. It's a truly disgusting trick that our bodies play on us. Throughout a period of 24 hours, our bodies produce 1.5 liters of snot. To put this into perspective, think of the bottles of Smartwater that cost about $2.50 in a convenience store.
That's how much mucus your body makes in a single day. Without having to think about it, we produce mucus in our mouths, throats, and nasal passages to act as a net or barrier for unwanted particles in our body.
You know when you're lying in bed at night, trying to quell the voices that are screaming in your head so you can get some sleep, and just before you doze off into dreamland, your leg kicks out with an agenda of its own? That's what's known as the hypnagogic jerk. Some doctors believe that increased use of caffeine can cause the jerk, while others maintain it's an archaic evolutionary reflex left over from when our kind used to sleep in trees.
But other than those basically wild guesses at the cause of a very strange involuntary spasm, most of the other information is simply one big shrug.
