That Sick Feeling Might Actually Be an Emotion

That Sick Feeling Might Actually Be an Emotion
You might feel terrible when you are ill, but that emotion could be just what you need. Prostock-studio/Shutterstock
Updated:

That weary feeling that sets in with an illness is an emotion that helps you fight off infection, researchers say.

Slack facial muscles and drooping eyelids appear early. Exhaustion, loss of appetite, and increased sensitivity to cold and pain come on. Those signs are among a long list of features that researchers have linked to the emotion of being sick, which the authors label lassitude, a now little-used term for weariness from 16th-century Latin.
Related Topics