Love spicy food? Hate it? Watch a hot wing’s trip through your body.

My mouth is burning!

No, it’s not — but your body thinks it is.

You’ll start to salivate, although you may not notice, because what’s a little drool when your lips and tongue feel like they’re on fire?

Soon those parts may become mercifully numb, as receptors there become temporarily exhausted and stop sounding the alarm. But your eyes, nose and entire digestive tract have those same receptors, and the capsaicin is headed their way.

Nerves dispatch the fire department

The extra saliva, plus a whole cascade of other reactions, is sparked by a “primordial, lifesaving reflex” in the trigeminal nerve, a large paired nerve in our head, said Federica Genovese, a research associate at the Monell Chemical Senses Center who specializes in the perception of irritants in the nose.

That nerve carries information about touch, pain and temperature to the brain, and it also relays information from the brain to skin, sinuses and mucous membranes.

When something comes in too hot, the nerve can bypass the brain and, on its own, set off a chain of events throughout the body.

In other words, these nerves don’t just transmit the 911 call. They also send the fire department to try to douse the (nonexistent) fire.

The water works really get going

In addition to the extra saliva, your eyes will water, your nose will run and you might sneeze. Some people become nauseated, and vomiting can be triggered by the brain early in the process or later after the gut gets involved.

Your brain tries to kill the pain

As the trigeminal nerves try to wash away the capsaicin, the brain tries to make you feel better.

It may release a shot of painkilling hormones called endorphins, perhaps followed by a chaser of dopamine, a mood-lifting chemical. The reaction varies from person to person and isn’t well understood.

Some people swear they feel euphoria, including the man who breeds the world’s hottest peppers.

“Smokin’” Ed Currie, founder of the PuckerButt Pepper Company in Fort Mill, S.C., says that a taste of something way up on the heat-measuring Scoville scale makes his limbs tingle and makes him feel “floaty,” like a hit of marijuana or the low-key euphoria of a runner’s high.

“When you eat the super hot stuff, it just gets you high,” he said. “It is craziness, the way you feel.”

Several neuroscientists said endorphins may dull the pain of fiery food, and dopamine may light up the brain’s reward centers to some extent and make a person feel better. But evidence for a true pepper-eater’s high is, for now, anecdotal.

The AC comes on

Because your body is under the impression that there’s a heat problem, the local cooling system kicks in, thanks to the trigeminal nerve’s all-hands-on-deck call.

Your face flushes because blood vessels dilate as blood is pumped toward the surface of your skin to release heat. The inside of your mouth turns red as well.

Your head and face begin to sweat.

Soon, the rest of you may start to sweat, also, as your core temperature rises. Even your finger tips get warmer.

“Even though the stimulus is chemical, you have the same heating sensation,” Genovese said, “and so you’re still trying to bring down the temperature by sweating.”

Down the hatch! (Cough.)

Have you ever bitten into a spicy pepper and started coughing?

All kinds of sputtering can happen, including hiccuping, wheezing and hoarseness, when airborne capsaicin molecules irritate major nerves in the head and spine that control the respiratory system.

The reaction is so easy to produce, yet so safe, that small doses of capsaicin are used to induce coughing in tests for lung disease. A much larger concentration is the incapacitating ingredient in pepper spray.

For all the burning, eating spicy food is usually harmless for people who have no unusual sensitivity to capsaicin. But according to Poison Control, extreme amounts can cause serious problems, including heart arrhythmias, breathlessness and acid reflux from the stomach that could be inhaled into the lungs.

Your heart speeds up

Capsaicin and the heart are a complicated pair, said associate professor Peter Bencsik of the University of Szeged in Hungary, who studies the role of capsaicin-sensitive nerves in cardiovascular physiology.

The adrenaline-fueled stress response that comes with a too-spicy mouthful raises your blood pressure and makes your heart beat faster. Contestants in pepper-eating contests have reported blurred vision and auditory hallucinations that may be caused by blood pounding around their eyes and ears.

But a diet rich in hot peppers appears to protect the cardiovascular system, Bencsik said, and one reason may be capsaicin’s interaction with the microbiome, the trillions of organisms living in our gut. Large studies in China and Italy found that those who eat a diet rich in hot peppers tend to live longer, healthier lives and have fewer heart-related deaths than people who prefer things bland.

Exactly why is a mystery.

Your gut feels it

“The gut has a tactile sense — it’s like fingertips,” said Arthur Beyder, gastroenterologist and associate professor of medicine and physiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “And so all of these touch receptors that are present in the skin are present in the gut.”

Gut touch receptors typically don’t fire a lot of pain signals in response to capsaicin unless you have a condition that makes your gut hypersensitive. And you can build up a tolerance to spicy food by eating it often enough that the body expresses fewer receptors, so you’ll feel less burn the next time.

But even if you’re used to extreme heat, you’ll still have repercussions if you eat something off-the-charts hot. Currie said he had cramps for four hours after ingesting a scorching Pepper X, the world’s hottest pepper.

The receptors in the gut typically take inventory of what is there, and they help adjust the speed at which things move along. The moving along is what some people notice.

“You can have any part of the gut that encounters something negative,” Beyder said, and the body rushes it to the nearest exit as vomiting or diarrhea.

One last sting

“Diarrhea is often considered to be a sort of primitive defense mechanism, by which you’re just trying to wash out whatever nasty is there,” said Kim Barrett, a professor of physiology and membrane biology at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, who studies the way things move through the gut. Nerves activated by capsaicin prompt cells in the lining to leak and secrete extra fluid. When it’s too much to reabsorb, it comes barreling toward the door.

The rectum and anus have a high concentration of nerve fibers that help them sense what is on the way out — liquid? solid? gas? — and “keep stuff in until it’s socially convenient,” Barrett said.

Receptors in those nerve endings also register capsaicin as hot, which is why so many people feel yet another burn when the hot wing, at last, leaves the building.