Good news for hopeless romantics and the perpetually dismayed: All that sighing is good for you. In fact, you’d die without it. Scientists have now pinpointed the region in the brain that transforms normal breathing into a life-giving sigh. They published their findings this week in the journal Nature.
Let’s start with the mechanics. Physiologically speaking, sighing is a way of keeping your lungs inflated. “A sigh is a deep breath, but not a voluntary deep breath,” study co-author Jack Feldman said in a press release. “It starts out as a normal breath, but before you exhale, you take a second breath on top of it.” Whether you realize it or not, you do this about 12 times an hour, and even more than that when you’re stressed or anxious.
And it’s a good thing you do. “If you don’t sigh every five minutes of so, the alveoli will slowly collapse, causing lung failure,” Feldman said. “That’s why patients in early iron lungs had such problems, because they never sighed.” The machines had not been programmed to give patients regular deep, lung-filling breaths.
via Mental Floss
Image: Stanford/Krasnow Lab
