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Sighing noisily is important to our health
Stress at work or worries at home: Often it's stressful situations that make us sigh. Usually, such a sigh has a liberating or facilitating effect. But there are even more reasons for it?
Sigh because of grief and problems
Too much work, family worries, anger in the relationship: In most cases it's grief and problems that cause us to sigh loudly over and over again. The lungs are sucked full of air, which is then exhaled quickly and noisy. Scientists have also been researching why we do this for some time now. Some say it might have something to do with people sighing trying to show people unconsciously that they need help. But it could also just free from internal tension. American researchers have now identified a biological reason for the sigh.
Often it is worry or grief that makes us sigh loudly every now and then. Sighing also has biological causes. It is even vital. (Image: pressmaster / fotolia.com) Of great importance for our lung function
As the scientists from the University of California (UCLA) and Stanford University in the journal "Nature" report, the involuntary sighing for our lung function is enormously important. Due to the deep breathing namely previously collapsed alveoli bubbles up again. This is vital, because "when they collapse, they disrupt the ability of the lungs to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide," said Jack Feldman, a neuroscientist at UCLA, in a statement from his college. Sighing, which brings twice as much air volume into the lungs as a normal breath, is the only way to inflate it again. "If you do not sigh, your lungs can not breathe over time," Feldman said. "One of the key goals in neuroscience is finding out how the brain controls behavior. Our findings give us insights into the mechanisms that could underlie much more complex behaviors, "the researcher explained.
Respiratory center controls the type of breath
The biochemist Mark Krasnow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute also highlighted the importance of her work in the communication. "Unlike a pacemaker that only controls how fast we breathe, the respiratory center in the brain also controls what type of breath we take," Krasnow says. Be it regular pains, sighing or even yawning, sniffing or coughing. Normal breathing becomes so deep. According to the information, this system also works in mice.
Not everyone sighs right away
Interesting is also an older investigation, which gives an idea why we sigh with grief or also out of relief. Psychologists around Disa A. Sauter from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands compared the sounds that, for example, emit British with anger, anger, grief, but also joy or amusement with those of a natural people in Namibia. As they reported in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" (PNAS) showed that the subjects of both ethnic groups, even without words in this matter understood well, but there were uncertainties in sighing. The people from the indigenous people, therefore, were especially hard to identify the sigh that British subjects gave as a sign of relief. The scientists assume that positive experiences in the evolutionary history were usually shared only with members of the own group and therefore better understood within this group.
Sighing helps babies develop a regular breathing rhythm
For babies, sighing helps develop a regular breathing rhythm. That's what an international team of researchers around David Baldwin from the University Hospital in Bern found out. They reported on their findings in the journal "Journal of Applied Physiology". The unusually deep breaths serve as a kind of reset switch to the breath control center in the brain, breaking the rhythm when the breaths become too slow and uniform. In this way, a stable respiratory rhythm is created in the long term, but it is variable enough to respond to changes in oxygen demand in the short term. (Ad)