Why Do We Sigh?

Why do we sigh? This act sometimes has something romantic, as if in that exhalation we let go of our sadness, the regret of longing or the longing to be in love. Sighing is for many another language of love and is often even poetically defined as the complaint of the soul. However … is there any reality in all this?
The truth is that very little. Despite this, there is one aspect that we must be very clear about: sighing is a decisive physiological process. Doing so is decisive for lung health, and also for the emotional aspect. What’s more, the brain needs it to the point that many neurologists define this mechanism as the “mental reset” button.
Let’s learn more about it below.

Take a moment to answer these questions: How many times a day do you sigh? Are you one of those who sighs every two by three? Beyond looking like the classic questions that every child would ask, it should be noted that something as everyday as sighing is key to the integral health of many living beings.
Because not only people do it, if we look closely at our pets, we will see how our dogs or cats do it too. Is it that they too fall in love, are they sad or frustrated? We do not know, but what we do know is that this mechanism is very important to preserve lung health.
Furthermore, if we do not carry out these periodic inhalations throughout the day, we will die.

The sighs, a vital reflection

Sigh to live. It seems like a phrase taken from a commercial, but it is not. Now we understand this mechanism much more, to the point that a work published in the journal Nature defines it as a vital reflection. It has been discovered that we have two small groups of nerve cells in the brain stem that orchestrate this process.

• The main task of this set of cells is to automatically take care of breathing, sleep and heart rate. Now we know that it also activates the sigh mechanism.
• And for what purpose? If we ask ourselves why we sigh, the answer is simple: to prevent the alveoli from collapsing. There are times when these small sacs that form the lungs and that control the exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide get stuck.
• What the sigh does is inflate the collapsed alveoli with more air than normal so that they can reactivate their function.
• If we didn’t, we would start to suffer from lung failure.
• The author of this research, Dr. Jack Feldman, professor of neurobiology at the University of Los Angeles School of Medicine, tells us something just as interesting. The brain activates different types of breaths thanks to neuropeptides, which mediate normal breaths, yawning, coughing, laughing, crying …

Sighs are also regulated by just over 200 neurons. A very small group of nerve cells capable of fulfilling a vital mission for our survival.

When you’re stressed you sigh more

Sighs seemed to us until not long ago simple long and deep breaths associated with sadness, emotional discomfort. Well, now we know that its role is to fill the alveoli with air. However … is that your only function? The truth is that they fulfill more tasks for us.

• Sighs increase in frequency when we suffer from stress and even certain psychiatric conditions : bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, psychosis … Any state in which our emotional state is of great intensity, sighs will appear. They do it to release tension, to let go of the anxiety that the mind and body are subjected to.

• On the other hand, studies such as those carried out at the University of Leuven, in Belgium, show us something else. To the question of why we sigh we must add another answer: to restore balance in the brain. It’s like resetting the mind, like bringing oxygen inside to hide negativity.

This explains why we can’t help but breathe long sighs when we are gripped by frustration, disappointment, sadness, nostalgia, and even boredom. A sigh not only stretches the pulmonary alveoli, filling them with air; By doing so, a feeling of mental relief is also generated, we oxygenate ourselves, we obtain calm and our entire organism recovers its precious homeostasis.

We are, therefore, before a mechanism that the brain activates automatically without our realizing it. However, we also have the ability to execute them, to benefit from that extra air intake that renews and reactivates us from the inside. In fact, something as simple as practicing deep breathing combined with long exhales generates the same calming and relaxing effect.

Remember: you have to sigh more to live better.