A New Study Says That Sighing More Could Help You Live Longer
You're not whining, you're extending your life.
If you're constantly sighing at the ridiculousness of the work around you, you might live longer.
Scientists have found a region in the brain that turns regular breaths into sighs. The results of the study were found in Nature.
Sighing is what helps to keep your lungs inflated and you do it about 12 times an hour -- more often if you're stressed or anxious.
Researchers looked through about 19,000 gene expression patterns in the active brains of mice in order to find where the sigh reflex is in the brain. They found that is was fairly small and was just a bundle of about 200 cells in the brain cell.
“It starts out as a normal breath, but before you exhale, you take a second breath on top of it,” said study co-author Jack Fieldman.
“If you don’t sigh every five minutes of so, the alveoli (the sacs in the lungs that allow oxygen and carbon dioxide to move between the lungs and the bloodstream) will slowly collapse, causing lung failure,” Feldman said. “That’s why patients in early iron lungs had such problems, because they never sighed.” Iron lungs didn't help to give patients deep, lung-filling breaths.
This research may help people who have diseases that limit their breathing.
“These molecular pathways are critical regulators of sighing, and define the core of a sigh-control circuit,” said co-author Mark Krasnow. “It may now be possible to find drugs that target these pathways to control sighing.”