I used to think that poor ventilation caused stuffiness, but I feel like it’s definitely temperature related… Maybe event mental? If I sit in my car in the summer with the windows up, I almost immediately feel like I’m suffocating. However, I do the same exact thing in the winter, and I’m fine.
In: Chemistry
Generally air feels hard to breathe due to humidity and heat, at least in my experience. Going outside in the summer in Mississippi was much worse of an experience than going outside in the summer in Nevada. I suspect that in a car, in that relatively closed area, your sweat evaporating makes the air more humid than just the outside if you’re in a dry climate.
The point about ventilation is also part of the equation, as moving air around generally helps cooler and/or less humid air get to you; your body’s cooling mechanism (sweat) relies on the heat in the air evaporating the sweat on your skin, which takes with it some of the heat from your body (hence why swimming on a hot day feels good, the water works the same way), but if you’re in a closed space with no air circulation, a pocket of air sticks around you that has already absorbed some of your sweat and can’t do more to cool you off. If you ever go to a very hot swampy marshland, even moving air hardly helps because it’s already at peak humidity in the area, and it’s almost impossible to get any moisture off of your skin to help cool down.
(also humidity and heat tend to go hand and hand, because the air can’t hold as much humidity in the cold.)
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