why is breathing harder when you’re full?

Question

Basically the title, why when you’re digesting a big meal do you have to focus on breathing?

In: 19

Answer 1

Your diaphragm is a flat muscle that sits horizontally under your lungs and above your stomach and intestines. To breathe, your diaphragm moves downwards (towards your feet), which creates a vacuum. It’s like pulling up the piston in a syringe, which sucks air into it.

So for your question, when your stomach is full of food, that’s taking up a bunch of space right below your diaphragm, right in the space it usually drops down into to pull air into your lungs. So now it has to work harder and smoosh that down and out of the way as it drops, which takes more effort than usual.