I mean, isn’t oxygen good fit your body?
In: Biology
TLDR; “Your body needs the right mix of air to work. Breathing into a bag helps keep the right mix”
Hyperventilation (rapid breathing or deep breathing, often caused by psychological stress) causes an imbalance of oxygen and CO2 (too little CO2) which leads to constriction of blood vessels, most importantly, to/from the brain. Should your blood vessels constrict too drastically for your brain’s oxygen requirements (i.e. strenuous activity while hyperventilating) you could pass out due to lack of oxygen to the brain. This is why doctors advise against taking a bunch of deep breaths before swimming distances underwater (military doctors). Breathing into a bag allows more CO2 into the lungs, helping maintain the O2-CO2 balance in the bloodstream, thus keeping blood vessels open and you conscious.
Breathing in your Co2 helps reduce oxygen you breathe in and reducers pressure while having a calming effect.
Oxygen is good for your body (to a certain extent), but that’s not what you worry about with hyperventilation. When you exhale, you blow off carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is one of the main players in your blood chemistry. If you hyperventilate, you exhale more and more carbon dioxide. You can end up exhaling so much carbon dioxide that you can cause respiratory alkalosis, which can result in all sorts of problems. By breathing into a bag, you can breathe back in some of the carbon dioxide you breathed out so you can maintain appropriate carbon dioxide levels in your blood.
Too much oxygen too quickly can actually burst blood cells which isn’t good but the whole breath into the bad thing forces you to breathe in carbon dioxide and will slow down your breathing as a result
Hi! I use to work as an EMT/FIRE. ^_^ When you inhale, you take in oxygen. While exhaling you breathe out carbon dioxide. Hyperventilating is bad because breathing rapidly makes it so you exhale more than you inhale. Your body needs balance. Too little carbon dioxide in your body & your blood vessels constrict, causing lightheartedness & rapid heart rate as your body tries to compensate. Some people even pass out. Meanwhile, too much carbon dioxide in your body & it will knock out your hypoxic drive, causing you to stop breathing altogether.
I would never reccomend breathing into a paper bag to treat hyperventilating patients. It’s not harmful, it just doesn’t actually do anything. What we do is explain we’re going to count backwards from 100 & that we want them to match their breathing to our pace. We start a a rapid pace, because they’re currently dialed to 11. Then we gradually slow it down until we can get them to a normal rate. I’ve never seen it fail.
You lose carbon dioxide with each breath. Blood flow to the brain is partly controlled by carbon dioxide content in blood. When the levels are off, your brain gets partly starved of blood and you can get dizzy. Other chronic symptoms can result from acidity of your blood being off, due to loss of carbon dioxide from hyperventilation.
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