Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath
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There’s another aspect to this beyond pure ventilation. Imagine your lungs are like an accordion with little tiny tubes carrying blood through it. When you take a really deep breath, your lungs swell up with air, but that tends to compress those tiny tubes and increase the resistance to blood flow so you don’t have good circulation, so you want to take breaths that maximize the balance between moving air into your lungs and promoting good blood flow to exchange gases from the blood.
Another way to look about it is that from a resting state where you are not breathing, it is easiest to take a breath and as you inhale more and more, it is harder to continue to take a deep breath; this has to deal with the intrinsic mechanics of how your lungs and chest wall interact, but that goes into functional residual capacity and is slightly advanced for ELI5.
Breathe* and breaths* for starters.
We only breathe in what our body feels is necessary. Every time we breath we still end up exhaling a lot of the oxygen we had just breathed in. If you try to breathe more than you need to your body will go into an O2 overload state where you will start to feel funky.
There’s more to it like what happens with your blood but since this question is strictly about breathing I’ll leave it at that.
You’ll need your full lung capacity when you run (or do some other exercise).
It’s the same reason why our heart rate is not at >180bpm all the time, our blood pressure not at >200mmHg, we are not all-out sweating without need and so on.
Regular, shallow breaths just seem to work best when there is not more demand.
The lungs are elastic. It’s like blowing up a thick walled balloon. Taking full breaths would expend a lot of energy, to distend the lungs fully, as well as to lift the chest wall. Your body naturally does what comfortable and what works.
In my case is to not show the entire size of my belly, but I am not sure that’s what everyone is doing 😀
We are optimised to live in a middle zone for most of the time, taking in what we need with a big buffer for when we need to exert ourselves. If we lived at the maximum during normal activity, we would keel over and die when chased.
I’ve wondered about that myself. I’m glad to see I’m not alone. Sometimes, for no reason and without doing it myself, my body with suck in a big breath. Doctors are always saying to breathe deeper, but I can’t remember that every half hour. Maybe it’s just natural to breathe shollow and when the body needs more it’ll take in a bigger one on its own.
There’s a difference between capacity and necessity.
Under normal, non-stressed circumstances, our body doesn’t require us to breathe at max capacity in order to function. So we don’t breathe at max capacity.
When engaged in strenuous exercise, like running, our body requires more oxygen, so we breathe heavier/deeper.
Same goes for eating. We eat what we need to provide our bodies with fuel, but we don’t (or shouldn’t) eat until we’re totally stuffed (Thanksgiving excluded). We have the capacity to eat a lot, but we really don’t need to.
Professional opera singer’s perspective:
Breathing is super important as an opera singer because the only functional difference between singing opera and singing anything else is we have to fill a large theater and be heard over the orchestra without amplification. Most of learning how to breathe correctly in opera has to do with unlearning the shallow breaths we take while conversing in our everyday lives. So one reason we tend to take shallow breaths is the pace and frequency of modern speech and conversion. We also tend to lift our shoulders a bit while we take these shallow conversation breathes (generally a big no-no in the classical singing world). However, watch a baby breathe – its all deep tummy breathes.
I have cystic fibrosis and while I’m generally fine, my lung capacity is reduced, to about 75%-80%. Yes, I’m much healthier than others with CF, I got diagnosed late and have great care. Part of this care is to have lung function tests (Spirometry). I generally do 2 different types of tests, both testing full lung and breathing capacity. I don’t know exactly how many I’ve done but it would probably be close to 100 of each.
Both of these tests require me to inhale and exhale fully as in lungs full of air and then completely empty. Exhaling, to completely empty the lungs, is especially hard and took me a while to fully understand how to do it properly. It needs good control over your diaphragm to push the last bit of air out of your lungs. One of the tests you need to breathe out as fast and hard as possible and I always get out of breath doing it and need a couple of minutes to recover so I can do it again.
The reason for saying all of this is that to breathe like this is hard work and exhausting. Its definitely not the same as breathing while you are doing no physical activity, and its also nothing like breathing hard after exercise. I think everyone should go through these kinds of tests at least once as it shows you how much you can breathe out when you have to.
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