Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath

Question

Why is it that we don’t often breath to our full capacity, we take shallow breathes and rarely take full breath

In: 680

Answer 1

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.