Your respiratory system includes your Nose and nasal cavity, sinuses, mouth, throat (pharynx), voice box (larynx), windpipe (trachea), lungs, bronchial tubes/bronchi, bronchioles, air sacs (alveoli) and capillaries (webMD, 2020). For an average person that is in a healthy state can exchange oxygen and breathe in and out without difficulty. My father was a healthy man his whole life, about two years ago he was diagnosed with emphysema and COPD.
What was the normal routine for him became super hard and it felt like his whole life changed overnight. When I asked him how he feels when during the day vs. his physical activity, his response was, he feels much better working out and moving around rather than just resting, I notice he now has a hard time breathing no matter what activity he does.
I brought this up in the discussion because people other than the average person has a hard time doing things such as breathing, a lot of people are different, some could have asthma, or other health issues that give them a hard time with tasks such as breathing normally. Now back to the average person, when a person is breathing during periods of the day it is much different than physical activity. When we work out, we breathe heavier, and we are inhaling more oxygen.
From the live lecture this week our instructor explained that when we yawn, it is our body taking in as much oxygen as needed because it did not receive enough, and I just thought that was quite interesting. Breathing patterns can change all the time, if someone is hot, they can start panting and take more breaths than they would normally, if someone is engaged in sexual activity they can take deeper breaths, or if someone is running that didn’t stretch beforehand they can catch a shortness of breath.
The human body needs oxygen to sustain itself. After only about five minutes without oxygen, brain cells begin dying. In humans, the average breathing, or respiratory rate, mostly depends on age. A newborn’s normal breathing rate is about 40 to 60 times each minute and may slow to 30 to 40 times per minute when the baby is sleeping. The average resting respiratory rate for adults is 12 to 16 breaths per minute, and up to 40 to 60 breaths per minute during exercise. (Zimmermann, 2019).
References:
- (webMD, 2020) https://www.webmd.com/lung/how-we-breathe#1 Links to an external site.)
- (Zimmermann, 2019) https://www.livescience.com/22616-respiratory-system.html
