5 Fascinating Facts About Our Breath

5 Fascinating facts about our Breath

- Divya Kanchibotla

Breathing is the first act of life. It’s also one of the most unconscious acts we do throughout our life. Although breathing is essential to our life, we hardly pay attention to it. Infact, are you aware that you are breathing right now? Well, now you are! In the 10-12 mins it takes you to read this article, you would have inhaled and exhaled more than 200 times, most of it in an unconscious, autopilot manner. Let us take a pause and look at a few fascinating facts about this critical life-sustaining process.

1. On an average humans breathe around 20000 times a day.
A senior pulmonologist once shared that we take in around 10,000 lts of air each day and 90% of the energy we need comes from the oxygen in the air we breathe, unlike the popular belief that food is main source of energy in the body. We breathe in around 500 ml of air in each breath.

2. Breathing is both under our control and beyond our control: Breathing is amongst an elite group of functions. Besides being critical to our existence, it is also one of the very few involuntary functions that can be converted into a voluntary function on demand. The functioning of most organs that are critical to our survival and health, like our heart, stomach, pancreas, liver is involuntary, i.e not under our control. Breathing is unique as it is mostly involuntary (not under our control) but can be made voluntary - under our conscious control.