You’re breathing fine, then you suddenly feel compelled to take a very deep breath. If your lungs don’t fill up to a certain point you feel a lack of satisfaction, as until you take a deep breath where your lungs fill up enough, that feeling in your chest doesn’t go away.
The closest is ‘catching your breath’, but that implies shortness of breath and trying to get your panting under control.
Anyone know what I mean?
Yes.
I get this quite often. I think of it as “oxygen debt,” but my pulse-ox always shows that I’m at 97-98%, so I guess that can’t be it.
I get something like this quite a bit. Happens to me if I go up one flight of stairs, I feel really out of breath, but I know I’m not. Started happening to me sometimes when I bend over, or bend to pick something up. Been happening for 8-9 years now on and off.
I have never found a trigger, and once the doctor told me I was out of shape, though at the time I was swimming 3-4 times a week. I started walking up 14 flights of stairs at work twice a day, I still get the feeling.
I’ve been through 3-4 doctors, none of which can tell me what it is. One went so far as to tell me I need to go to the emergency room as I was having a heart attack. I really wish I could figure out what causes it. I’ve had two stress tests, two breathing tests and other tests and there’s nothing they can find wrong with me. I’ve learned to live with it. Still annoying though.
I get this sometimes as well and to me it seems less about needing the oxygen and more about stretching the lungs/ribs out to get some satisfaction. Sometimes forcing myself to yawn will do the trick.
I think it’s a pretty similar phenomenon to yawning. Like yawning it’s not unique to humans – I often see my dogs & cats taking a deep breath and letting it out in a sigh… for them, it seems to be primarily a relaxation response. (Also like yawning, it’s catching!)
I get this sometimes. Most often, it seems to occur when I’m in the car driving home from work. Like Bob Ducca, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with being out of breath, but the only way to make the sensation go away is to take a really, *really *deep breath.
Or, to have something happen to occupy my attention; then I forget all about it. Which leads me to believe it’s all in my head, and not in my chest.
ETA: And of course, it’s happening to me right now. The power of suggestion strikes again!
A compulsive sighing respiration can be a form ofa tic disorder and can be associated with anxiety as part of chronic hyperventilation syndrome.
Doing it every so often … sigh, it’s normal.
Well, it’s threads like this that let me know it’s not just me.
And I can also agree with Bob Ducca’s post here. Sometimes, as the OP implies, just taking a deep breath doesn’t do it for me. The lungs have to fill up to a certain stretch factor, it feels like. Sometimes, if I take multiple deep breaths trying to do this, I just end up feeling hyperventilated. But sometimes I can do just what Bob Ducca implies here and it works.
Hah. I just totally did one as I started to read the thread.
I get them just as I’m falling asleep. My dog and cats do it too when they’re falling asleep. My WAG is that it’s a way to relax the lungs and take in enough air to begin the deep breathing of sleep.
When my cat was a kitten she would take a big deep breath while purring herself to sleep. It was like “Deeeep breath purrrrrr” then she’d stop purring and be asleep.