Oxygenenisum

Rapid breathing, sighing, rapid exhalation causes you to loose too much Carbon Dioxide and it is this loss that can make you ill. Carbon dioxide is a cohort of oxygen and without enough you will end up being oxygen deficient as well.

The presence of sufficient carbon dioxide in the body helps oxygen get released into the cells. Let me explain. When you breathe in air, oxygen enters your lungs where it attaches itself to iron forming the molecule hemoglobin. As hemoglobin, oxygen gets transported through your body. Now, oxygen is strongly attached to hemoglobin. If you were ever an anxiety (blood level of C02 around 25-30mmHg) or panic patient (blood level of C02 between 20-30mmHg) perhaps your doctor told you to breathe into a brown paper bag. What would you be breathing? You would be re-breathing your Carbon Dioxide that you had breathed out. So, you would be breathing mostly Carbon Dioxide. Why do this? Your blood level is saturated with Oxygen from over-breathing, and your arterial carbon dioxide level is too low. When you breathe a bag full of carbon dioxide you will raise your blood level of C02 to a higher level (40mmHg is normal) and now the Oxygen that is attached to the hemoglobin molecule can be EXCHNGED for C02.

Carbon Dioxide and Oxygen are symbiotic, co-dependent gases upon which our lives intimately depend. If oxygen level goes up as in over-breathing, Carbon Dioxide goes down by means of exhalation, oxygen will remain attached to iron as hemoglobin and be unavailable to the tissues. If C02 goes up through retention or slowed exhalation, then more oxygen will unload off hemoglobin and be available to your tissues in your arterial blood.

How can we know this? Can it be measured? Can we consciously learn to adjust this equation if need be? The answer to all three is, yes, we can become aware, we can measure it and we can consciously adjust the equation.

The only way to absolutely know if you are over-breathing or not is to measure your blood gases. There are two machines that can be used: an oximeter that measures oxygen level and a capnograph that measures Carbon Dioxide levels breath by breath. Using an oximeter by itself can be somewhat misleading unless you understand the ratios of Oxygen to Carbon Dioxide. Hospitals are now using Oximeters to know about someone`s breathing and unfortunately, very few have the background to interpret a correct reading. Many think an Oxygen saturation reading of 99% is good. Instead it means you are hyperventilating.

Oxygen accounts for about 23% of the atmosphere's mass with pairs of Oxygen atoms stuck together to make Dioxygen molecules, but it's not just in the air, we breathe. Overall, it's the most abundant element on the earth's surface and the third most abundant in the universe after Hydrogen and Helium. Our planet's rocks are about 46% Oxygen by weight, much of it in the form of Silicon dioxide, which we know most commonly as sand. And many of ...