Why We Yawn and How to Stop It
When it comes to yawning, there is a good time and place.
Work is not the place for this if you want to appear alert and prepared. Yawning in class isn’t great either. This will annoy your professor and you will probably miss out on something important. Yawning in the middle of a conversation: Not perfect either. You will look bored and distant.
Have you yawned yet? Well, get it now because you’re going to read a lot about it.
Welcome to the strange world of yawning, with few answers and many questions. Why does the mere talk of yawning make us yawn? How can we stop yawning when we feel that he is approaching deep in our souls? And how many more times can I mention yawning before these sentences get blurry?
While the science behind yawning remains largely a mystery, I spoke to Andrew Gallup, an assistant professor of psychology at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, who has long studied the evolutionary purpose of yawning. He explained the big purpose behind our need to yawn, and how a simple breathing technique (and an ice pack) can stop it:
Yawning Regulates Your Brain Temperature
According to Gallup, yawning consists of two familiar phases: an extended involuntary opening of the jaw with inhalation of air, followed by a passive closing of the jaw.
But forget everything you know about yawning. While it’s easy to imagine that this is as simple as a mechanism to deliver oxygen to your brain when you’re tired or sleepy (a prevailing, long-standing theory), it can be more complex than that.
“It turns out [it] promotes the physiological processes that cool the brain,” Gallup said. “Thus, it significantly alters the speed and temperature of the blood flow entering the brain.” In other words, a simple yawn actually prevents your brain from overheating.
Then why do you usually do this when you are especially tired? This coincides with two periods of maximum body temperature, according to Gallup. When you wake up, your body temperature rises rapidly, and when you are about to fall asleep, your brain and body are at their highest temperature all day, which explains why you tend to yawn at both times of the day.
Other hypotheses include yawning as a simple transitional tool when your body is in a state of change.
“Yawning can function to transition from sleep to wakefulness or activity to inactivity, or vice versa,” he said. It can also stimulate your cerebral cortex or just stimulate part of your brain, so yawning can do much more than just show you are not getting enough sleep.
Contagious yawning can be a sign of empathy.
So what about all those times when you yawned because someone else did it (or simply because someone mentioned it over and over again)? Well, Gallup divides yawning into two types: spontaneous (what we just discussed, caused internally) and contagious.
According to Gallup, contagious yawning is defined as a species that is triggered by social cues. However, there are few studies on this subject, although there are hypotheses that this is just a sign of emotional empathy.
“Empathy is defined as the ability to influence or share the emotional state of others,” he said. “There is some evidence [that] the way people rate empathy is positively correlated with their contagious yawning in the laboratory, but there are many conflicting results.”
So if you yawn a lot because you see it happening around you, it could very well mean a certain degree of empathy on your part, although contagious yawning is still far from a certain science (however, consider yourself a caring person if you do it!).
Change your breathing to avoid yawning
Need to quickly stop yawning? According to the Gallup theory, according to the refrigeration theory, an ice pack on your head or staying in a cool room may well help curb your problem. And if the ice pack looks odd, just change the way you breathe.
“We conducted experiments in which we manipulated the participants’ breathing patterns when they yawned, and we found that when participants breathed in and out through their nose, they almost never yawned,” he said. “The reason is that repetitive nasal breathing actually cools areas of the frontal cortex.”
So taking a few breaths in and out through your nose can cool your brain and prevent you from yawning altogether. And if that doesn’t work, try sleeping while you do it. This may not solve your yawning problem, but you will benefit from it anyway.