How breathing too much makes you sick

Breathing is a mechanism for regulating the acidity of the blood through the controlled release of carbon dioxide.

The body does not have to regulate Oxygen since under normal breathing conditions the blood holds just about as much oxygen as it can. If you hyperventilate (breathe more than you need to), you don't get any more oxygen. Too much breathing flushes out too much of that valuable carbon dioxide. As will be shown later, with insufficient carbon dioxide not enough oxygen can get to the brain, and as a result you become dizzy and faint.

A popular myth is that carbon dioxide is nothing more than a waste product. Yet it is as important to life as is water, which is just as much a waste product. The body contains a complex biochemical factory, which produces hormones, enzymes, and everything needed to keep you healthy. Many hundreds of biochemical processes rely on the right mix of carbon dioxide in water to make the right products in the right quantities. If you breathe too much for too long, over breathing becomes a habit and you develop a chronic shortage of carbon dioxide. Since all the chemicals the body manufactures and all the body's control functions depend on carbon dioxide, a shortage upsets the entire biochemical balance of the body leading to a whole host of disorders. Some of these, commonly found in the medical literature, are listed at the back. But apart from the massive disturbance to the body's biochemistry, a shortage of carbon dioxide has two other very important effects.

  1. Poor oxygenation of tissues: Haemoglobin is the component of blood that collects oxygen from the lungs and delivers it to the body's tissues where it is needed. Carbon dioxide helps to unload the oxygen. This basic physiological principle is known as the Bohr effect and has been understood for a long time. The importance of this lies in the fact that if the baseline level of carbon dioxide is low, then oxygen is not fully released from the haemoglobin when it is required, and goes back to the lungs on a wasted trip. The result is that if you breathe more than you need to, your cells actually get less oxygen, resulting in a feeling of breathlessness which makes you try to breathe even more.
  2. Smooth Muscle spasm: Low carbon dioxide is known to cause spasm in the smooth muscle found in the walls of blood vessels, the bronchioles of the lungs, ducts, glands and the gut. Reduced blood flow resulting from narrowing of the blood vessels due to spasm of the smooth muscle, together with the depressed Bohr effect can cause migraines, fainting, angina pains and high blood pressure. Spasms are known to occur in the duodenum and in the gut producing conditions such as spastic colon and irritable bowel syndrome. The spasm in the bronchioles produces wheezing as found in asthma.