Question: How often do we breathe in a minute??

Cheryl Andisi answered on 18 Jan 2017:

@ Dolly da Gucci,
Good question!
The number of breaths we have in a minute varies a lot depending on things like age, health status, whether you are active, recovering from an activity and even when you are sleeping.
When my son was a few days old, I remember calling my doctor friend panicking because he seemed to be breathing very rapidly! In my studies, I had come across the clinical symptom of rapid and shallow breathing as one of the signs of malaria in children. I thought he was unwell! Turns out that newborns breath 30-60 breaths per minute, toddlers 20-30 and a healthy resting adult 12-20 per minute.
Think about it…
12 breaths X 60 minutes X 24 hours= 17280 breathes per day, on the lower side! Even higher in infants!

Naturally, If you have higher carbon dioxide concentration eg after a race, you get faster and deeper breathes as the body’s mechanism to attain balance.

You can find out the number of breathes you have per minute/ day etc by counting the number of breathes in a minute using a timer. You can try do this at different times of the day and after different activities and tell me what your average is 🙂

Mine average between 17-18!