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

    Asked by Dolly da Gucci to Ivy, George, Daniel, Christina, Cheryl on 18 Jan 2017.
    • Photo: Cheryl Andisi

      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!

    • Photo: George Mochamah

      George Mochamah answered on 20 Jan 2017:


      Hi Dolly, it all depends with many things like age–young children breath faster (20 to 40 times per minute) than adults (about 15 to 20 times per minute). Again if you are running, working you will breath fast–this is because you need more oxygen to produce more energy

Comments