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Don’t stifle yawn, it’s good for you
Published 04/24/2010When she worked in banking, Nana Gigolaeva used to shift her eyes from left to right during presentations by her boss.
“It made me focus so I wouldn’t yawn,” says Gigolaeva, 30, of Walnut Creek, Calif. “If I yawned while he was talking, well, God help us.”
If Gigolaeva’s boss knew a little something about thermoregulatory function, the maintenance of a consistent temperature, he’d take her yawn as a compliment.
According to psychologists and researchers who study such things, yawning has nothing to do with boredom, rudeness or even fatigue. Quite the contrary. Yawning helps cool down our brains so they function better, explains Andrew Gallup, a researcher at New York’s University of Binghamton who specializes in yawning.
“Our brains are like computers,” says Gallup, who conducted yawning studies in 2007 with his father, Gordon Gallup, of the State University of New York at Albany. “They operate most efficiently when cool. Our research indicates that we yawn in response to increased brain or body temperature.”
Despite a 1987 study that disproved yawning as a response to reduced oxygen levels, the younger Gallup says some people still believe that’s why we yawn. It’s not. In fact, he adds, comparative support shows that yawning provides a means for achieving increased alertness and arousal, especially when changing from one mental state to another (activity to inactivity or sleeping to waking). So, if anything, it’s a mechanism to recharge so you can better absorb information.
Nevada City, Calif., therapist and educator Patt Lind-Kyle encourages clients to induce yawning.
In her work, Lind-Kyle uses neuro-monitoring tools such as yawning to help increase health and manage stress. Slowing down your breath, flaring your nostrils while inhaling or watching someone else do it are all ways to induce yawning, she says.
“Yawning helps us relax,” says Lind-Kyle. “It lifts our moods. It’s good stuff. And it’s free.”
Andrew Gallup doesn’t believe yawning is beneficial enough to induce, because if you’re not yawning, your brain temperature is probably where it needs to be, he says. However, he does believe that yawning has important direct applications in the medical field as it relates to thermoregulatory dysfunction, he says. And it tends to be commonly overlooked.
Certain methods, such as applying a cold wash cloth to your forehead or breathing through your nose, can be effective in cooling down the brain and body and warding off excessive yawning, which is a symptom of epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, for instance. Both diseases have degrees of thermoregulatory dysfunction, Andrew Gallup says. Yawning has also been linked to blocking the reuptake of serotonin, much like antidepressants do, so that more of the brain chemical is available to act on receptors in the brain, Gordon Gallup says.
You’ll be glad to know that one of the most commonly held beliefs about yawning it’s contagiousness is fact.
“We believe contagious yawning is a byproduct of primitive empathic mechanisms,” says Gordon Gallup, a psychology professor at SUNY Albany. “In a group situation, we evolved to yawn as a way to raise our overall mental processing and collective vigilance, say, against predators.”
