Why Humans Yawn and Stretch Essay

A bodily response that highly associated with hunger and getting tired. Many people experience this physical response without understanding the primary cause of it. An average adult will experience about 20 yawns in a day. Assuming they take 8 hours of sleep a day, that means they will yawn more than ones every hour. But we both know that is not the case. Majority of these yawns will occur periodically (Czarnecki n. p). One may be sitting in a meeting, watching a particular tv show, typing a specific document, or writing. All these activities are from a wide array. Some require the physical straining while others require mental training. Some require no straining at all. So what causes yawning? Human beings yawn to increase the oxygen supply in the body. This paper will support this claim by giving the following arguments.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Yawning is an involuntary response. No one can intentionally trigger a yawn. During yawning, there is more than usual inhalation of air. The eardrums are stretched which in most cases resets their position. Both lungs expand which in turn stretches the chest muscles. A sense of relief is achieved after stretches and yawning. The sudden intake of colder air that stretches the tissues and specific organs in the body creates a feeling of rejuvenation (Czarnecki n. p.).

Looking at the process of yawning, the main event is the sudden intake of air. Apparently, this is caused by the expansion of the lungs. One has to wonder why the person would gallop a large volume of air when all along they have been breathing. Three competing theories try to explain Yawning. The first one is the one that is being proposed by this paper. Yawning is a result of lack of enough oxygen supply to the bloodstream. The second one is that yawning is caused by the need for the lungs to stretch. The third theory is that yawning is an involuntary response to the need for the brain to cool. The fourth theory is that yawning is contagious.

Although still under research, the idea that yawning is contagious fails to hold up because of one main reason. Yawning may occur without the presence of any other person close by. In some cases, it happens when one has just woken up. The lack of any other person in the room or the house gives the theory a weakness. The second theory is that it may be an attempt to stretch the lungs. Bodily functions start from the brain sending a signal. There is no sufficient proof that the lungs need to be pulled periodically. Especially twenty times in a day. Also, there is no direct health benefit from stretching the lungs. So why would the body try and attempt stretching it?

This leaves two min theories competing with each other. The brain need for cooling may trigger yawning. Since the brain is the central processing unit of the human body, it can trigger such an event. The colder air entering the mouth may be meant to cool the brain. But then this theory fails to account for one central part. How comes yawning occurs even when a person is in a cold environment. All other body cooling activities don't happen in the cold environment unless a person is performing a strenuous exercise and his body is experiencing some high temperatures. Yawning will occur even if the person is experiencing cold.

Why does every good sleep or nap accompany by yawning and stretch when an individual wake up? The kind of body relaxation experienced during sleep makes the body to experience muscle relaxation that requires a moderate stretch to wake the muscles back to their functional state. The best moments experienced by an individual during massage is what humans feel when they stretch after sleep. Humans, therefore, stretch by letting their muscle to be moved gently into their normal position. On the other hand, stretching results when tendon or muscle groups take place in the process of deliberate flexing as a way of enhancing muscle elasticity and as a way of achieving comfortable muscle tone. Additionally, the body's reflex actions relieve muscles from over-extension through inhibiting the body's nerve impulses as they reach their set limit (Villazon n. p.). The blog outlined that stretching is a form of the body invoking the normal range of muscles thus it recalibrates the joints to initiate the normal fluid amounts required throughout the body. This suggests that humans stretch their bodies by pulling the body muscles beyond their normal range as a way of provoking the normal muscle range. The muscle stretch is enhanced by the whole body structures including the muscles that tend to pull back the stretched muscles while redistributing joint fluids.

Also mentioned that when a human wakes up, their muscles lose tone and body fluids including muscle fluid tend to pull towards the back. Stretching accompanies with yawning since, during sleeping, human body seems to receive minimum oxygen due to reduced metabolic rate thus the muscles will try to regain their functionality by initiating stretching and yawning at the same time. Humans stretch through the mechanism of breathing in and out to help the body to make use of oxygen inhaled to be engaged in the body (Yang et al. n. p). Human body participates in a static stretch of muscles gently and holding the stretch for like 30 seconds until a release of tissue is achieved without making any movement. The human body needs to fit at all costs thus the body initiates stretch as a self-healing approach for the overstraining or increased complexity of the body muscles.

Works Cited

Czarnecki, Samien. "The Science of Yawning." 2009. Retrieved from QualityHealth : https://www.qualityhealth.com/sleep-articles/science-yawning.

Villazon, Luis. "How do we stretch when we wake up?" Science Focus Blog Post. BBC Health News Magazine, 2016.

Yang, Yuan, et al. "Nonlinear connectivity in the human stretch reflex assessed by cross-frequency phase coupling." International journal of neural systems 26.08 (2016): 1650043.