You may have been sneezing since the day you were born, but do you actually understand what’s happening when you do? This common bodily function can still be mysterious: Why is it so loud? Why does it feel so satisfying? And how come a sneeze can occasionally be so disgusting? All of the answers, right this way.
A: You’ve probably felt this direct cause and effect when a dust bunny flies into your face. “Sneezing is a coordinated, autonomic response to stimuli,” says Alexis Jackman, M.D., of the New York-based ENT and Allergy Associates. “It works to expel a foreign body.”
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The stimulus arrives and sets off a chain of events. “Your brain triggers your chest muscles to contract, the throat muscles to relax, and some of the musculature in the back of your mouth—the uvula, the base of your tongue—coordinate to close off the mouth,” says Jackman. “Air is then forced out through the nose.”
You might feel like different stimuli cause different sneezes—like they feel different if you have a cold versus allergies. But “it’s a similar neurological mechanism,” says Jackman. “The sneeze is trying to get you back to your normal state, to reboot your system.”
A: Jackman dismisses this popular myth and explains how the idea came about in the first place: “I think the myth has to do with the erectile tissue in the nose, and how that relaxes once you’ve sneezed,” she says. But it's definitely not the same as the erectile tissue in your genital area.
A: “You have a hyper sensitivity, and it builds and builds and builds, and then you relax,” says Jackman. “We are conditioned for that release. Your body solved a problem.” You might compare that feeling to going to the bathroom after you’ve been holding it for a while—or, sure, orgasming (although that's where the similarities end).
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A: It can be super annoying in the moment, but sneezes disappear because your body assessed the situation in your nose and decided it wasn’t worth it. “You don’t have enough stimulation to cause a sneeze,” says Jackman. “You’re at a sub-threshold.”
It turns out, though, that you can make yourself sneeze if this does happen. “Just increase the stimulus,” says Jackman. If stuffing pollen directly into your nose sounds unpleasant, you can also try tickling your own nose hairs or simply humming. “It vibrates the nasal hair, and triggers the same neural pathway,” she says.
A: “The mucus lining of your nose is a defense mechanism,” says Jackman. “Sneezing expels the mucus and things that are stuck in the mucus.” So you’re catching air, snot, microbes, and particles in that tissue.
Make sure to cover your eyes (and wash your hands), germaphobes. Jackman says new research out of MIT suggests that a cloud is formed when you sneeze, a combination of gas and particles, and that cloud can remain intact long enough to enter ceiling ventilation systems. In other words, your sneeze could be the butterfly flapping its wings that makes an entire airplane sick.
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A: If you always sneeze in threes, blame it on slower nerves. “Different individuals take longer for that signal to travel and to resolve itself,” says Jackman. “Some people naturally take longer before they reset to the state where their body stops sending the neurological signal.”
A: Again, the guilt lies in your anatomy. “The volume of your lungs, the size of your trachea, or larynx, or mouth, and the degree of the stimuli” could all affect the sound you produce, says Jackman. So you’re not being dramatic if you sound like an angry bear—or a squeaky pixie, for that matter.
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