Why is it useful to breathe into a brown paper bag when having a panic attack?

Answer 1

It isn't to do with taking in too much oxygen. It's to do with getting rid of too much carbon dioxide.

If you breathe too fast, you are getting rid of carbon dioxide from the blood faster than normal. You might think this is a good thing, since CO2 is a waste product. However, the amount of CO2 in the blood affects its pH - too much CO2 makes your blood too acid, too little CO2 (like if you have a panic attack and hyperventilate) and your blood gets too alkaline. That has lots of other effects, like making you dizzy and tingly and faint etc. If you breathe into a paper bag, you are not breathing in fresh air each time - you are breathing back in some of the air you just breathed out, so you are breathing in more CO2 than normal. This means you don't get rid of it so fast and the blood pH can get back to normal. And because that makes people feel less dizzy and weird it helps them to calm down.

Answer 2

the reason why they have people breathe in a brown paper bag when they are having a panic attack is so that they can breathe back in some of their own carbon dioxide. In a panic attack you start to breathe faster. When that happens you do not take in enough oxygen, and you breathe out too much carbon dioxide. You can go into a state of alkalosis and pass out. the brown paper bag allows you to get back some of the carbon dioxide that you breathed out, thus putting your body, mainly the respiratory system back on track.

Answer 3

Because when you have a panic attack you hyperventilate, which means you increase the oxygen concentration in your blood and blow off all your carbon dioxide. The decreased levels of carbon dioxide (termed hypocapnia) cause some of the physical symptoms you experience in a panic attack, such as pins and needles in your hands and feet, tingling around your mouth, and dizziness.

If you breath into a paper bag (it doesn't have to be brown, just paper!), you are inhaling the air you have just breathed out, so you're breathing in air which has a higher concentration of carbon dioxide and a lower concentration of oxygen than regular room air. This helps to balance the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stream, which relieves the physical symptoms mentioned above.

Answer 4

Doing so forces you to actually rebreath some of the air you exhale. This means, you begin to take in less oxygen. Usually in a panic attack, a person takes rapid short breathes, which then leads to the person "hyper ventilating" or taking far too much oxygen too fast.

Breathing into a brown paper bag lessens the amount of oxygen you are forcing into you, allowing you to calm down.

Answer 5

When you are having a panic attack, one tends to taken lots of deep breaths. This can cause one to pass out due to too much oxygen in the blood. Breathing into a paper bag cuts down on the amount of oxygen that goes back into your lungs.

Answer 6

When you have a panic attack you breath too fast, thus taking in more oxygen. When you breath into a paper bag you breath in more carbon dixiode which helps stablise the oxygen/carbon dixiode balance in the blood

Answer 7

what signals the brain to breath is carbon dioxide, when having a panic attack, you hyperventilate and cause a rise in oxygen but because you are not getting all the carbon dioxide out the brain is missing the signal to breath and exchange gas, so you get oxygen poisoning, by breathing in a paper bag you level the gases and can hopefully breath normal

Answer 8

Because you have a tendency to Hyper-ventilate when having a panic attack, and when you do that you get too much Oxygen, so by breathing your own Carbon Dioxide, it has a calming effect.

Answer 9

It's called hyper ventalating. Your breathing in more Carbon Dioxcide than oxygen, making you light headed. Because of lack of oxygen you automatically get "tired", which in a way, relaxes you.

Answer 10

Less oxygen, also of course when having a panick attack it helps to be able to see the in and out movement of the bag, it gives you something to focus upon.