Why does your heart stop beating every time you sneeze?!
Question: It actually doesn't stop when you sneeze...
This is from a page found when you type in "heart stops when you sneeze" at http://www.google.com. A doctor is the one who actually wrote it. Hope this helps!
In a word, no, your heart does not stop when you sneeze. From my
perspective, it is hard to even imagine what this would mean. A sneeze
itself is really a very brief event, occurring in a shorter time then a
heartbeat. Of course, there is the building up to the sneeze (the "ah" of
the "ah-choo"), but the heart certainly does not stop beating because of
this ah-ing. Check your pulse next time to prove this to yourself.
As I answer this question, I am trying to imagine just how the heart might
even "know" that you are sneezing. The heart beats because a small part of
it called the SA node has a "pacemaker" activity. What this means is that
there is a type of electrical cycle going on that triggers beats roughly
once every second. Sneezing does not change this electrical cycle, so the
heart keeps beating. Said a different way, the muscle of your heart is a
big mass of electrically active tissue, and this electrical activity will
not stop because of a sneeze, or anything else for that matter.
And yet, a sneeze is definitely a complex cardiovascular event. As you
"ah" and "choo", you significantly change the pressure inside your chest,
which in turn affects blood flow and thus the beating of the heart. Still
further, I assume that a sneeze involves a significant activation of
certain pathways of the "autonomic" (roughly means automatic) nervous
system. These also innervate the heart and do affect the frequency and
other aspects of the heartbeat.
So MAYBE the rapid culmination of these inputs OCCASIONALLY causes the
heart to "skip a beat" after a sneeze. Notice I did not say "stop". We
all experience skipped beats once in a while, some more than others. You
may notice it as a "fluttering" in your chest, a sensation that generally
evokes a bit of anxiety. What happens is that there is occasionally a
discoordination of the normally organized pathways of electrical activity
in the heart. Sometimes one part of the heart does not conduct the beat
appropriately, or more commonly, another part actually manages to beat
ahead of schedule, thus throwing the whole beat off. Either way, you get
one beat that does not occur correctly. But all this means is that you
have to wait for the beginning of the next electrical cycle to come around,
at which time a normal, organized beat will occur (assuming that we are
talking about a normal heart!). You see, the heart didn
Answers: It actually doesn't stop when you sneeze...
This is from a page found when you type in "heart stops when you sneeze" at http://www.google.com. A doctor is the one who actually wrote it. Hope this helps!
In a word, no, your heart does not stop when you sneeze. From my
perspective, it is hard to even imagine what this would mean. A sneeze
itself is really a very brief event, occurring in a shorter time then a
heartbeat. Of course, there is the building up to the sneeze (the "ah" of
the "ah-choo"), but the heart certainly does not stop beating because of
this ah-ing. Check your pulse next time to prove this to yourself.
As I answer this question, I am trying to imagine just how the heart might
even "know" that you are sneezing. The heart beats because a small part of
it called the SA node has a "pacemaker" activity. What this means is that
there is a type of electrical cycle going on that triggers beats roughly
once every second. Sneezing does not change this electrical cycle, so the
heart keeps beating. Said a different way, the muscle of your heart is a
big mass of electrically active tissue, and this electrical activity will
not stop because of a sneeze, or anything else for that matter.
And yet, a sneeze is definitely a complex cardiovascular event. As you
"ah" and "choo", you significantly change the pressure inside your chest,
which in turn affects blood flow and thus the beating of the heart. Still
further, I assume that a sneeze involves a significant activation of
certain pathways of the "autonomic" (roughly means automatic) nervous
system. These also innervate the heart and do affect the frequency and
other aspects of the heartbeat.
So MAYBE the rapid culmination of these inputs OCCASIONALLY causes the
heart to "skip a beat" after a sneeze. Notice I did not say "stop". We
all experience skipped beats once in a while, some more than others. You
may notice it as a "fluttering" in your chest, a sensation that generally
evokes a bit of anxiety. What happens is that there is occasionally a
discoordination of the normally organized pathways of electrical activity
in the heart. Sometimes one part of the heart does not conduct the beat
appropriately, or more commonly, another part actually manages to beat
ahead of schedule, thus throwing the whole beat off. Either way, you get
one beat that does not occur correctly. But all this means is that you
have to wait for the beginning of the next electrical cycle to come around,
at which time a normal, organized beat will occur (assuming that we are
talking about a normal heart!). You see, the heart didn