Medical and Science

Why Do We Yawn and Why is it Contagious

Yawning Cat

Photo by [dan] FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why do we yawn, now that’s a good question. Better yet, why is yawning contagious? These are a couple of very good questions and I went in search of answers. I know you are all dying to know as well, so I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about why we yawn and why in the world is it so darn contagious!

Have you ever Seen someone yawning and then it happens! You can feel it creeping up on you, your jaws start to clench, maybe your eyes water a bit and bam, You Yawn! It can be quite embarrassing at times and not only that, but some people find it a bit rude.

Of course we can not help it, yawning is a natural thing and we all do it. Anyone that tells you they don’t yawn is lying. They probably sneak off and yawn in private or something…lol

But I’m sure everyone has noticed that humans aren’t the only ones who yawn. There’s a bunch of animals that will yawn as well. Domesticated dogs and cats are the world’s worst. My little poodle Jack yawns all the time. And in fact, even his yawns are contagious! 🙂

Why Do We Yawn

Many folks will yawn while faced with a boring situation or sometimes even a nervous situation can cause the same effect. Some scientists will say that yawning is a way of the body waking us up when we’re in a situation that requires us to stay awake or alert. This is interesting because anytime I’ve driven on the highways at night I’m yawning like a crazy person. So this theory kind of makes sense to me.

There was an experiment done by Italian researchers where they videotaped premature infants that were in ICU care. The study showed that the babies cried both when going to sleep as well as when waking up. So in conclusion, the scientists stated that yawning was an indication of a changing state of arousal in the body. Of course the transition between sleeping and waking would be such an arousal. No dirty minds out there now! 😉

Many people believe that yawning is a way of increasing the oxygen levels in our bodies. But from what I understand, this isn’t the case. Another yawning experiment was conducted on a group of university students on just this sort of thing. They actually put themselves in different rooms that contained either higher or lower oxygen levels to see how the body would react. Well, come to find out, the students were yawning just as much in the low oxygen level rooms as they did in the rooms with more oxygen. So that kind of blows that theory out of the water.

Here’s something interesting though… There are some diseases that are linked to yawning, although there isn’t any clear explanation as to why. Excessive yawning is said to be connected to a wide variety of medical conditions. Most of these are diseases of the brain such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. But on the “flip side” schizophrenia patients are said to hardly yawn at all, go figure. So this leads us to our next question, why is yawning contagious.

Why is Yawning Contagious

Well first of all, yawning is definitely contagious, I don’t care who you are. If you’re in the room with someone and they bust out a nice big yawn, then you’re going to follow suite. If you don’t, then you’re definitely fighting back the urge.

In fact I bet some of you that are reading this right now have yawned a couple of times just from reading about it. They do say that even the act of reading, hearing or thinking about yawning can produce some pretty good yawns.

One interesting theory is that yawning was naturally developed as a form of communication. Possibly developed during a time that languages were formed. Maybe caveman days, who knows. But it’s supposed to be a communicative way of informing each other that we need to stay awake or alert. This brings me to believe it may be an instinctual thing.

Something similarly along those lines suggests that yawns evolved from our ancestors as a social behavior and a way to help create a stronger bond between members of social groups. Picture this, a groups of folks are sitting around socializing and one begins to yawn. He’s telling the group that it’s time to take a nap or go to sleep. So then the rest of the group yawns in return signaling that they agree with him. Seeing how babies are unaware of the social communication of yawning, they will not yawn contagiously until they are around one year old.

So that’s it folks, those are my Odd Random Thoughts on Why Do We Yawn and Why is it Contagious.

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46 thoughts on “Why Do We Yawn and Why is it Contagious
  1. Great article! I always wanned to know why my golden retriever yawns back at me 🙂

    1. Yep, it’s very contagious, as we all know. If yawning could possibly be communication between humans, then I wonder how we could learn to communicate with our pets through yawning, we must master this.

      1. It’s probably part of the pre language world communication. If someone could make money on that, I bet it will be discovered in no time 🙂

        1. Indeed Peter, money often dictates the importance of research unfortunately. If it could be monopolized on, I’m sure there is a crowd of science teams that would be lined up to take the job.

          1. Thank you! Great blog, by the way. It’s hard to find something unusual worth to read on the net. Bookmarked!

          2. Hmmm ,,this is the best information related to yawning . But sometimes we feel very strange when ever we yawn in front of anyone by mistake lol 😀

  2. Nice post, always wondered about yawns and their contagiousness! All It takes for me is to either hear or see another person yawn, and I’ll be busting out one myself. It’s weird, because i’ll not be bored and still yawn…I agree it could be some kind of communication. Maybe its a way for us to tell one another’s feelings without actually saying something. Just a thought!

    1. That’s a good way of looking at it. You know there was a time before languages had fully developed that man relied solely on their ability to communicate with body language. Yawning could very well be reminiscent of that.

  3. I yawned at least 2 times while reading your article)) haha, no, articles is not boring for sure. But after watching House MD I heard about mirror effect. It is v when you see someone’s yawning or read about yawning, the brain has a signal kind of – “time to yawn”. Yawning is pretty catching)))

    1. hah, that’s funny, when I first was reading your comment in the control panel, I didn’t realize what post it was on. I thought, “Oh man, I wrote a boring article!” Then you said something to that effect. 🙂

      That’s very interesting, I’ve not heard about the mirror effect. I’ll have to do some research on that, thanks for bringing that to the table.

  4. This would explain why that Olympic speedskater Apolo Ono always yawned before each race! And here I was thinking the guy was just bored to tears 😉

  5. I watched a television program (can’t remember which one) that tested the theory that yawns are contagious. They had an actor with a hidden camera approach 50 people and yawn, and another 50 without yawning. When the actor yawned, the subjects yawned at a significantly higher rate. I found it quite interesting.

    1. That’s a pretty cool experiment. Anyone could test that theory out pretty easy without drawing too much attention.

  6. Its a very interesting article made it me and Yawn while reading this, good to know there is a connection while you Yawn. 😉

    1. Yah, it’s really crazy that you can actually yawn just from reading about it. The human mind is so fascinating!

  7. My mother always said I was stealing her air when I yawned, thus she yawned to steal ‘my air’. lol
    I always thought we yawned because we’re tired and thus our breathing becomes lazy, so we make up for it by taking a huge yawn.

  8. Thanks for the interesting read. The article made me yawn a couple of times haha.

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