It has been a tiring time, what with moving house and almost-finishing writing my book. Everything is unfamiliar around me: the taps are the wrong way, the boiler is leaking and the oven keeps beeping at me and I don’t know why. And then I try to sit down to do important book tasks like referencing and fact checking, and I can’t muster the enthusiasm. Unsurprisingly, I am sighing a lot more than usual.
A few years ago, during the Pandemic, I was invited to take part in a radio discussion about breath and emotion. Images of suffocation were all around. The Covid patients gasping for air. George Floyd’s strangulated cry ‘I can’t breathe’ that reverberated around the world. I found myself wondering about the opposite. About excessive breathing, huffing and puffing and most of all, sighing.
The way we breathe is entangled with so many stories about emotions. There are shocked, sharp intakes of breath. There are bored yawns, and breathless gasps from too much laughter, and anxious panting breaths. I suppose my mind went to sighing back in the summer of 2021 because I was thinking about the lethargy and resignation that had fallen over me and everyone I knew after more than a year of lockdowns with young children. Sighing might seem negative, but it is also indulgent. It feels almost wasteful – all that air, for what?
I tell a friend that I am thinking about sighing, and her eyes light up. ‘ I sigh way too much!’ she exclaims. ‘I hate it’. A professional cellist, she has spent more time than most thinking about breath and emotion. She worries all that sighing makes her seem depressed and brings others down too. Her older daughter has caught the habit too, and this appalls her. She is delighted she has managed to nix it in her youngest. It seems crazy to be so acutely aware of your sighing. But then again, I know exactly what she means. I sigh, and there can be a little twinge of embarrassment or shame, as if I have been caught exposed in some way. Sighing feels out of step with the relentless modern pressure to be positive and in control. Sighing speaks of indolence, passivity and defeat.
Lately, scientists have become interested in the evolutionary purpose of the sigh. Scientists propose we sigh in moments of stress and anxiety to regulate the breath. More surprisingly, according to researchers at UCLA and Stanford, on average people sigh at least once every five minutes (which amounts to twelve times an hour). These involuntary sighs begin life as ordinary breaths, but then, before we realise, a second breath appears on top of them, creating the effect of a particularly deep inhale and exhale. These periodic extra-deep breaths are very important. In the lungs, alveoli, tiny air sacs which allow the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the lungs and the bloodstream, would collapse if it were not for these sighs popping them back open again. The researchers found that when rats were prevented from sighing, they perished because their lungs stopped functioning.
Sigh or die, I say to myself, permitting myself a brief sigh of pleasure.
Have people always felt embarrassed by sighing? The twelfth century Occitan troubadours, architects of our modern cult of romantic love, sang of their unrequited desire and yearning. In their verses, troubadours are forever sighing: their sighs mingle with sweet salty tears; their beloveds make them sigh all day long; their sighs will kill them. A sigh was a status symbol of a kind. It was evidence of the depth and intensity of your feelings. Medical treatises of the time linked powerful emotional states like love-sickness, to overheated internal organs. Inhaling a large amount of air, as we do when we sigh, was thought to cool the inflamed body. ‘Sighing’ Francis Bacon wrote in the Sylva Sylvarum (1627), is like a ‘great draught when one is thirsty’.
It is possible that sighing became a habit worth cultivating by the seventeenth century. The sighing lover was by then firmly a cliché. Hamlet advises the troupe of actors who arrive at his step-father’s court not to over-egg it: ‘the lover shall not sigh gratis’ he warns. Around the same time, a cult of melancholic genius1 was beginning to take hold, exemplified by the sighing scholar, all dressed in black. Two decades after the first performance of Shakespeare’s play, the scholar Robert Burton published The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, a book so enormous just thinking about it would make you sigh. Burton warned against going around sighing too frequently and too enthusiastically: if they [the sighs] be vehement, then shake they the hart and midriffe too much, and cause a soreness about those partes’.
Over the next three hundred years, sighing began to seem less desirable. As modernity, with all its ideals of forward momentum, ambition and vigour, took hold, so sighing signalled its opposite: defeat, listlessness, inertia. In Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901), their stifling nostalgia for a long-lost world is captured by one stage direction that recurs over and over: [sighs]. And in the 1950s, Charlie Brown’s catchphrase *Sigh* captured all his feelings of futility and victimhood in a world gone mad. Recently, researchers at the University of Oslo found that onlookers most often associate sighing, not with love sickness or deep thinking as they might have in the past, but with less noble feelings of boredom, irritation or frustration.
In reality, we sigh for any number of reasons. I stand in front of a painting I love, and I sigh as if to inhale it all the more deeply. I finish composing a difficult email and I sigh, calming and readying myself for the next one. Right now, sighing seems to give me a moment of pause from all the scurrying and scuttling. I sigh indolently and greedily, and feel its cooling draught. I sigh noisily (at least, in private I do) and my body expands to fill all the space, just for a moment. I sigh, because in a world where even something as fundamental as how we breathe can become laden with value judgements and embarrassment, it seems luxuriant and defiant to take in as much air as possible.
For more on this, see ‘Melancholy’ in my The Book of Human Emotions (Profile, 2015).