At rest and at work, asleep and awake: roughly how many breaths does an adult take in 24 hours?
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🫀 Human body · breaths
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Answer
About 22,000 breaths
Your two lungs are not the same size. The left one is smaller to leave room for the heart.
How to estimate it
Time your own breathing: a resting adult takes about 15 breaths a minute, a little less in sleep and more during effort, so 15 is a fair average. A day has 24 × 60 = 1,440 minutes. 15 × 1,440 = 21,600 breaths. The commonly quoted figure is about 22,000 breaths per day.
Source: American Lung Association; Canadian Lung Association
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