Does Fresh Air Help With Nausea: What Anyone Who Gets Car Sick Needs to Know
People often get motion sickness while driving in a car or on a boat, and it is believed that a breath of fresh air can relieve the discomfort.
To answer whether this is true or not, we will have to start with the symptoms characteristic of motion sickness. These include: nausea, vomiting and sweating, which is obvious, as well as a decrease in body temperature, which is not noticed by every "sufferer".
The thing is that during motion sickness, the capillaries expand, which means that more blood is close to the skin surface. As a result, the body's heat is transferred to the environment, and the body temperature decreases.
In addition, during such periods a person sweats more intensely (we break out in a “cold sweat”), which means that the body temperature drops even more.
In turn, when the temperature drops due to motion sickness, the hypothalamus, which is responsible for regulating body temperature, tries to resist this process.
As a result, despite the decrease in temperature, the person experiences heat and may even turn red.
A drop in temperature causes the body to respond compensatorily by making you feel nauseous. Breathing in cold air or applying a cool compress to the back of your neck or forehead for a few minutes can help reduce the feeling of heat or flushing because it counteracts the hypothalamus's efforts to raise your body temperature.
Therefore, this method really does relieve the feeling of nausea caused by seasickness or while traveling.
