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While resting, you will take one breath every five seconds, or 12 breaths per minute. During extreme exercise, you will breathe up to 80 times per minute. During sleep, your breathing can slow to as low as six breaths per minute. On an average day, you will take 21,600 breaths (15 per minute).

An average breath at rest is about two cups of air. Breathing deeply, you can inhale more than a gallon of air.

The surface area of all the air sacs (alveoli) in your lungs, if stretched out flat, would be larger than the footprint of most people's homes.

Most people can hold their breathing for about a minute; the world record is over eight minutes.

Your body uses over 80 lbs of oxygen a day. But lack of oxygen is not what stimulates breathing. Inhaling brings oxygen into your lungs which enters the blood, and exhaling discharges carbon dioxide from your bloodstream. It is the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood that stimulates you to breath.

Each breath you take will include millions of atoms of air that most of the rest of the world has breathed recently. Quite a few of those millions of atoms will have been previously inhaled by everyone on the planet.

Your brain uses about three-quarters of all the oxygen you take in. Some people say that people who breath deeply, especially older people, are smarter.

Other people say that those who rank this article highly are among the smartest.

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