Hyperventilation

Introduction

Hyperventilation is excessive breathing, it is normally caused by acute anxiety and it may accompany a panic attack, it can also occur in individuals who have recently experienced an emotional or psychological shock.

Recognition

• Unnaturally fast deep breathing.
• Attention seeking behaviour.
• Dizziness.
• Feeling faint.
• Trembling or marked tingling in the hands and cramps in the hands and feet.

Treatment

Your aim with somebody who is hyperventilating is to remove the casualty from the cause of distress, to reassure them and calm them down.

• Speak to them firmly, but be kind and reassuring.
• Remove them to a place that is quiet.
• If this is not possible ask bystanders to leave or turn away.
• If the casualty is unable to regain control of their breathing by doing this ask them to re-breath their own exhaled air from a paper bag.
• Ask them to hold the paper bag over their mouth and nose and breathe in and out slowly into the bag about ten times, and then breathe without the bag for fifteen seconds.
• The patient should continue to alternate this cycle of breathing with and without the bag until the need to breathe rapidly has passed.

Encourage the casualty to see their own doctor about preventing and controlling panic attacks in the future.

Related topics

• Heat exhaustion
• Sunburn

Please note:

These hints are no substitute for thorough knowledge of first aid! St John Ambulance holds first aid courses throughout the country.