If you’ve been to the top of a mountain, you probably know the air is thinner up there. I recently described this experience like so:
If you climb up a mountain or go up in an airplane, the constant pressure pushing in from all directions goes down. There’s just not so much of the atmosphere here, in that imaginary column above you. That’s why your ears will pop: a sensitive cavity in there called the middle ear will expand when the pressure outside goes down, so a little tube that connects your ears to your throat opens up, helping to relieve the pressure on your eardrum.
That’s why yawning or chewing gum can help relieve inner ear pressure due to changes in elevation.
If you’ve been to the top of Machu Pichu in Peru, you know what 8,000 feet feels like. Some ski resorts and other high places in the US are at the even more perilous 10,000 foot level, where altitude sickness kicks into high gear.
Altitude was a serious limitation for airplanes right from the start. While Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flight went up only about 120 feet (like 37 meters), this was probably more due to not wanting to become a splat on the ground. However, people quickly gained in confidence and knowledge as World War I began to employ spy planes and even a few early bombers. Ever higher we went, and altitude became more and more of an issue.
In order to address this, airplane manufacturers ultimately developed the pressurized cabin in the 1930s. Prior to that, pilots just couldn’t fly any higher than 10,000 feet or so. The second World War once again blasted aviation forward, and by the end of the war, these cabins were beginning to become standard for military use planes. By the 1960s, they were standard in passenger jets.
This lower pressure allowed humans to fly much, much higher. Today, commercial jets cruise between 30,000 and 40,000 feet (around the 10 KM range), allowing them to take full advantage of better fuel efficiency due to less air resistance.
If something goes tragically wrong up there, or even if there’s a concern that something might be going wrong, though, the pressure isn’t the immediate concern.
We need oxygen in our bloodstream in order to produce energy. Now, when I say energy here, I don’t mean Crossfit and jumping jack energy. I’m talking about the energy we need in order for our most basic biological systems to function.
The immediate and urgent problem with the air being thinner isn’t just that it exerts a much lower pressure on you, but rather that there’s less oxygen in the air. To be clear, there’s less of everything in the air, not just O2, but we are focused on that oxygen.
Naturally, then, a flight attendant has already warned the passengers (before takeoff) that something like this might happen, so everyone knows the oft-repeated mantra:
Put your own oxygen mask on before helping other people.
Hypoxia comes from the ancient Greek words hypo (not enough) and the word oxia, which eventually became associated with oxygen over time. It’s not something most of us want to experience.
Early symptoms of even mild hypoxia are alarming. Your heart starts pumping more blood right away; after all, it exists for the sole purpose of pumping oxygen throughout your body, and your body certainly knows when this isn’t happening.
Because there’s not enough oxygen reaching your brain, you start feeling a little lightheaded. You might even feel a little bit of euphoria, kind of like a head rush from drinking or using drugs, maybe. This can mask the deadly danger you’re in, making you feel as though you are in complete control of your mind.
You are definitely no longer in control of your mind. Any urgent decisions are going to seem really smart, but they’re probably going to be really, really dumb. Your lips and skin start turning blue, and your head is pounding. Is that… is that nausea washing over you as you lose your ability to see? Yikes.
Incidentally, if you enjoy dives like this into terrible things that can happen to you over time, you might really enjoy some of
’s writing. Here, he writes about what it’s like when your body overheats like an egg white as it boils.Put your own oxygen mask on before helping other people.
Over the last thirty years or so, the mantra has grown outside of airplanes and into a useful metaphor that anyone who has flown can grasp. While most of the world’s population has never been in an airplane, the overwhelming majority of Americans have flown, and I’m betting you’ve been up in the air if you’re reading this.
Many of us would roll our eyes and make jokes during the preflight routine, cynically dismissing most of it as nonsense that wouldn’t help anyway, but even in doing so, we further cemented the mantra in our minds.
Today, it’s often given as self-help advice. The idea is that you need to take care of yourself first, or else you won’t have the capacity to help others effectively.
Instead of hypoxia, you might be dealing with emotional trauma that makes trying to help anyone else a black-hole endeavor. Maybe you’ve got so much on your own plate that offering to help someone else means that something important in your life will go undone.
Whatever it is that’s going on in your life, the advice reminds us that we should take care of ourselves first. Now, people who want to hear a certain thing are going to hear that, no matter what:
However, that’s not what I’m saying at all. We don’t need to be so cynical, because this is actually about helping other folks out. It’s just that you have to make sure that you’ve got your own life under control.
Another part of this cautionary mantra is that you can actually make things worse in helping someone else, particularly if your mind isn’t clear due to unresolved issues in your own life.
No, this isn’t about greed. This is about effective altruism.
Fun fact 1: Cusco is higher in elevation than Machu Pichu
Fun fact 2: Airplanes are pressured to the equivilant of 9000ft, not sea level.
Func fact 3: Cabin pressure control systems to maintain that pressure are incredibly precise and are maintained by the bleed air from the engines .
As always, great work (and this is a topic I'm diving into next season of my newsletter, so I'll be sure to link to this piece). And thank you so much for the shout-out, Andrew!