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As a SciShow viewer, you can use our link to grow your language skills with Babbel for up to 60% off and a 20 day money-back guarantee. Sneezing is a part of life.

Whether it’s from allergies or a cold, sneezing is your body’s  natural reflex to remove stuff that shouldn’t be inside your nose. And it’s a pretty forceful eviction. When you sneeze, you’re exhaling a stream of air at up to 23 meters per second.

That puts about 41 kg of force on your chest, which is similar to a mid-level  intensity bench press. That much force can do drastic  things to your body, from making you lose your hearing to  increasing your blood pressure. If that kind of thing makes you squeamish, you might need to watch this  video through your fingers.

These aren’t just stories your older sibling would tell you to freak you out during allergy season. Everything in this video has  really happened to at least one person and been reported in  peer reviewed academic journals. So get ready to learn about  five of the weirdest things that have ever happened to people after a sneeze! [♪ INTRO] One of the most popular legends about sneezing is that it can pop your eye out of its socket, only to be left dangling on your cheek like you’re starring in the next  zombie apocalypse movie.

And we’ve already made a SciShow video generally debunking the idea that this can  happen to you out of nowhere. But it turns out that a  sneeze can dislocate your eye. It’s called a blow-out fracture, which, I know, sounds like exactly what I  just told you doesn’t happen.

But it just means that enough air has built up behind your eye socket to  make the eye stick out a bit, not pop out entirely. In one case, a 32 year old was seeking medical advice for their swollen eye. It was very much still in the  socket, just, you know, kinda puffy.

The air pressure from their  sneeze was forceful enough to damage their orbital wall, which is made of the bones  on the rim of the eye socket. So the top and bottom part of  their eye socket was still intact, but the side was pushed a bit out of place. Normally, this kind of injury happens when you’ve been hit in the eye socket or you’ve banged your forehead against something.

But this person’s eye started  swelling after they just sneezed. While it’s definitely not  comfortable, this is generally the kind of thing that sorts  itself out within two weeks. And you won’t shoot your eye out.

Eye pain after a sneeze might  not be a massive health concern. But chest pain that crawls up your neck and into your back for three hours  is a horse of a different color. Especially when it affects  your ability to breathe.

That’s what happened to a 57 year old whose super-powered sneeze ended up tearing their aorta! You know, that really  important artery on your heart where your blood flows out  to the rest of your body?! Physicians suspect that this  extreme response to sneezing was helped along by something  called the Valsalva maneuver, which you’ve probably done before.

If you plug your nose when you sneeze, you’re already familiar with it. When your sneeze is pushing air  out while you clog its exits,  it can increase your blood pressure even more than sneezing already does on its own. Like I mentioned earlier,  sneezing exerts a lot of pressure.

And plugging your nose just adds to it. But you don’t really want to mess  around with your blood pressure because tearing your aorta could be fatal. Luckily, not in this case.

This person was given blood  pressure medication and recovered, leaving them with quite the  story to tell at dinner parties. For some people, that kind of event changes their whole approach to sneezing. This next lifelong  nose-pinch-sneezer swore off the Valsalva maneuver after losing  their hearing from a sneeze.

When a 32 year old suppressed their sneeze, they likely created an explosive  force on the inside of their ear at the tympanic membrane, leading  one of their ear bones to break. The tympanic membrane is  also known as your eardrum, and it’s the barrier between the outside world and your delicate little ear bones. When sound waves come into your ear, they vibrate the tympanic membrane, which then transmits those vibrations to the malleus, incus, and stapes bones.

But if one of those bones gets broken, then you can lose hearing in that ear. Injuries to the malleus bone are mostly caused when you jam something into your ear. And, while it’s very rare to break or bruise your malleus via a sneeze, it’s still been reported multiple  times in scientific journals.

And a lifetime of Valsalva  maneuvers might even weaken the malleus by overpressurizing the  inner ear and causing it to inflate, which could make you more susceptible to sneeze-related hearing loss. But, in a marvel of modern medicine, doctors can restore hearing by  patching up the broken bone. So after a surgery, you can make a full recovery and hear just like before!

Some of these sneeze effects are life threatening. But fortunately, some turn out to be much less so than they could have been. This is one of those.

You see, this patient broke their neck. To be clear, it wasn’t the kind of neck break that you see combat fighters do in the movies. Instead, the 35-year-old patient experienced what’s called a laryngeal fracture.

Your larynx is your throat  pipe that air flows through so you can do things like  breathing, swallowing, and talking. That means this person broke  some cartilage in their neck, but not any of the bones in their spine. Since many of these sneezing snafus are caused by increased air pressure, it makes sense that the part of  your neck where air travels through is the part that’s most  vulnerable to sneeze damage.

And ultimately, that damage was pretty bad. It was brought on by a quote  “violent sneezing fit” unquote. Now, it takes about five times  more force to fracture your larynx than you’d generate sneezing,  even with your mouth closed.

But it’s possible that your body  position after a violent sneeze could distribute that force in a  certain way that breaks your larynx. While it can be life-threatening, this case turned out to be pretty mild. The only medical attention needed  was to monitor the situation and make sure nothing escalated.

Luckily, the patient appeared totally fine at the two-month follow-up visit. It’s important to note that  everyone I’ve talked about in this video ended up okay. Some of these people a-choo-ed their way into really dangerous and scary complications, so these case studies are nothing to sneeze at.

But they all came away from  the experience with the same amount of bodily function that they entered with. And this final story is a triumphant  tale in which our main character leaves a sneeze better off than they were before. This story begins with a 63 year  old who had inflamed sinuses.

When they went to the dentist and then to the doctor to get those sinuses checked out, they learned that one of their dental implants had found its way into their sinuses. Turns out, that happens more  often than you might think. But the way this person removed  their implant was the weird part.

Usually, you need to have a surgery to get all up in your sinuses and take the implant out. And this person was ready  to go through all of that, having prepped with antibiotics and medicines that break down the mucus in there. But two days after starting  that course of medicine, they sneezed out the implant!

See, the maxillary sinuses sit  directly above the back molars, so as the implant migrated upwards, it ended up lodged into that sinus. But the sinuses are also  connected to the nose through openings called ostia, so the  implant had a nice escape route too. So this story had a happy ending when they got to cancel surgery without any symptoms a week later!

For all of the problems that sneezing can cause, sometimes a good stream of pressure is the solution you didn’t realize you needed. There are so many weird things that can happen to your body when you sneeze. But most of the time, it’s just  another trip to wash your hands.

All of the events I just covered are pretty rare. So there’s no need for this  video to keep you up at night. Which is good news, since  it’s not exactly possible to stop yourself from sneezing  for the rest of your life.

If anything, you might steer clear of the Valsalva maneuver when you do. This SciShow video is supported by Babbel, the #1 language learning app in the world. And it’s #1 because people have fun using Babbel.

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