Insight on stuffy noses

As I've been fighting the Battle for De-Congestion this week, I did some research on what makes a stuffy nose, well, stuffy.  My inspiration for this highly scientific research question came from my observation that I had been blowing my nose all day, nothing was coming out (or hardly anything), and I was still stuffy.  It seemed to me that mucus was not the cause of my stuffy nose. And guess what? I was right!

According to Medline Plus, nasal congestion is not the result of thick mucus; it is from inflamed blood vessels. Inflamed blood vessels?! Then why have I always just blown my nose? Blowing your nose is actually one of the things that can make a stuffy nose stay stuffy for longer. It continues to inflame your blood vessels. Interesting.

Once I learned that I was exacerbating the problem by blowing my nose every ten minutes, I put my Charmin toilet paper squares away, and did a Google search for how to clear a stuffy nose, since obviously blowing your nose does not do anything to clear it.

I fell upon a useful wikiHow site: 3 Ways to Clear a Stuffy Nose.  Since it was about 11pm at this point and I didn't want to do any of the more complicated remedies (salt water, warm washcloth, etc.), I did the first recommendation after 1) Stop blowing your nose, which is "2) Before you buy anything, try breathing in deeply, then slowly exhaling all of your air. Hold your breath until you are empty.  Pinch your nose to avoid accidentally breathing out.  Rock your head back and forth slowly taking 2 seconds from looking at the sky to looking at the ground.  Repeat until you absolutely have to take a breath. Your nose should be decongested."  And hallelujah, it worked!

Why on earth would such a strange thing work? The wikiHow explains, "The way this method works is that your brain realizes that you need to breathe, so it opens up your nasal passages by lessening the blood flow to your nose.  Typically the congestion is caused by increased blood flow to that area-that's why you can blow your nose and nothing comes out."

Then I experienced the second most annoying thing about nasal congestion: I can breath out of one nostril but not the other. Why?  I did another search and learned that our nostrils are almost always "taking turns" so to speak. One nostril works harder than the other and then they switch so that our sense of smell is more complete (something about scent molecules breaking down at different rates from each other...), and so that our nose stays nicely filtered and humidified.

In conclusion: The nose is more cool than I thought. I don't need to ever waste my time with blowing my nose when it's congested again and I hope you won't either.