Our audible exhalations can send out so many different messages to others… it’s almost breathtaking, says Tom Hodgkinson

Enslav’d, the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation / Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs towards America
– William Blake, “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”

Sometimes I feel I should stop sighing. I’m tempted to sigh quite a lot: on resting my weary head on the pillow at night, or when listening to the news, or when sinking down into an armchair.

But I’m now making an effort to hold back the sighs, as sighing seems akin to self-pity, and also because sighing is seen in some quarters as an aggressive act. In May of this year, sighing made the news. A judge deemed that an employee had been discriminated against by his sighing boss. “A worker was subject to disability discrimination after his manager repeatedly sighed and made ‘exaggerated exhales’, an employment tribunal has found,” reported the magazine Personnel Today. Turns out the boss was sighing in a pointed fashion: he wanted to make his displeasure at the employee’s bad timekeeping habits known.

And a friend says that his twentysomething son finds his Dad’s loud huffings and puffings intensely irritating.

But exaggerated exhales (along with weeping and wailing) have a long and noble history. The Bible seems to think it was OK. Job was a great sigher: “Sighing has become my daily food; my groans pour out like water” (Job 3:24, NIV). One of the Psalms seems to celebrate sighing three times a day: “Evening and morning and at noon I will complain and murmur, And He will hear my voice.” Your sighing may annoy your work colleagues, but God will hear it.

We should perhaps be more sympathetic to the sighers. A recent piece in Psychology Today magazine speculated that sighing has a practical purpose: “Perhaps frequent sighing helps people mired in negative emotions constantly reset to a manageable emotional state.” Sighing makes us feel better.

Sighing is strange because sighing can express joy as well as sadness. A sigh might accompany a feeling of exultation: “Ahhhh, I’m feeling so happy!” Or we might sigh when in love. I often sigh with joy after my first sip of St Austell Tribute in the evening.

So I suppose we need to subdivide our sighs. There is the woeful sigh, the joyful sigh, the bittersweet sigh and the purely physical sigh.

Tell me, do you enjoy sighing, or do you think it’s an annoying habit which should be suppressed?

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Sir: I have a 1970s childhood memory of a school assembly given by an austere and matronly headteacher. We all compliantly filed in to the school hall where she proceeded to talk about heaven. She said that we are all born with a beautiful garden of our own in heaven. Six-year-old me wistfully gazed into the distance imagining such a thing. She then said, and this is the bit I remember, that every time we sigh a flower dies. I distinctly remember taking a sharp intake of breath at this. When I breathed out, I was confused if that was classed as a sigh. A quietly terrifying assembly, and I have no concept then or now what the context of this was, other than I feared that sighing was bad, bordering on terrible. I’m still mindful of sighing to this day. Exhale responsibly!
Belinda Fletcher

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