Confessions Of A Serial Fainter: The Weird Science Behind Fainting & How To Stay Upright
I’m standing in Biology class, watching as my teacher scrapes along a piece of bone marrow. Everyone is looking on in a state of barely sustained interest but I am absolutely wired. I can feel a faint coming and I’m starting to freak out. Adrenaline is coursing through my veins, and my heart feels like it’s about to crack open my ribcage. I can already hear my friends mocking me, forever labelled as that kid who fainted in year 9 science. Social suicide.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Cameron Nicholls and I am a serial fainter.
Over the course of my life I have fainted countless times — in hospitals, after a bleeding nose in public, in cars after vaccinations (quite a terrifying sight apparently, considering I was convulsing in a seatbelt) and worst of all: at school. The cause? Most episodes can be attributed to fainting at the sight of blood but in reality it’s a lot more complicated than that. But we’ll get to that.
I try to mask my panic as I ask the teacher if I can go to the toilet. My request is denied. I start fiddling with my hair, compulsively opening my pencil case, clicking a pen like an absolute maniac. Anything to try and distract myself. Little specs of black are beginning to invade my vision. Oh god here it comes. I ignore my teacher and sprint out of the class.
Black.
I open my eyes and for a second I can’t remember where I am, disoriented by a brief but vivid dream. Oh how I wish I could crawl back into that dream. In reality, I’m sprawled pathetically on my front, limbs contorted on the concrete just 2 metres out the door of my classroom. Thankfully, I’m obscured by the waist high brick wall below the window.
When my eyes adjust I can see a classmate bending over me looking slightly bemused.
“What happened…?” He asks.
“Oh… I must have tripped,” I reply. Somehow he buys it.
I stumble to the bathroom groggily and gaze in the mirror. I look like I’ve been in a punch up. My face is whiter than a redhead who hasn’t seen the sun in a year and I have a wound the size of a 10 cent coin just above my lip, not to mention the scrapes along my jawline.
I sheepishly head back to class, where a sea of puzzled faces greets me.
“Oh my god what happened to you?”
My brain scrambles.
“Oh this?” I say, gesturing towards my battered face. “I just um… fell up the stairs.”
To this day I still have no idea why I said fell *up* the stairs rather than down. I think I thought that falling down the stairs would be too dramatic. Needless to say, I may have avoided a reputation for fainting, I gained one for falling up the stairs. That suited me just fine. I guess it’s true that when you lie, it helps to make up something embarrassing to make it seem more believable. To this day, only a handful of people actually know what really happened (until now anyway).
This certainly wasn’t the only time. I once fainted visiting my Grandmother in hospital, effectively stealing the limelight as nurses attended to me passed out on the floor while my sick Grandmother looked on. I once even defied established medical science by fainting whilst lying down after I was given an injection for anaesthetic. The anaesthetic hadn’t even kicked in yet and I was already out cold, causing the doctors to believe I was having an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic. Before I went under I had warned them several times I was a serial fainter, to which they all assured me it was impossible to faint lying down. Proved them wrong.
Serial Fainters
I’m not alone as a serial fainter. Around 30% of people will faint in their lifetimes, with about 3% of people experiencing repeated fainting episodes. There are a range of triggers from the obvious to the seriously bizarre. People have been known to faint from swallowing, urinating or pooing, the sound of trumpet playing or even having their hair brushed or cut.
Fainting at the sight of blood is far more common though. Personally, I’ve never really given the condition much thought. I believed it was a biological anomaly that I was unfortunate enough to possess. But is there more to it?
Turns out doctors aren’t really sure.
Most doctors agree that rather than being a purely physical response to seeing blood, fainting at the sight of blood is actually a phobia. It’s part of a fun little group called blood-injection-injury (BII) phobias. The reaction to all phobias starts the same — whether it be spiders, snakes or needles. Blood pressure and heart rate spikes as the body activates its flight or fight response. This is the feeling of being wired just moments before fainting as panic sets in. Almost paradoxically for BII fainters, immediately following this our heart rate plummets causing dizziness, sweating, heart rate, tunnel vision, nausea and potential lifelong embarrassment — otherwise known as fainting.
Why?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself countless times in the second before my knees buckle in and I slump to the floor. Turns out scientists don’t have a much better idea either. Some scientists have hypothesised that it is an evolutionary trait that is passed down genetically. For example, if you were out hunting an ox and you slice you foot open with a spear, low blood pressure would reduce blood loss and increase your survival prospects. Others have suggested different evolutionary purposes. Dr Fred Jaeger from the Syncope Centre in Ohio suggests that if a caveman had cut your arm off, fainting would have fooled them into thinking you were dead, hopefully preventing them from killing you. This would have to be one of the more pointless evolutionary traits, in my opinion, considering it would likewise cause entire armies to simultaneously collapse at the sight of blood on the battlefield and render them useless.
A correlation to anxiety
Most experts agree that a propensity to faint tends to cluster with anxiety. However, no-one really knows whether people faint because they’re anxious or whether they are anxious because they faint.
Allow me to weigh in. I may not know the science behind it, but I can tell you that as soon as you start to freak out about the prospect of fainting, it’s probably already too late. Staying calm is crucial if you want to avoid dropping like a pin. This explains why many people, including myself, don’t faint when they get a bleeding nose alone in their room, but they might collapse if the same thing happened in front of a room full of other people. The panic is triggered more from the prospect of social embarrassment rather than the physical fainting itself — and the sheer powerlessness of the whole situation. In this way it can mirror a panic attack — although unless you have a history of fainting, it’s very unlikely you will faint from panicking alone considering your blood pressure spikes.
Please help me — even this talk of blood is making me feel woozy
There are actually several ways to reduce the chance of fainting, few of which I knew before I started researching this article. Essentially what you need to do is direct blood to your head. It’s just a pity our heads sit right at the top of our bodies.
If you feel like you’re about to faint, follow these steps:
1. Don’t panic
As soon as you start thinking you will faint, you probably will. Keep calm and think about something else. I’ve come back from the brink before by distracting myself with my phone and trying to breathe normally. Hyperventilating is not at all helpful in this situation.
2. Lie down
If possible, the best thing to do is lie down. This automatically directs blood flow to your head making it nearly impossible to faint (although not impossible as I can attest). If you’re anything like me though, the thought of spontaneously lying down in a room full of people is about as embarrassing as actually fainting. If so, proceed to the next strategy.
3. Squat down
Pretend you’ve dropped something and crouch down. The blood from your legs will hopefully make its way up to your head. Just don’t think about that happening or you’ll probably faint.
4. Cross your legs and tense your muscles
If you don’t want to squat down, cross your legs and tense as many muscles as you can. This should also promote blood flow to your head.
5. Drink water half an hour before you might be exposed to a trigger
This can help tighten the blood vessels making it harder to experience a sudden loss in blood pressure.
6. Head to a psychiatrist or a psychologist
If all that fails, a trip to the psychiatrist might be on the cards. Applied-tension therapy is an effective way to treat most phobias, including blood-injection-injury phobias. Patients are gradually exposed to their phobias — for example in the case of arachnophobia, patients are exposed to a picture of a spider, then a plastic spider, then a small spider in a jar, eventually reaching a point where they can hold one in their hands. In the case of blood, patients start with a picture of an orange dot and lead up watching blood drip on the screen in front of them. This is completed while the patient tenses their muscles and breathes calmly as a coping mechanism.
John Sanford who suffered from a blood phobia, underwent this treatment and found that he completely overcame his phobia — eventually able to prick his own finger and watch the blood ooze without even a mild response.
So my fellow fainters, there is hope. I myself have never tried any of these remedies, bar one time when I frantically tensed my toes for about ten seconds before I collapsed. However, it seems many of these do work very well.
But if all else fails, you can follow the last option — accept your fate. Have a seat, put down anything valuable you’re holding and look forward to the deceptively long and vivid dream you’re about to experience. I’ve had some absolute bangers.
Plus you can look forward to all the attention and lollies you’ll receive once you wake up.
Originally published by Cameron Nicholls at The Vocal
