How to Stop Yawning (and Why It Keeps Happening at Work)

The fastest answer to how to stop yawning comes from a 2007 study at the University at Albany. Andrew Gallup and Gordon Gallup Jr. sat college students in front of videos of people yawning and counted how many yawned along. About half of the students who breathed normally or through their mouths caught the yawn. The students told to breathe only through their nose didn't yawn at all.

So close your mouth and breathe slowly through your nose. The other tricks below were each tested on rooms full of volunteers.

How to stop yawning immediately

1. Breathe in and out through your nose. In the Gallups' first experiment (published in Evolutionary Psychology, May 2007), nose breathing took contagious yawning from around 50% of the group down to zero.
2. Put something cold on your forehead. In their second experiment, students holding a cold pack to the forehead yawned far less than those holding a warm or room temperature pack. Live Science reported the split as 9% against 41%. A cold can or a chilled water bottle pressed above your eyebrows is the office version.
3. Chew gum. Andrew Gallup and his co-author Engert filmed 110 students watching a 227-second yawning video in 2019. Nearly 60% of the plain group yawned. Only 23.8% of the gum chewers did, and their longest yawns ran 3.52 seconds against 5.83 seconds in the plain group. Students sucking on a mint also yawned less often than the plain group.
4. Get up and walk for ten minutes. Robert Thayer at California State University, Long Beach had 18 volunteers either eat a candy bar or walk briskly for ten minutes. After the walk, their self-rated energy went up and stayed up for the full two hours he measured. After the candy bar, energy rose and then fell about an hour later.

Gum has a second piece of evidence. In a 2020 report, Gallup described a 75-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man who had long bouts of yawning, up to 25 yawns in a row. In both, chewing gum in the middle of a bout stopped it straight away.

Live Science also lists a glass of ice water, on the same cooling idea as the cold pack. It's the easiest one to do with a meeting already running.

Why do we yawn?

Andrew Gallup's research points to temperature. A yawn pulls in a big breath of air and stretches the jaw hard, and his team's work links that to cooler blood heading to the brain. Gordon Gallup told the Naked Scientists in July 2007 that changing the oxygen or carbon dioxide people breathe leaves yawning unchanged. That fits work from Robert Provine at the University of Maryland in 1987, where students breathing 3% or 5% carbon dioxide, or pure oxygen, breathed faster but yawned no more often.

The clearest test came in 2014. Jorg Massen, Kim Dusch and Andrew Gallup asked pedestrians in Vienna, Austria, to look at pictures of people yawning, then compared the results with an identical study in Arizona (published in Physiology & Behavior). Contagious yawning peaked when the air was around 20°C. It dropped near 37°C in an Arizona summer and near freezing in a Vienna winter. People in Vienna yawned more in summer. People in Arizona yawned more in winter.

A human yawn lasts about six seconds. In a 2016 study in Biology Letters, Gallup's team timed 109 yawning animals from 19 species on YouTube, and people had the longest yawns of all, about 6.5 seconds.

Why am I always yawning at work?

An office hits two triggers at once. The first is the room. If your office is kept around 20°C, it sits right on the mark where the Vienna and Arizona data put contagious yawning at its highest.

The second is boredom. In a 2025 interview with Johns Hopkins, Andrew Gallup said there is "some basis for yawning being linked to low levels of stimulation and boredom." Provine showed it with teenagers. Students aged 17 to 19 who watched a plain color test pattern yawned 5.78 times in 30 minutes. Students watching a fast music video yawned 3.41 times.

Then one person yawns and it goes round the table. Provine made a five-minute video of repeated yawns, and about 55% of the people who watched it yawned. The rate held even when the yawning mouths were blocked out. Gordon Gallup's view is that catching yawns kept groups alert together, so when one person's brain runs warm, everyone gets the signal.

If you want to know how to stop yawning so much across a whole afternoon, start with the room. Open a window or turn the heating down a couple of degrees, and stand for the next call. Our post on getting through the afternoon slump has more ideas for that stretch of the day.

How to stop yawning at work, one spray at a time

Gum is slow and it's awkward to unwrap mid-sentence. Dragon Breath is a 50 ml mouth spray made from chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a root from Central Mexico, and it lives in your pocket next to your keys.

One spray onto the tongue and it tastes earthy and a little peppery for a second. Within about 10 seconds a bright, electric buzz spreads across the tongue and mouth. Then your mouth floods. The saliva comes fast and you swallow it down, and when it settles there's a clean, fresh feeling that stays for a while. Most people come out of those ten seconds switched on and looking at whoever is talking.

One customer tried it on camera for a reaction video. Moments after one spray, they said, "Definitely energized."

Dragon Breath – Chilcuague Extract

50 ml mouth spray. Wild-harvested chilcuague root, dual-extracted. 250+ sprays.

Add to bag

The buzz comes from affinin (also called spilanthol), measured by HPLC at 6.9 to 8.5 mg per gram of chilcuague root. In the Sierra Gorda of Guanajuato, Querétaro and San Luis Potosí, people have chewed the root and cooked with it for generations, and they call it raíz de oro, golden root. Our full guide to chilcuague covers the plant and where it grows.

The root in Dragon Breath is wild-harvested from growth zones the Mara team selects with the help of local elders, then dual-extracted in organic solutions. A spray makes sense for something you'll use in a meeting. A few sprays is all it takes, the bottle holds 250+ of them, and the extract stays sealed inside Miron violet glass, away from air and light, where loose root or powder would sit open in a bag.

Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five.

Dragon Breath considerations

The product page recommends this: "If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it."

Questions people ask

Can you stop a yawn halfway through?

Partly. Robert Provine found that clenching your teeth during a yawn stops you finishing it. Breathing through your nose as soon as you feel one coming is easier.

Why is yawning contagious?

Gordon Gallup's explanation is that catching yawns kept groups alert together, since a yawn signals a brain running warm. In Provine's tests, about 55% of people yawned while watching five minutes of yawning faces.

Does yawning mean you need more oxygen?

Provine's 1987 experiments say no. Students given extra carbon dioxide or pure oxygen breathed faster but yawned no more often, and exercise didn't change how often they yawned either.

How long does a yawn last?

About six seconds on average. In Gallup's 2016 study of 19 species, human yawns came out longest at around 6.5 seconds.