Why crowded meetings and conference rooms make you so tired
We've all been there: You're one hour in a meeting in a crowded conference room. The air is thick with warm breath and thickens per minute. You're trying to be aware, but you're so, so tired. If only you could just close your eyes for a short second …
But just as you're about to devour, the boss says it's time to unpack and the contestants jump out of their chairs. Some open the door and the cool fresh air washes over you, and suddenly you are back to yourself.
The tough, dizzying, suffocating feeling? It's not just in your head, something underlined in this week when an astronomer took a carbon dioxide monitor to an academic conference where 100 people were stowed into a dense lecture hall. The screen's production tells a wonderful little story of what happens to the air quality in a room when you hold a bunch of exhalation of people into it.
Our story begins at 9:05 am Tuesday when astronomer Adam Ginsburg of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory took up a session during the "Linking the Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies" conference in Helsinki. Ginsburg said in an email that he is taking a portable carbon dioxide "everywhere", especially "crowded meeting rooms."
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Ginsburg turned the screen on. Ambient indoor air tends to contain about 800 ppm of dioxide. But the carbon dioxide level rises rapidly in poorly ventilated rooms, because the exhaled air is about 4 percent carbon dioxide in volume. In the lecture hall of Helsinki, the monitor showed that the concentration quickly reaches the 1000 ppm threshold where a room begins to feel close to most, according to the US heating, cooling and air conditioning engineers.
As the talks continued, the carbon dioxide level continued to rise. At 1500 ppm, Ginsburg characterized the room as "noticeably stuffy." At 10:20, the reading had spiked past 1700 ppm.
Then there happened two things: Participants took a 30-minute coffee break at. 10:50, and the organizers used that time to open the windows. The fresh air combined with the departure of dozens of carbon dioxide-emitting humans sent carbon dioxide levels down, just below 600 ppm, in minutes. When the session resumed, the windows remained open and carbon dioxide remained within 1000-100 ppm.
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Recent research has shown that there is much more at stake in these situations than the toughness, discomfort and crawling scent of what your colleagues ate for lunch. Too much carbon dioxide is, for example, correlated with an increased sense of drowsiness in the office settings.
It has then been found that carbon dioxide can quite literally make you stupid: "There is significant evidence that the performance of challenging decision-making tests and challenging flight simulations is exacerbated by [carbon dioxide] concentrations as low as 1000 ppm," as researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory summarizes in its review of the literature.
Other research on air quality in schools and offices shows that the levels routinely exceed this limit. A 2002 study by two schools in Texas, for example, found that 88 percent of the studied classrooms had peak carbon dioxide levels above 1000 ppm. The levels exceeded 3,000 ppm in 21 percent of the classrooms.
Researchers are likely to place greater emphasis on the effect of indoor carbon dioxide in the coming years. Ambient atmospheric carbon dioxide has climbed around 100 parts per million since 1958, striking a record 414 ppm last month. The increase is expected to continue over the next few decades, potentially affecting 1,000 ppm by 2100. If that happens, it will create indoor carbon dioxide levels much higher, with possibly devastating ramifications for people's ability to think and work.
