What holding your breathe does to your body?
Breathing is a reflex, and we do it about 19,000 times a day without even thinking. But when we hold our breath, or our breathing is cut off, say by plunging a little too far into the deep-end, a few things happen in our body.
Please, don’t try this at home.
We breathe to take in oxygen, which is used to power our cells so they get energy. In this process, the cells release carbon dioxide, which we breath out. When you hold your breath, residual carbon dioxide that would ordinarily be exhaled starts to accumulate in your body.
Your brain senses that it needs oxygen, and when you can’t take it in, the buildup starts to become painful. First, you’ll feel a burning in your lungs, then, after more time, involuntary and unbearably painful spasms in your diaphragm and the muscles around your ribs, along with lightheadedness.
The thing is, you won’t die just from holding your breath alone. If you hold your breath long enough to lose consciousness, your autonomic nervous system, which regulates your breathing, blood pressure, and other automatic functions, would kick back in to get you breathing again. Of course, this assumes that you aren’t underwater and are able to breathe in.
If you do hold your breath underwater, your body also experiences what’s called the mammalian diving reflex. It tries to preserve oxygen for its most important organs, like the brain and the heart, by slowing down your heart rate and reducing blood flow to the limbs. This is essentially your body’s ‘power save mode’ to help you decrease oxygen consumption.
According to a paper published by the American Physiological Society, likely all mammals and possibly all vertebrates have similar diving reflexes. But the mammalian diving reflex can only be triggered by cold water on the face, which is why people can hold their breath longer underwater than say, when they’re driving through a tunnel.
The free diver Ale is Segura Vendrell currently holds the world record for breath-holding at just over 24 minutes but he achieved this after filling his lungs with pure oxygen first. Without that, the record for longest breath holding in is Branko Petrovic at a measly 11 minutes, 54 seconds. Which isn’t really measly at all.
Seriously, don’t try this at home.
It’s unclear if there’s any permanent damage from repeatedly holding your breath. One study of divers in The Clinical Neuropsychologist Showed no long term neurological damages in divers. But another study by The American Physiological Society did find that divers had an elevated level of the protein S100B, which could bea marker for brain damage. It’s important to note that these studies we're done on small numbers of participants, so you know the line -- more research is needed.
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
Do not enter spam links or verbal abuse. ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon