Can you actually suffocate to death from holding your breath? There's a video of a guy passing out from holding his breath, who apparently didn't start breathing until people yelled at him to breathe.

There's a common saying that you can't die from holding your breath, because once you pass out, the autonomic nervous system takes over and you'll start breathing again.

The inspiration for this question is this video of a guy who apparently almost died from holding his breath too long, and being told to breathe while he was blacked out is what saved his life. People in the comments are praising the rescuers for saving the guy's life by slapping him and shouting at him to breathe after he passed out from holding his breath, and are acting like had the rescuers not yelled at him to breathe, he surely would've died.

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No. You can sorta do it until you pass out and then your involuntary nervous system takes over and your body breathes on its own because you’re not conscious anymore.
- When my child started holding her breath when tantruming the doctor made sure to tell us not to worry and that if they manage to hold their breath until they pass out they'll start breathing as soon as they go unconscious. Kids are wild
- In the video the guy apparently was passed out, but didn't start to breathe until the rescuers yelled at him to breathe. People in the comments are acting like the guy would've died had the rescuers not yelled at him to breathe.
  
  If the person was unconscious, what would yelling actually do?
  
  Correct, yelling and chanting does nothing, they slapped him to a functional enough state that he managed to regain control of his faculties
  
  It's commonly done in some specific cases of people not breathing. Sleep apnea and opioid drug overdoses are two immediate examples I can think of.
  With opioid drug overdoses, stimulation in general can be (temporarily) effective if they haven't taken too much. Usually, they require more stimulation, such as sternal rubs or trapezius pinching, but I have seen cases where they needed someone to shout at them every 30 seconds or so.
  
  The video is showing something called a freediving blackout, it’s a condition that gets triggered in divers such as the one shown, plus other factors such as hyperventilating prior to the dive.
  What happens in this case is the person loses consciousness because they don’t feel the need to breathe as they have purged a lot of the CO2 the body has prior, giving them “room” to not feel the urge to breathe.
  Again, as specified previously, assuming the person doesn’t die of anything immediate in the water, the body simply stops breathing.
  The problem is when it starts again.
  Your body, once “jolted awake” by the involuntary nervous system, will try to breathe, and it doesn’t know or care that you might still be underwater since you stopped swimming and didn’t get out of the water in time or weren’t rescued or washed ashore on some deserted island.
  If you’re out of the water at this point, you’re fine, usually. If you’re still underwater, you breathe in (involuntarily) a bunch of the water (or a bunch of “nothing” if you got your holes plugged) and that’s what kills you.
  Kind of ironic that in an attempt to preserve your life, your own involuntary bodily function is what ends up being the final nail.

13 comments