FFAF: How to Hold Your Breath for 20 Minutes

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Could you hold your breath for this entire Free for All Friday? Believe it or not, there are some people who can do that, and we’re going to find out the secret of how they’re able to perform this amazing feat. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics, theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. Today I want to talk about how to hold your breath. Now the inspiration for this came from my family and I. We all went to the pool last week and of course something you do during summer, right? I think a lot of people, you’ve done this because it’s the middle of July, it’s hot. You go to the pool, you swim around, you have fun. You tell the kids, “Hey, no running, no splashing.”

When you’re at the pool, a lot of times people say, “Hey, let’s have a breath holding contest.” You get ready and you go and do it. My wife and I love watching this YouTuber, Dude Dad. He has a video about kids at the pool and he nails it perfectly. He shows the kids like buying candy, running around the pool, being really gross. Little kids always try to do breath holding contests. They’ll say, “Time me as I try to hold my breath.” Then he holds his breath and goes under and only lasts four seconds, like those four seconds. “Oh, okay, let me try again. One, two, that was two seconds. That was worse.” When you see little kids, ages like five to eight, try to hold their breath, they can only make it usually like 10 or 15 seconds.

Then my wife and I started to get really competitive. She went and held her breath. There’s different rules that people have. Some people say, “Oh, you got to be sitting on the bottom of the pool.” We just do the static, you can float on the top, your face just has to be under the water. She was there and she was floating on the surface of the pool. I thought, “Okay, we’ll see how long she can do that.” I think I started. I went first and I made it about 45 seconds. Then she goes, and then she beats me and her sister was encouraging her. “Five more seconds. You’re going to beat Trent. You’re going to beat Trent. Five more seconds. You’re almost at a minute.” Then I think she might’ve gotten to a minute or something like 58 seconds while she’s going to complain. “I did it a minute in four seconds.” She did it around a minute.

She was just so happy and I was super proud of her like, “Way to go.” In fact, she got really good. She was able to swim the whole length of the pool underwater actually. It’s a pretty large pool that the HOA has. We don’t have our own pool in our house, which I’m grateful for by the way. With little kids, pools are, well, they’re expensive and they’re just stressful when you have little kids. I love the setup that we have that we don’t have a pool in our backyard, but we can walk about three minutes to the HOA pool and that has just been awesome this summer.

We’re there and so she goes and she makes it a minute floating on the surface of the water and I was proud of her, but then I also got super competitive. I’m thinking, “Okay, I can beat you. How did you beat me? How did you beat me?” She told me what she did, that she had been reading a book called The Mindful Catholic, and I’ll probably have her come on the show on Free for All Friday to talk about it. I hope I’m getting the title right. I think it’s called The Mindful Catholic. It’s a book that helps you be more present to avoid distractions. It’s almost meditative, but it’s not new age or bad. It just helps you to be focused on the present moment. She said that what she did was that she just focused on everything else around her rather than herself and then she was able to hold her breath for over a minute. I said, “Okay, I’m going to give this a try.”

It really did work when I did it and I applied those techniques. I doubled my time from about 45 seconds to almost a minute and a half. I was able to go, I think a minute 23, minute 25, almost at 90 seconds. Most untrained adults, if you’re an untrained adult, if you’re not an apneists. Apnea is like holding your breath. If you’re an apneists, if you’re not trained in any of that, most adults can hold their breath for about 30 to 90 seconds underwater. It was amazing. I just floated there and instead of thinking about myself, I think before I was trying to count in my head slowly, and that was not a great idea. I just focused on everything around me, just the sound of the water going past my ears. I could hear my kids talking away so I imagined that I was outside of my body and I was just floating next to them, watching them talking next to the water or sounds of other toys hitting the water away from me.

It actually worked. It worked because it took me out of myself and I was able to go just a lot longer because what happens is when you hold your breath, the level of CO2, carbon dioxide, because we breathe in oxygen, and then we turn that into carbon dioxide when we respirate. Oxygen in, O2 out. This will be important later by the way. What we breathe as human beings is not pure oxygen. It’s only about, what is it like 21% oxygen? Most of the air we breathe is actually nitrogen, but you need a specific amount of oxygen. If you don’t have at least, I want to say 18, maybe 15% is probably too low, but it has to be at least like 17, 18% oxygen in the air. Otherwise, you suffocate. If you breathe in pure nitrogen, you will just immediately go unconscious.

If the air only has 15% O2 in it, you’re going to be slowly going unconscious because even though you’re breathing O2, you’re not getting enough O2 into your body. You breathe in oxygen and then you respirate out car carbon dioxide. If you hold your breath, the level of CO2 in your bloodstream and your lungs increases. It gets more and more and more as your body uses up the oxygen in your lungs. When your body does this, it sends an alarm to your body to give you the urge to want to breathe. Now, when you put your face underwater when you’re underwater, it does kick in something called the mammalian diving reflex. That automatically causes your body to become more efficient when it uses oxygen because your body realizes, “Oh, you’re underwater. We can’t really waste oxygen right now.” It automatically causes your body to use it more efficiently.

Then as the CO2 level rises, you can feel your chest getting tighter. You feel that natural urge to want to breathe. Then if you still don’t breathe, if you’re really trying to hold your breath, your diaphragm will start to spasm and sometimes somewhat violently. That’s like your body really telling you, “You got to breathe right now.” It’s like how on airplanes, there is a safety mechanism on commercial airlines called a stick shaker that if the pilot is in a stall or is in a really bad position, it will shake the yoke of the plane at the pilot to tell him, “Hey, buddy, you’re in a lot of trouble here. You got to fix this.” It’s not just like a bleeping alarm or just a light that goes off. It will shake the stick in front of him.

I don’t know if that’s on Airbus. At least that’s on a Boeing. Boeing has the big yokes. Airbuses have a little joystick next to the pilot, but the stick shaker on a Boeing aircraft, it’ll shake. Your diaphragm, it shakes and convulses inside of you to let you know, “Hey, you got to breathe right now.” Then most people just can’t resist and then after 90 seconds, even if you’re still underwater, like if you’re trapped underwater or something like that, or if you’re drowning, you will breathe. Then if you breathe in the water, it will cause you to become unconscious because you don’t have enough O2 to your lungs. Okay?

Okay, well then how do you get past 90 seconds? How is that possible? Here’s what’s interesting. Recently, James Cameron came out with the sequel to Avatar. What was that like a year ago? Avatar 2, The Way of Water, and it had a lot of really impressive scenes of the Na’vi, these aliens on this other planet on Avatar. They’re swimming underwater, and it looks really cool because it was actually filmed underwater with motion capture. It’s why it looks so real. It’s completely different from something like The Little Mermaid, for example, the new live action Little Mermaid, where that’s just filmed with somebody on a green screen on a harness, and they’re just being moved around by a harness in the air. But in Avatar 2, the actors are actually underwater and they don’t have scuba tanks because if they had scuba, they would be releasing air bubbles from the tank. They would be respirating when they breathe in the air. Because of that, it would mess up the CGI motion capture.

They wear these motion capture suits that allows the animators to put the alien skin on them later, but it looks so real because they really are underwater. Their movements are actually really fluid because they’re underwater and they were holding their breath for four to five minutes at a time. How they’re able to accomplish that is they got the actors for Avatar 2 to train with free divers. These are people who dive down to incredible depths for someone, not like what you or I could do just at the local swimming pool, and they can stay underwater for four, five minutes at a time and not just be static underwater, but they’re using their oxygen. They’re swimming really hard and diving deep, and they learn how to maximize the use of their O2. They train with them for about a week and they immediately improve their lung capacity so a lot of simple things they’re doing.

For example, when they breathe, they learn how to increase their lung capacity by having deep breaths through their diaphragm. Now when a lot of us breathe, you’ll breathe, you’ll raise up your shoulders and you only fill about the top part of your lungs. But they would train with free divers to fill up their entire lung capacity and to do exercises to increase their lung capacity. One thing they would do right there, they would just increase their lung capacity by breathing deep with their diaphragm and then doing various breath holding exercises to increase that capacity. What you would do is you hold your breath for a minute and then stop for a break for one minute. Then you go back to holding your breath for a minute, and then you have a break for only 45 seconds and hold your breath for a minute, and then you have a break for only 30 seconds, and the breaks get incrementally shorter and shorter.

They would use these kinds of techniques to build up their natural O2 reserves to be able to do that. Now here’s the thing that’s also controversial. By the way, these tips that I give about breath holding, I should have given this disclaimer earlier, but I’m giving a disclaimer now. Be very careful if you try to practice breath holding at a swimming pool. Never, never ever, never ever, never do breath holding activities by yourself. Do not go to a swimming pool by yourself to practice breath holding and free diving techniques. Because what can happen is that you can get really good at ignoring your body’s carbon dioxide levels. You can get really good and just ignore that and ignoring the urge to breathe. For example, one thing that divers used to and free divers used to do would be hyperventilate and that you would try to flush the CO2 out of your system.

But all that does is it tricks your body into thinking you don’t have to breathe and allows you to resist the natural urge to breathe. The danger with that approach though is that you still need the oxygen. You still have a low O2 level in your bloodstream. You just don’t realize it because your CO2 alarm inside of you is not going off. You can be practicing this, and this happens often even with free divers, they’re minimized, they don’t hear that CO2 alert in their body and they just black out because the oxygen level in their body has just dropped. It’s dropped below a level that can keep them conscious. If you’re practicing breath holding by yourself and you experience shallow water blackout, you’re going to die. But even if you’re with other people and you experience shallow water blackout, if you start to breathe in at all, if your body naturally does that, you can still be injured, you can be killed, you can have secondary drowning if there’s water still in your lungs.

In general, what I’m telling you, be safe. Don’t practice dangerous breath holding activities without a professional free diver with you is teaching this. If you’re just holding your breath and you’re just having fun, whatever. But just come on. Everybody, let’s be safe as we’re out there at the pool this summer. Hyperventilating was one technique that they would use. But what free divers do, apparently there’s a second stage of breath holding. You have an alarm in your body when you’re CO2 is getting too high that they learn to ignore. Apparently, there is a second feeling, and I have no idea what this feels like because I’ve never done it before, that when you get past the CO2 alarm, your spleen can emit extra oxygen that your body needs and you can feel it leaving your spleen.

I don’t even know what that would feel like, but apparently they can notice when that’s happening and that’s when free divers know, “Okay, I’m almost out of air. I need to go up right now.” But another thing that divers do to really extend, because you’ve seen for example people like David Blaine for example hold his breath for like 17 minutes. How can somebody hold their breath that long? There was a Croatian diver, Budimir Šobat, I think he has the world record right now. It was set in 2021 that he held his breath for 24 minutes and 37 seconds. That’s probably going to be longer than this episode. How in the world do people like David Blaine and others hold their breath for 17 minutes, 24 minutes? That can’t be possible.

What they do is they O2 pack beforehand. They will breathe in pure oxygen for several minutes for a prolonged period of time. They’ll just expose themselves to pure oxygen. Remember what I said earlier, air is only about 20% oxygen, the rest of it’s nitrogen, and then you’ve got a few other gases in it, right? They’ll just breathe pure oxygen. When they do that, it floods their body with O2. It floods their cells with oxygen, and so they have a lot in their body. They have so much more to be able to use. They’ve turned their body almost into a scuba tank. That’s what allows people to be able to hold their breath for over 15 minutes, over 20 minutes.

They use pure oxygen to be able to do that. But some people are really good. They actually can do it without oxygen assist. They just use all of the other techniques. They take really deep breaths. They’ve exercised and trained for years to be able to build up their own lung capacity. I think the world record for non-oxygen assist, these people don’t breathe oxygen, they just do it on their own breath, their own lung capacity is Stéphane Mifsud has held his breath for 11 minutes, 35 seconds. There’s others. I think it might be 11 minutes, 50 seconds, but they weren’t recognized by the World Apnea Association or whatever the governing body is.

Then for women, it’s nine minutes, two seconds by Natalia Molchanova. Kate Winslet, actually. You remember Kate Winslet from Titanic. Kate Winslet was in Avatar 2 and was training and doing all of this, and she actually broke the world record for holding your breath on a movie set. She did that and she held her breath. I want to say it was like around seven minutes. I’ll play the clip for you here of when they were filming it when it happened. That record was originally held, I think, by Tom Cruise, maybe it was a stunt double. It was held on Mission Impossible. The one movie where they have the scene where they’re underwater. They’re trying to do the files on the underwater server.

It was Tom Cruise or someone else had the record for holding their breath in. It was probably Tom Cruise, right? He does all his own stunts in that Mission Impossible. Kate Winslet broke that with around seven minutes on Avatar 2. I don’t know if she was using oxygen or not. I do not know that. But regardless, even if you breathe oxygen without training, you still won’t last as long as other people. Here is the clip of her as she breaks the record. You’ll hear some applause or laughter. I think the original clip is from an Australian news company, but here it is.

Here we go. Oh, here we go. Nice. Here we go. Here we go.

Am I dead? Am I dead?

You are alive. You are very much alive.

What was that?

What do you think it was?

I don’t know. It could have been 6:10. It could have been 7:10.

It was 7:15.

I love that. Am I dead? Am I dead? For most people, if they held their breath for seven minutes, they would be dead. Great. Well, I hope this is fun for you guys. Definitely, like I said before, stay safe when you go out to the pool. Don’t do anything reckless, but have fun out there. Yeah, I just hope you have a very blessed weekend.

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