I stopped breathing every day for a week. Here’s what happened.
So much of our consumption is subconscious. Eating a quart of ice cream straight out of the container. Grabbing chip after chip until the bag is empty. Throwing back a whole box of pasta because that’s exactly how much we cooked. And beyond food consumption, consider media consumption! Watching seven hours of Netflix until we fall asleep splayed across the bed spooning the potato chip bag, episodes still running on auto-play.
I decided that I wanted to take things back to the basics and disrupt the most subconscious consumption of all: oxygen consumption. Almost all of our calories are spent on this basic activity, supposedly necessary for survival. There are so many things we think we can’t survive without, but it only takes one lonely sojourner to prove the naysayers wrong. For example, we think that we can’t survive without our smartphones, but at least one brave soul disconnected for a week and realized that it is, indeed, possible. I decided to set out on a similar mission and see what would happen if I stopped breathing for a week.
Minute 1: Detox
I thought the first minute would be the hardest, since it would take a lot to go against the breathing habit I’d honed over years and years, from the moment my head burst forth from the birth canal. I’d definitely gotten in my ten thousand hours of breathing and I was proud to call myself an expert breather. Letting it go would be akin to divorcing part of my identity as a human.
In the end, it was actually a lot easier than I expected. I held my breath while I went about my usual activities, and what do you know, I was able to function as usual. I poured myself a cup of tea and mixed in sugar, cheeks puffed out on account of stored air. The one step which was a bit challenging was blowing on the steaming mug. It seemed wasteful, given that I was preserving oxygen. No matter. I even took a gulp without inhaling. Win.
Minute 2: Focus
In the second minute, now that I was used to this not-breathing thing, I thought I should be hitting my stride. All of the preoccupations that had seemed so important were suddenly falling away: amassing instagram likes, the grating jackhammer down the street, which sushi place to order from for lunch, Uber or Lyft. Everything was gone, and I was finally able to hone in on one singular ambition. Unfortunately, this exquisite focus didn’t make way for my repressed and neglected passion to burst forth from my subconscious. Instead, it became clear that my life purpose had been recalibrated into one goal and one goal only: acquiring oxygen.
Minute 3: Muscling Through
But I wouldn’t let this oxygen obsession get the best of me. Other people had fought through much more debilitating addictions. Sugar. Cigarettes. Pokemon. This was my shot at building the self-discipline I’d never taken the time to develop. And here I was, two and a half minutes in, fighting all of my demons. My lungs burned for a gulp of air, but I wanted to do this cold-turkey and be there to tell the story in the end.
When the edges of my vision started to blur, I felt like this would be the push that counted. I closed my eyes to stay focused on the objective of not opening my mouth, and that’s when my mind exploded into a world I never could have imagined. My inner eyelids became a kaleidoscope of shapes and color, spinning and colliding in an ever widening sea of soft black. The mouth of the dragon opened sinsot i the alecisfogitic flir sl skd fke wna dk where the lkdkf ks d f d dd d ddddddddddddddddddddddddddd
Minute 4
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