Today I held my breath for over two minutes. How detrimental is it to one's health if they hold their breath for too long?

Asphyxia

Nobody really cares how long you can hold your breath. Stop trying to show off in the form of a question.

NO, you will not die. You will pass out and start breathing on your own.

I doubt that you’d get asphyxia from holding your own breath, for you would go unconcious and have your body take over before it happens.

Good lung strength! I can hold my breath for a timed 2:23 too.

Ah vectorul, great minds do think alike.

@beast; who pooped in your cornflakes?

[I’ve wondered the same thing too, trickface]

Hahahah! Good stuff, cheers all.

Interesting info about apneists… people who’ve trained themselves to hold their breath for nine minutes or so.

It doesn’t say it here but the Ama Divers of Japan could hold their breath up to 10 minutes. (See I remembered something from all those years of Japanese class in school.) LOL! So I highly doubt that anything would happen. That and like @Eambos said you would pass out and you would start breathing again.

Actually, the answer is no one knows yet if the long term practice of breath holding can cause brain damage. Here is an excerpt from the NY Times:

“In another study, Dr. Potkin and Michael Uszler conducted brain scans of five people who had done at least 1,000 breath-hold dives over a five-year period. One kind of scan, the well-known M.R.I., revealed no abnormalities in the structure of their brains, Dr. Potkin reports. But another kind of brain can, called S.P.E.C.T. (single photon emission computed tomography anatomy), revealed abnormalities in their metabolism of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, according to the study, which was published in 2006 in the Proceedings of the Proceedings of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society.

Dr. Potkin calls these abnormalities “troubling” but says it’s not clear whether or not they indicate a problem, particularly in light of the Australian study that found no apparent damage to the divers’ mental abilities.

“This was a preliminary study and we did not have the benefit of pre-dive scans for comparison,” says Dr. Potkin, who is the physician for the United States free-diving team. “The issue of long term brain damage is not yet settled and will require further investigation.””

2 mins, that’s pretty awesome dude, congratulations =)
im crap last time i tried (because i dont do much you can tell) i only got 1:07 or something =\
i don’t know…