How Long Can A Human Hold Their Breath? The New World Record Shows It's Way Longer Than You Think

How long can you hold your breath? 30 seconds? A minute? Longer?

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Whatever your answer, there’s a very high chance it’s not as long as some divers out there. Whether through culture, evolution, or just one dude’s strangely specific obsession, there are plenty of people in the world who saw the classification of humans as a terrestrial animal and thought, “nah” – and sometimes, the limits they can hit is barely believable. 

So: how long can a human hold their breath? The answer is… way more than you probably think.

The Haenyeo of Korea: 1-3 minutes

Jeju Island sits around 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Korea, and it’s one of the places where traditional ways of life have hung on the longest. There, shamanism can still be found and the Jeju language, though considered critically endangered, is still spoken.

And at the shores, the Haenyeo – literally, “sea women” – still dive for their harvests.

“The women have been in charge of diving for seafood to provide for their families since the 17th century,” explains Oceanographic Magazine, “when many of the men were either conscripted to the army or had lost their lives at sea while fishing.” 

“Additionally, the Korean ruler at that time had imposed heavy taxes on the earnings of men, but exempted the labor of women,” it adds. “The womenfolk of the island had no choice but to become the main breadwinners of their families.”

The result was generations of divers, all women, who started training for the job at age 11 and continued… well, pretty much forever, given their average age right now is 70 years old. The women dive for up to 10 hours a day, and spend more than half of that under the water, according to a new study that followed the group and noted that they spent “a greater proportion of time at sea per day than polar bears” as well as “the highest [time spent underwater] for any humans measured.”

While the average dive only lasted around 11 seconds, they can hold out for two or three minutes without oxygen if necessary – and the reason for that isn’t just training. The study comes shortly after another from some of the same researchers, which found two genetic mutations particular to this group: one which improved the divers’ tolerance for cold, and the other that decreased diastolic blood pressure. 

That, combined with changes to the mammalian dive reflex – the physiological changes that kick in to help conserve oxygen when you plunge into water – which experts think anybody can learn, have left the Haenyeo with bodies perfectly designed for the life aquatic.

“It’s as close as you get to […] a mermaid,” Chris McKnight, a marine mammal biologist at the University of St. Andrews and one of the coauthors of the new paper, told Science News this week. But can it be beaten?

The Bajau “sea nomads” of southeast Asia: up to 13 minutes

Head south from Korea, and eventually you’ll come to the Sulu Sea in southeast Asia. There, for 1,000 years or more, the nomadic Bajau people have made the water their home in a way very few outside of a James Cameron sci-fi sequel can boast.

“The way they dive is so natural,” Melissa Ilardo, an evolutionary geneticist now at the University of Utah, told CNN in 2018. “There’s nothing like seeing them in the water.”

Bajau freedivers – and this is the truest sense of the word, as they plunge down hundreds of feet underwater “with nothing more than a set of weights and a pair of wooden goggles,” Ilardo and her colleagues pointed out in a paper that same year – can go without air for up to 13 minutes, often spending up to 60 percent of their working day in the water. 

“That doesn’t really compare to any other humans,” Ilardo said. “The closest thing to that is sea otters.”

So, what’s the Bajau’s secret? In a word: evolution. While they’re not exactly as far removed from the rest of us as a sea otter, they do have a significantly different physiology from the rest of us – at least in one particular area: their spleens are up to 50 percent larger than those of the Saluan people, an ethnic group living (on land) on the nearby island of Sulawesi.

“The spleen is a weird one,” Ilardo told CNN. “I hadn’t really heard much about the spleen. I know that you can live without a spleen, so it was kind of like, ‘What is the spleen even doing?’”

It’s a good question, and the answer reveals itself close to the end of the breath-holding experience. First, your heart slows down to reduce the amount of oxygen being used; next, blood vessels in the extremities close off, so that blood flow can be kept to the most vital organs. Finally, the spleen contracts, sputtering out a last-ditch reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells into the body.

That’s not the only genetic difference between the Bajau and the Saluan. Ilardo and her team also found the gene PDE10A in the former but not the latter – it’s thought to control thyroid function and has been linked to spleen size in mice.

While the role of culture and the sheer amount of lifetime spent in the water can’t be overstated, therefore, it seems the Bajau are playing with a stacked deck. And the reason for that, Ilardo suggested, may simply be survival of the fittest: “Free diving is extremely dangerous,” she said, “and so even highly trained free divers often die because they lose consciousness on ascent and they drown.”

“If that’s happening over thousands of years, then the people who are surviving are those that are carrying the genes that give them an advantage.”

One guy from Croatia: half a frickin’ hour

Beating out all of the generational training and DNA mutational advantages is Vitomir Maričić, a freediver from Croatia who this year managed to hold his breath for a whopping 29 minutes and 3 seconds. That’s the longest voluntarily held breath underwater on record, according to Guinness World Records, beating the previous record by almost five minutes.

But how did one man from Europe beat all this traditional wisdom and genetic adaptations by so much? Well, he had some help. “Before the attempt, Vitomir inhaled pure oxygen for ten minutes,” notes a video posted to the diver’s Instagram page on June 26. “That supercharged his blood, dissolving O₂ not just in red cells but also in the plasma – something that doesn’t happen normally.”

Because of this, the video explains, “he started the dive with nearly five times more oxygen than usual.”

But just taking a big ol’ gulp of air isn’t enough to survive that long without breathing. Another advantage Maričić had over the Haenyeo and Bajau divers is that he… well, he wasn’t doing anything.

“It’s about how little [air] you need,” the video says. “No panic. No thoughts. Just silence. That’s how you make it to 29 [minutes].”

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Making it to nearly half an hour without breathing puts Maričić far beyond what most humans can do, and indeed it’s longer than most dolphins can survive without surfacing for air (though, weirdly, not as long as a sloth can). Hell, it’s long enough to miss an entire episode (and a half) of your favorite sitcom.

And for those quibbling about the added O₂ and sedentary assists – well, you’re not alone. Such aids are “kind of like doping,” Aleix Segura, the previous record holder, who made it 24 minutes without air, told Wired in 2017 – though he did, of course, use the same techniques for that record. “A 24-minute breath-hold is an interesting achievement, from a physiological perspective,” he argued, even if he did agree that it was a bit of a cheat.

But rest assured Maričić has an impressive capacity even without pure oxygen: he ranks seventh worldwide in static apnea, the technical term for “holding your breath a real long time”, with a recorded time of 10 minutes 8 seconds (the world record is held by Frenchman Stéphane Mifsud, who went 11 minutes 35 seconds without breathing in 2009).

Will any of these records stand unbeaten? Probably not. There’s no knowing where the upper limit on human capabilities will be – data and modeling suggested we were already nearing it, with improvements coming by seconds rather than minutes, but Maričić’s record, ironically, blows that out of the water.

“I don't know” what the physiological limit would be, Segura told Wired. “Half an hour? I think more." 

“We always think we've reached the limit,” he said. “But we're always wrong.”