I cannot begin to tell y'all how much my life has improved since I learned to intentionally trigger my mammalian diving reflex, love tricking my spleen every damn day

OK I'M GONNA TELL YOU HOW THE MAMMALIAN DIVING REFLEX WORKS
(this is a good thread for Valentine's Day because it involves the heart AND the spleen and something called blood shift, what's more romantic than BLOOD SHIFT)

When you, a land mammal, go in the water, your whole body goes

??!?!?!!!?!?!?!?!

and does a TON OF COOL-ASS SHIT because it thinks you wanna be a whale again. Bodies are stupid, you should take advantage of your rube organs

According to my research, your face is the area where most of your breathing holes are located. When those intake valves encounter cold water, your heart, lungs, brain, and spleen go

UH, FINE, I GUESS

Your heart goes
OH GREAT I GUESS THERE'S NEVER GONNA BE OXYGEN AGAIN
~and the beat drops~
... by like 15%. You can totally induce bradycardia by putting cold water on your face because your heart is a GULLIBLE FOOL

(Why do doctors ever refer to bradycardia without playing fifteen seconds of dubstep and then saying 'and the beat drops'? Why)

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Your spleen, which medical professionals refer to as "the liver but STUPIDER," is also totally fooled by you pretending to turn back into a whale.

So, if you do the cold water on your face (best with submersion but splashing or a wet washcloth works too) and hold your breath for a few seconds, your spleen goes AAAAHHHH FUCK and sends you a BUTT-TON of extra red blood cells

Your spleen sends you all those extra red blood cells because, terrifying fact, if you were a whale your size you'd have 3x as much blood in you as you have now.

Just. You, with a blowhole, FULL of blood. That's what your spleen wants.

How long are you gonna hold your breath while you're fucking with your organs? Because if you hold it for a little longer, you get

~*THE BLOOD SHIFT*~

The Blood Shift happens when your brain is like 'wuh oh, this dummy is trying to kill us all' and redirects bloodflow to... itself, because the brain is a selfish dick. Also some of your other internal organs, because they're in the brain clique

(Look, your brain only gives a hot buttered fuck about itself and it tolerates your heart and lungs because they send it that good uncut oxygen. It'll jettison the rest of you before you can say 'what's my gallbladder do again?')

So, when you do your whale cosplay, your brain is like GIVE ME MORE OXYGEN and you get a nice lil' O2 hit! Which is nice, because your brain makes all kinds of happy noises when it gets extra oxygen.

Obviously the extra O2 is your brain prepping to be deprived of the oxygen, but because it's a junkie, it'll take all the extra hits it can get. And since you're TRICKING it, you get the extra O2 without the later, you know, brain starvation

So when I'm all stressed and freaked out and shit, and my heart rate is too high and my breathing is shallow, I ask myself:
how would a whale respond to this situation

And then I go hold my breath and put cold water on my face for like thirty seconds (or submerge my face if I can) and then I LAUGH because my organs are FOOLS AHAHAHAHA I WIN AGAIN

uh all the usual disclaimers that you shouldn't do this if for any reason it will, like, kill you, I'm not a doctor, I'm just a simple country bird lawyer with a gullible spleen and a greedy brain

I *THINK*
(this is 100% me guessing)
you'd see an immediate drop in O2 and rise in CO2, which is what stimulates your spleen. BUT immediately after, you should get an O2-sat boost, because of the increased rbc-count. https://twitter.com/stephenablack/status/963855371663298560