Willpower

ice. He was entombed in a coffin with six inches of headroom for a week, during which he consumed nothing except water. He later went on to conduct another water-only fast, whose results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine: a loss of fifty-four pounds in forty-four days. He spent those forty-four days without food suspended above the Thames River in a sealed transparent box, inside which the temperatures ranged from subfreezing to 114 degrees Fahrenheit.
    “Breaking the comfort zone seems to be the place where I always grow,” says Blaine, echoing St. Simeon’s notion that suffering makes the spirit flower. We won’t attempt to analyze that rationale. The why is beyond our ken.
    We’re interested in the how of Blaine’s feats. How he endures is a mystery that matters to people who aren’t endurance artists. Whatever one thinks of his ordeals (or his psyche), it would be useful to figure out what keeps him going. If we could isolate his secret for fasting forty-four days, maybe the rest of us could use it to last until dinner. If we knew how he endured a week of being buried alive, we might learn how to sit through a two-hour budget meeting. Exactly what does he do to build and sustain his willpower? How, for instance, did Blaine not immediately give up when everything went wrong during his attempt to break the world record for breath holding? He’d spent more than a year preparing for this feat by learning to fill his lungs with pure oxygen and then remain immobile under water, conserving oxygen by expending as little energy as possible. Blaine could relax so completely, both mentally and physically, that his heart rate would drop to below fifty beats per minute, sometimes below twenty. During a practice session at a swimming pool at Grand Cayman Island, his pulse dropped by 50 percent as soon as he began the breath-hold, and he kept his head under water for sixteen minutes with little apparent stress. He emerged just shy of the world record of 16:32, looking serene and reporting that he hadn’t felt any pain, and had barely been aware of his body or surroundings.
    But several weeks later, when he went on Oprah to try to break the world record in front of judges from Guinness, there were a couple of complications in addition to the pressure of performing for a television audience. Instead of floating facedown in a pool, he had to face the studio audience from the inside of a giant glass sphere. To remain vertical and not float to the surface, he had to keep his feet wedged into straps at the bottom of the sphere. As he filled his lungs with oxygen, he worried that the muscular effort to keep his feet in place would eat up too much oxygen. His pulse was higher than usual, and when he started holding his breath, it stayed above 100 instead of plummeting. To make matters worse, he could hear his racing pulse on a heart-rate monitor that had inadvertently been placed too close to the sphere, continually distracting—and distressing—him with its rapid beep-beep-beep. By the second minute, his pulse was 130 and he realized he wasn’t going to be able to control it. It remained above 100 as the minutes ticked by and his body used up its oxygen. Instead of being lost in a state of meditative bliss, he was acutely aware of his racing pulse and the excruciating buildup of carbon dioxide inside his body.
    By the eighth minute, he was barely halfway to the record and convinced he wouldn’t make it. By the tenth minute, his fingers were tingling as his body shunted blood from the extremities to preserve vital organs. By the twelfth minute, his legs were throbbing and his ears were ringing. By the thirteenth minute, he feared that the numbness in his arm and the pain in his chest were precursors to a heart attack. A minute later he felt contractions in his chest and was nearly overwhelmed with the impulse to breathe. By the fifteenth minute his heart was skipping beats and his pulse was erratic, jumping to 150, down to 40, back over 100. Now convinced that a heart attack was coming, he released his feet from the straps so that the emergency team could pull him out of the sphere when he blacked out. He floated upward, forcing himself to remain just below the surface, still expecting to black out any second, when he heard the audience cheer and realized that he’d broken the old record of 16:32. He looked at the clock and held on until the next minute, emerging from the water with a new Guinness