hello,
Ok so the best advice I can give anyone thinking about asphyxiation or breath play is DON'T DO IT!!! It is extremely dangerous and people have died doing it. At best it can be considered extreme edge play. Alright now that i have the disclaimer out of the way the answer is not as simple as do it this way or that way first you have to know how your going about it in the case of something like the gas mask your not risking direct bodily harm from the action of disrupting the breathing because there is no direct contact however if your talking about actually choking someone you run into issues of actually causing real damage. The dangers your looking at range from bruised and inflamed vocal cords to collapsed windpipes. The common misconception is if you only press on the sides of the neck there by avoiding the windpipe and restricting the flow of blood instead that your out of the woods and you still get a similar result however this is simply not true. Aside from the fact that your depriving your brain of blood there is also two nerves called the vagus nerves that run extremely close to the arteries in your neck and as it just so happens they control your pacemakers in your heart. Now I'm not talking about the electric variety your heartbeat is caused by your body's pacemakers and when the nerves are disrupted it causes extra pacemakers to fire and not always when they're supposed to which can cause cardiac arrhythmia (very not good) which unless you just so happen to own defibrillator your not going to fix before you croak. Now on to the "bad news" that's right it gets worse. Now assuming you can avoid all of the other issues you run headlong into the last and possibly the most dangerous problem of all acute respiratory acidosis which is a abrupt drop in blood pH caused by the increase in CO2 in your lungs the human body has a very narrow range of pH that is conducive to life. If after all of the above you still choose to practice what i will say is the maximum "safe" amount of time to stop someones breathing for is about as long as they can hold their breath for beyond that your taking your or your partners life into your hands. Can you do it and not kill yourself or someone else well yes for a while maybe but your gambling every time some lucky people may get away with it for their whole life with no problem however before you think it can't happen to you between two hundred and one thousand people die every year from erotic asphyxiation and that's only reported cases the truth of the matter is familys have a tendency to "clean up" a lot of sex related death scenes to avoid embarrassment. If your going to practice take the time to learn at the very least rescue procedures including at least CPR, rescue breathing, and emergency tracheotomy. My focus is not to be a downer but to inform you of the very real danger of practicing this type of edge play I can't stop you nor am I trying to. My only hope is to inform people of what can and does happen... Play Safe, Play Sane, Play Consensual
-DK
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