Blacking out due to Nitrous is a form of hypoxia?

[Larssonn]

I love doing nitrous occasionally, but I can't stop worrying about the harmful effects it may cause due to oxygen deprivation. I've read that hypoxia doesn't occur until the brain is aprox. 4-6 minutes on very low oxygen. But if one blacks out, it must be due to such low levels of oxygen that the neurons cannot function properly and simply shut down for a second, right? Or am I completely missing the boat here?

It happens to me every now and then, especially when I'm drunk, that I lose consciousness after a hit from a balloon. And it just feels so.. bad. I can partly defend my brain cells against damage from amphetamines by taking anti-oxidants and such, but these won't help me when I'm oxygen deprived.

So where it boils to, how bad is blacking out? Will I really lose some brain cells every time this happens?

 

[Larssonn]

So, what I actually mean is passing out instead of blacking out. Google doesn't really seem to help me, but what I am trying to figure out is if passing out causes apoptosis of or damage to neurons..

 

[.:Holy::Toast:.]

No nitrous is a powerful dissociative anisthetic and can make you unconscious from its psychoactive effects not from oxygen deprivation.
You know that gas they put people under with at the dentist? That's nitrous, and they can perform surgeries while you knocked unconscious from nitrous, definitely not the same as oxygen deprivation
Excessive hyper ventilation on the balloon could deprive your brain of oxygen however, but you should faint and start breathing again enforce any real damage occurs.
Remember to always take air with your balloon

 

[Solipsis]

Realize that a dentist will administer medical nitrous which is 50%, the rest being air/oxygen not sure.

Nitrous is an anaesthetic but at the same time it is also true that you can get hypoxia from not getting enough air when you inhale nitrous.
It may even be so that (I read this) nitrous could fool the body into thinking it has enough oxygen while really it hasn't. It could be sort of a myth but at the very least I would believe that the dissociative anaethesis can make you much less aware of your respiration and oxygen levels so it may lead to hypoxia much quicker than holding your breath underwater normally would because you keep aware keenly when swimming (I would hope). So hypoxia can occur quicker even if the nitrous has little to do with it directly.

I can attest to this because I've gotten blue lips at least once from using lots of nitrous at a party and boundary overstepping behavior. Why else would I let it come that far if I was always under the impression that I always breathed when it seemed like I needed to? I wasn't even using insane amounts really..

Just be careful. Nitrous can be harmful in certain ways, a lot subtle, it can also cause crazy amounts of drug potentiation that in my case lead to things ranging from dubiously powerful effects on the body and especially mind to straight up dangerous incidents like epileptiform insults / seizure-like phenomena. The mental effects when combined with something like LSD must IMO not be underestimated. Complete derealisation and experiences that are mind bending and pretty impossible (such as experiencing everything happening in reverse including sound) can be disorienting and debilitating, and while interesting to recount as stories problematic if not had in a safe setting. Temporary insanity and freakouts are no joke.
Although having intense explosive visionary imagery of mad hatter type scenes and literal cuckoo!! clocks and feeling as if hit squire in the face with a bat made of whiteout and thinking you are coming to after being astrally projected onto the sidewalk across the street and getting confronted by a cartoon cop (!) for not able to identify myself in any way, apparently not even as a human being, and a lot of balderdash... well after people checking up on me if everything is okay as I come out of the hallucination... all of that is pretty funny but I wouldn't make a habit out of it.
Not sure how I acted while hallucinating that.

 

[Ballz_Trippington]

I shudder sometimes when I watch some people huff that balloon of N2O. I always leave a small crack open on the side of my mouth when I inhale a balloon to ensure air gets in as well. I never ever huff the balloon in and out like a lot of people. IMHO, doing it the huffing way is the only dangerous thing about doing whippets. Don't forget the air!!

 

[thikal]

and especially mind to straight up dangerous incidents like epileptiform insults / seizure-like phenomena.

I've down nitrous in a 6APB comedown (I took codeine too on the comedown) and it felt exactly that : Two inch from a seizure like phenomena.

 

[pofacedhoe]

what drives a non COPD person to breathe is the CO2 in their lungs so if your lungs are filled with nitrous oxide you may not get that drowning gasp feeling where you "just have to breathe"

 

[Solipsis]

The balloon would quickly fill with the CO2 you exhale / expell though (at least in relative terms), while air only contains 0.033% CO2. So what's your point?

 

[cpuller]

My experience with N2O so far was to huff the gas from the balloon and do that until something happens. Usually in my case this was sound starting to distort so that it becomes slowed down and metallic sounding.
Me and 2 others frequently passed out from doing this for a few seconds and Im almost sure that this is not only due to a drug hitting you fast.
I never took air in between because the guy who does this often didnt tell me to do so and it was hard enough getting any effect at all without breathing in and out into the balloon. (and being persistent with this)

So Im interested now if I could get more dissociative effects if I do the breathing with the air in between right.
Meaning I can get to higher more interesting levels before I pass out?
Somebody told me about different colors etc and I only got the audio distortions.

 

[.:Holy::Toast:.]

If you do it right you can do two balloons consecutively.
Just don't do it until you pass out, you don't need to go near that far.
I take several deep breaths, take the balloon and huff it maybe 3-4 times, hold it in for a couple seconds and exhale slowly, then take a couple breaths and do the second one.