My whole life I’ve been told that if you fall asleep in the bath then you’ll drown, or something. But is this true? I’m a grown ass adult I think I’d just wake up if my head fell under water
This thread is wild simply because I don’t know any adult humans who actually take baths, and I have honestly always assumed the reason they exist at all is for washing small children.
Your life is very sad.
The average person will be fine. If you are a (remarkably) heavy sleeper, if there are drugs or alcohol involved, if you have any neurogenic disorders or have difficulty protecting your airway, you have a much higher risk of a negative, potentially lethal outcome.
If you’re this curious why not try it out and report back? Many people have provided exactly why the warning exists.
In Korea they say not to leave a fan running overnight. Why? Because it will blow the oxygen away and you’ll suffocate.
Doesn’t mean it’s true.
Can you breathe water?
Can you wake up?
https://www.healthline.com/health/dry-drowning
Sure but you can still drown wide awake.
Cool! I’m not entirely sure because I know little about it, but you may have actually brought up a valid point! It’s a shame we had to climb a mountain of snark and smartassery to get to that possibility.
So you agree humans cannot, yet, breathe water. 🤪
Yes, a person can drown in as little as 2 inches of water.
But do you drown instantly? Surely as soon as you got water in your throat you’d wake up and start coughing or something
The cautionary stories came about with the era of bored housewives who drank heavily and took pretty heavy prescription drugs…
But they were also wealthy so rather than say OD or suicide they “fell asleep” in the bath.
And I’m sure more than a few murders got wrote off as the same thing. A housewife that habitually passes out deeply could just got tossed in the tub.
Because like you said, no sober person is staying asleep till they drown.
But people hear the cover story and believe it, so they warn people about something that just won’t happen
Nowadays you “died doing a tiktok challenge” and then your parents launch a legal case against tiktok and advocate for the Online Safety Act to lend credence to their story
Possibly, but you might just pass out and drown. Theres also something called Dry Drowning where you get enough water in your lungs that you slowly suffocate, even when not in the water any more. Its about minimizing risks. Sleeping in the tub increases your risk of drowning.
Okay thats fair enough. Does inhaling water generally make people pass out?
Lack of oxygen does
But do we have some real stats around it?
Because like OP, I’ve heard it my entire life and have never heard of someone drowning in the tub without being drugged up or really ill.
Yes some stats would be nice. If it were really that dangerous to fall asleep in the bath I think it would be negligent to let children take unsupervised baths, yet kids do all the time (at least I did when I was a kid). I think thats because most people intuitively know that drowning is not super likely
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26046678/
A bathtub drowning is one of the leading causes of death in a bathtub. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how reliable the drowning-related signs could be for identifying a bathtub drowning in the cases of death in the bathtub. Performing a retrospective review of 92 deaths in the bathtub in Maryland, 71.7 percent were the presence of bathtub drowning and 28.3 percent were the absence of bathtub drowning. Three leading contributory causes of death were cardiovascular disease, drug/alcohol-related death, and seizure disorder in both groups. There was a statistically significant difference between the groups in relation to a history of recovery from the water (95.5% and 38.4%, p<0.001), foam in the air way (33.3% and 15.4%, p<0.05), watery fluid in the sphenoid sinuses (81.8% and 11.5%, p<0.05), hyperinflated lungs (36.4% and 3.8%, p<0.01), and watery fluid in the stomach contents (40.9% and 3.8%, p<0.01). More than triple overlapped drowning-related signs could be beneficial for the diagnosis of a bathtub drowning. A comprehensive investigation incorporating a thorough scene investigation, gathering of the victim’s medical and psychosocial history, and a meticulous full autopsy is necessary to elucidate both the cause and manner of death in these cases of death in the bathtub.
So there are usually contributing factors like age, alcohol/drugs, or other medical issues. So ask yourself this: Can you be certain that you will never have a medical issue in a bathtub that might lead to you drowning? Have you ever bathed while drunk or high?
There’s more than just drowning.
Hypothermia is a risk of the water isn’t kept warm. And most likely someone’s going to fill the tub and let it sit, so it would quickly lose its warmth. Don’t assume because you’re cold you’d wake up.
Even assuming you start with room temperature water, it’d be several hours before you start feeling the effects of hypothermia. Given the water starts off warm, it’s only a bathtub of water so body heat will keep it above room temperature, and you’re (probably) in a small room that’ll help hold in the heat, I’d say you’d more than likely be okay assuming you don’t sleep more than 8-10 hours. If you pass out in the tub for something like 16-24 hours then I’d be more worried.
In some ways, I’d be more concerned about what would happen in the drain plug wasn’t completely watertight and the water drained away, particularly if you weren’t naked and were wearing clothing that holds in water like cotton.
Right? People swim in lakes and stuff with water that’s at our below room temp for hours and don’t regularly get hypothermia.
I guess if you have something like hypoglycemia you’d be at a higher risk, but most healthy adults would be fine.
