Freediving and Daily Stress: Through the eyes of a lifelong educator

Graham Hookey is an educator, an author and an experienced columnist. Recently retired from a teaching and administration career of almost 40 years, he shares how mindfulness and freediving can be an effective way for us to learn to better handle day to day stress.

I am an insatiable learner, curious about everything.  I loved teaching as a career because I got paid to learn alongside my students.  When I became a parent I read everything I could about the subject and started writing columns as a way of collating and organizing the information.  My goal, as an educator and a parent, was to find a way to offer to my students and children a better way to learn than the standard memorization and study skills I grew up with.  It has been a long journey and while I believe I was a much better teacher at the end of my career because of what I'd learned, I still felt there was a long way to go.

My breakthrough came late in my career with my introduction to the concept of mindfulness.  It was just at the time that MRIs began to show much more technically how the brain worked and it was also at a time when stress levels in young people and young adults seemed to be rising significantly.  There were many factors to blame for this increase in stress, from rising educational expectations to a lack of job opportunities once formal schooling was done, to constant strain from connectivity to electronic devices and social media and the subsequent loss of sleep.  Clearly, a storm was brewing for the mental health of young people.  

Teaching mindfulness: from the school to the ocean.

Mindfulness seemed to offer an opportunity for two things.  The first was to offer young people an understanding of how their brain actually functioned and the second was to give them skills and strategies to manage their brain functions in a way that could maximize learning and minimize stress.  I was intrigued by it, read as much as I could find on it and began to utilize some of the techniques on a school-wide basis. It didn’t take long before these small practices changed the atmosphere of the school, the effectiveness of our teaching practices and the stress level of students.

Once I retired, I visited my middle son who had settled into a role as a scuba diving instructor in Bali.  He had travelled far and wide once he'd graduated from university with a degree in marine sciences, and was never going to be the type to sit at a desk and do repetitive tasks. He instead dedicated much of his career to seeking new techniques with which to cope with his own tendencies towards anxiety and share those with his students.  As he took me under his wing to teach me scuba diving, I was quite surprised at what an effective teacher he was and how, at a relatively early age, he had achieved an understanding of the techniques intended to guide learners to use their mind to overcome fear and to effectively learn something completely new in a short period of time.  

I was sure he had found his niche in scuba diving, but it turned out his niche was just one more turn away.  It was when he lost the scuba tank, put on larger fins and began to freedive that he found the perfect blend of sport, work and stress management.  Freediving, it turned out, had all of the requirements of mindfulness that he had learned through meditation, yoga and the integration of self with nature.

The human capacity to be in the water: mammalian dive reflex

There may be some truth to the notion that having spent the first eight and a half months of our life in the protective, calm and watery realm of the amniotic sac, being immersed in water is not only natural but helps us relax.  Science has shown that despite our terrestrial existence, humans still retain what is known as the mammalian dive reflex, a set of body responses to water that include reduced heart rate, retained oxygen levels and relaxed muscles.  Unless we have had some traumatic experience around water or watched too many reruns of Jaws, we are naturally predisposed to the calming effects of the ocean.  How many of us come home from stressful jobs and run a tub of water to relax?

Equally important to this natural dive reflex is the way in which freediving quickly teaches us the most essential elements of mindfulness.  Learning to resist the urge of panic when the stress of not breathing feels desperate, only to find that our body can and does adapt and absorb more oxygen from our blood so that we do not have to breathe as often.  Breathing exercises learned through freediving have an extraordinary application to learning relaxation long after we've left the water and returned to normal terrestrial activities.

Can freediving help with stress?

Stress is generally our body's response to perceived threats, whether they are real or imagined.  Learning to breathe deeply and effectively, then immersing all of our senses into a fluid environment without the technical risks that come with something like scuba diving, offers a feeling of personal control and oneness with the natural world of the ocean that is next to impossible to replicate with any other activity.  It is the pinnacle of mindfulness and an exercise of the most important element of self-management, anxiety and stress control.

Perhaps, best of all, freediving brings an overall sense of peace to overactive minds.  It is as close as we will ever get to that amniotic state of calm and serenity.  No one who freedives finds sleep elusive that night.  

Here at Blue Corner Freedive we teach with the philosophy that if the students learns anything, it’s to be a more relaxed and content human being. Freediving gives many people the tools and techniques needed to practice a more stress free lifestyle. Join us for a course, and let the sport of freediving work its magic.