you college yeah 18

yeah i was young yes and i think we all have capacity for allostatic load which is a fancy word for stress so like the first couple of weeks or months that you do that your body's like oh fine it's no big deal especially if you're 17 or 18.

Anyway, graduated college, went into management consulting, traveling 48 weeks a year, loved the job, like really good opportunity, but more stress on the body.

Now, here I am.

My outlet for stress is running and I'm not anti running.

We can get into that later.

But in this case, excessive running on top of not enough sleep, not enough fuel, not enough like nervous system stability and traveling 48 weeks a year.

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... [laughs] adrenaline.

Well, yeah, and that's why competition is so interesting.

There's some people who thrive in training, and then they try and compete, and they can't because you go- you do have all that adrenaline going, and you're nervous.

You know, there's people, there's a load of people watching.

There's this b- underwater drone following you.

It's live.

Um, and you are trying to, like, everything you want to do before a free dive is reduce your heart rate, uh, calm your breathing, relax all the muscles.

And it's been going a long time?

What are you seeing as you're encountering patients? And is that, you know, a big mental shift for them to think that anxiety is not, oh, the end all answer, but something that's just a sign for us to keep looking further?

I think, thankfully, we are getting there thanks to, in large part, work like yours and all of us trying to do this similar work.

I remember in, I guess it was 2000 or so when I first, maybe it was even before that, but sometime around then, I first went to see a therapist and my parents really wanted me to be on medication.

I was struggling with a lot of anxiety, a lot of just kind of like trying to become an adult emotions.

And They framed it to me like, oh, we found the problem.

We found the diagnosis.

You have anxiety.

So where did this lead you?

Can you tell us about that and about the sport of freediving itself? Like, you know,

what it is, how you got into it? Yeah, so I guess how I got into it was quite trivial.

I was in Kowtow traveling and I just wanted to hold my breath longer to swim with the fish.

and I saw you know everyone does scuba diving I've never actually done scuba diving and I saw this school and I was like I'll give that a go my first experience was horrific uh normally in a level one course I know now they they'll swim down with you face to face almost like invasively so so that you feel like you're with someone and it feels safe um and also there's so many like mechanics and like chemistry with breathing so the biggest like misconception I guess with the urge to breathe is that when you feel like you need to breathe it's because you're low on oxygen and like you're like I need oxygen but actually your urge to breathe is completely triggered by CO2 so rising CO2 in your body is what gives you the urge to breathe so if you were to put like a one of those little oxygen things on your finger and take a breath hold your breath and then when you're like oh my god I need to breathe if you look at that your oxygen sats will still be 99%.

It's just that rising CO2 level.

So nobody told me any of this information.

So I was swimming down.

wanted to ask you after watching the documentary was have you ever blacked out like is it as common