Don't go holding your breath

Unless you're a free diver

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about the strong pull of holding your breath in times of pending: why it’s often our first instinct when we’re waiting on something important and usually the last thing we should be doing.

But I haven’t sent a newsletter for almost two months. Talk about pending. Or don’t, as it turns out. Why the pause? I can’t tell you exactly. Work, holiday, and a lingering crisis of confidence have all got in the way of writing time (the gentle yet persistent encouragement of my partner notwithstanding). But if I’m being honest, I suppose I must have been holding my breath.

It’s a well-worn metaphor, isn’t it, conveying that febrile mental state when you want something to work out the right way, or not work out the wrong way. And its rooted in the body. It’s what we - and specifically I - do. We hold our breath when we’re anxious or angry. We hold our breath when we’re scared. We hold our breath when we’re in pain. It’s part of our ‘fight or flight’ response, the primeval sympathetic nervous system you might have heard about from a yoga teacher sometime.

Breathing is central to yoga, of course, and still the thing I struggle with most on the mat, written like I practise every day, ha ha, when I haven’t been to class (and even then, candlelit restorative, aka ‘guided napping’) in weeks. I struggle with it elsewhere, too. When I started therapy, a decade ago now, it was almost the first observation my therapist made: this propensity to hold my breath at moments of awkwardness, challenge or discomfort in the conversation. And having it pointed out only made it worse, at least to begin with. Both of us sitting there, waiting for me to exhale.

Is it any surprise something similar seems to happen here? At times, Substack certainly feels like therapy and I’m grateful for the outlet. But writing anything personal is a negotiation. The medium asks of you how much to share and how much to keep private. How vulnerable about the hard bits you really want to be. And recently, every time I sat down to start a newsletter, I clammed up.

Far preferable to write about other people. There’s at least one context where holding your breath is a virtue, after all, and that is in free diving, captured beautifully in the short film by Emmett Sparling below.

“They say underwater is the last quiet place on earth, but quiet places speak loudly when you slow down enough to listen,” says a diver in its opening frames. “The surface is my comfort zone but I dive to face my fears.”

It certainly looks a scary business to the untrained eye, never mind lungs. Free divers learn to hold their breath for minutes at a time to descend, unencumbered by scuba equipment, to depths of up to 100m in the most experienced cases.

This practice depends on an instinct called the mammalian dive reflex, common to all mammals when our faces are immersed in water, from seals to humans. Think of the baby on the cover of Nevermind - not drowning but waving, all thanks to his MDR, which closes off the windpipe and conserves oxygen until his next breath.

Divers learn to control MDR’s constituent parts: bradycardia (when your heartbeat slows), peripheral vasoconstriction (where blood moves from your hands and feet to the core organs) and blood shift (as it moves to occupy the space your lungs did before compressing). The techniques are precise, the risks considerable, the rewards rich.

“It’s incredible what can happen in that space between two breaths,” says one of Sparling’s divers as his film captures this magic space-time, embued with a sense of calm but also a heightened awareness at every extra metre of depth.

This being a sport, there’s a competitive side. Professional apneists Stéphane Mifsud and Natalia Molchanova currently hold the male and female records for non-oxygen assisted breath holds, 11:35 minutes and 9:02 minutes respectively. Budimir Šobat managed a staggering 24 minutes and 37 seconds on one breath, though this was after pre-breathing 100% oxygen before going under.

Most divers do it for the sheer wonder, though - and the freedom. “Underwater, everything is a dance between breaths,” another says in the film. “The tempo of my heartbeat decides how long I get to stay.” What does this teach us mere landlocked mortals? That we have more control over our bodies than we think we do, perhaps. And that life doesn’t stop when our breath does. At least, not straight away.

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

Oddly, free diving appeals to me in a way scuba never did. Reliance on kit loops me out, or it did that one time I tried it at the bottom of a London swimming pool; perhaps it would be different in the open sea. That said, I don’t think I’m destined for a life of competitive apnea any time soon. So it’s back to the surface for me.

Swimming demands you keep breathing and somehow this comes easier to me in the water than in yoga or therapy. I leaned into this when I lived in Sydney, where I found the city’s many lap pools a great curative for anxiety. It was also where I picked up one of my favourite ever zines, ‘The Art of Swimming’, from a zine fair at the Museum of Contemporary Art on the harbourfront.

In it, the artist Vivienne Cutbush details a dip with her father for his 60th birthday, when he reminds her that swimming is about the ‘quality of the experience’ rather than the distance or speed you achieve. It’s about breathing the air as if there’s not much there, he says.

Don’t panic (he placed his hand upon mine).
Breathe.
Just breathe.
You don’t need to get it RIGHT the first time.

I think I’ve got better at this breathing lark since I started swimming on the regs. I even use it to calm myself down on dry land from time to time. Will I ever get the hang of it, really and truly? Don't hold your breath. And I'll try not to hold mine either.

While I wait this week

I’m feeling the benefits: Of five days in Cornwall. There’s no place I breathe easier, and this was only boosted by early morning swims in the cove with friends - and a friendly seal (no doubt putting his MDR to good use when we weren’t looking).

I’m reading: Tiff Phillipou’s Tough Love newsletter, in particular, What I Write About When I Don’t Feel Like Writing. Such honesty and vulnerability here. And after weeks of holding my own breath, it encouraged me to get writing again. Thank you, Tiff.

I’m still basking: In the afterglow of Glastonbury. Glasto goers are the new vegans. How do you know if someone’s been? They’ll tell you, of course. I’ve tried to keep a lid on it, really I have, but my seventh trip to the farm was hot, hot, hot not to mention unapologetically middle-aged. As was its follow up, seeing Blur at Wembley last night with 80,000 other forty- and fifty-something nostalgists. All together now:

“And it looks like we might have made it, yes, it looks like we made it to the end.”