By: Valentina Skackova
Or what synchronised swimming – a sport with glittering swimsuits and slippery nose clips – can teach us about handling pressure.
There are various kinds of cold. There’s the cold that makes you shiver once in a while, but that you otherwise don’t feel. There’s the cold that hits you like a wagon when you step outside, so cold that you feel snowflakes instead of oxygen in your lungs, paralyzing you. There’s the cold that comes as a relief after a day of torpid, sluggish heat. There’s the cold that you don’t really acknowledge until you step into a warm room, and you realize the tips of your fingers went numb.
Now, replace the word “cold” with “stress”. After a few tweaks, you’re faced with a whole new metaphor – one that is just as accurate. In many ways, stress is similar to the cold: you can’t really influence when it happens; it can be useful in small doses, but overwhelming otherwise; you can try to block it out by adding a few layers. And like with the cold, you can become more resilient to stress when you regularly expose yourself to it.
If this sounds to you like abstract nonsense: let me take you on a more practical detour, filled with chlorine, underwater acrobatics and borderline asphyxiation.
Dancing in water? Not quite
Although part of the Olympic Games for decades, synchronised swimming remains a relatively unknown sport, often perceived as charming underwater dancing in sparkly costumes. But don’t get mistaken: synchronised swimming (or “synchro”, like we say dans le milieu) is actually one of the most demanding sports out there, ranking second only to long distance runners for the swimmers’ aerobic capacity – and for good reason. During the choreographed routines, they spend half of their time (anything between 2 to 6 minutes) upside down, vigorously sculling their arms to keep them from sinking while moving their entire body to the music. As former professional swimmer Kim Davis described it: “Imagine sprinting all-out, while holding your breath and trying to be [in sync] with seven other colleagues”. So, would you still call synchro dancing in water? Not quite.
I discovered synchronised swimming eight years ago, and I haven’t taken a break from it since. Our training mixes on land flexibility and strength with laps of traditional swimming, practising our routine in the water, and breath-holding (apnea) exercises. It is the latter that I’d like to focus on during our detour (I warned you it would be long. Think getting off at Arsenal and going all the way around the VUB campus instead of straight across kind of long).
The idea of these “sous-eau” is to take a deep, deep breath on one side of the pool to swim the 25m underwater. When our coaches feel creative, they like to complicate them: swim a lap of butterfly stroke, turn, and swim the “sous-eau” right away, or waiting fully submerged for 60 seconds before immediately pushing off the wall and swimming the 25m, just to name a few. The first lap is easy: you get to the end with still a decent air storage. But after the third, fourth, eight time, you can feel how each movement drains you of some energy. After several strokes, you’re out of air, so you look up to see how much longer you have to hold: half is still ahead. You start feeling small convulsions in your throat. It’s not a cough: it’s your lungs expanding, trying to get some air. It’s a relief when you finally breathe, as your every muscle melts. The feeling’s only temporary though: soon, you start dreading the moment you’ll have to inhale one last time before plunging again.
The Stress Vaccine TM
The growing pressure, the panicky feeling, the short relief before it all starts again, does it not sound familiar to you? It can: I’ve just described one of the most common patterns of acute stress. In a way, every time we do those “sous-eau” or practise our routine underwater, me and my fellow teammates experience small amounts of stress (mind you, on our recreational level, we’re far from what professional athletes experience – but it’s still there).
The description of our apnea training may sound rather negative, but these exercises are key to success. Not only do they improve our breath-holding capacity, but by exposing us to controlled, safe doses of panic response, they teach our bodies and minds how to react – or how not to react – in a stressful situation. This is called stress inoculation, and it copies the vaccine’s principle: exposure to small doses of stress can make you more resistant to it. It is far from being exclusive to the niche category of synchro swimmers though. When you’re in a stressful situation (a presentation, an excessive workload, exams, a breakup…) a typical response is the activation of the fight-or-flight reflex, your body’s instinctive reaction to danger. However, your brain can also overreact to certain stressors that are not life-threatening. Ever felt like you were breathing too much, had clammy hands, or could hear every little noise around you during an exam? Yup, that’s one case where your fight-or-flight response was unnecessarily set off. But if you “practice” stress regularly, your survival instinct is not as likely to be triggered when it’s not supposed to be.
How to hold your breath… in more ways than one
We all live through stress differently, and consequently, our coping mechanisms are different too. There’s unfortunately no one-size-fits-all tutorial that you could tattoo on your forearm and read religiously before each exam. But there are some common points, of which the most important is: you are the one who chooses how stress affects you. In the words of writer Tara Parker-Pope: “Stress is inevitable. Getting sick from it is not”. To make it more concrete: in a 2012 study, researchers from Wisconsin looked at the death rates of over 25 000 people over 9 years. They found that high stress levels alone were not enough to lead to a premature death. Yet people who led stressful lives and were convinced that the stress was affecting their health had a 43% increased chance of premature death. In short: stress doesn’t necessarily kill you, but believing it will, can.
When swimming our “sous-eau”, what really shows our progress is how far we get without breathing. At the end, you usually have no air left anyway, so it’s all about those final strokes that you do, about how far you push yourself while in hypoxia. This is also a way of getting “used” to stress: by exiting your comfort zone, voluntarily exposing yourself to small (or not-that-small) amounts of stress – not enough to make you panic, but enough to make your body and mind be on the lookout for other situations where you may feel the same way. Try entering a competition of some kind, performing on stage, take public speaking lessons, a first-aid course, or set yourself a physical challenge: running in wind or rain or other unfavourable conditions, rock climbing, swimming in cold water (or taking an icy shower, to start more mildly) …
And if you managed to hold your breath (metaphorically or not) once, remember: you can do it again.
