Katie Wood
Freediver, Writer, Explorer
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Katie Wood
Freediver, Writer, Explorer
I thought I understood myself. Disciplined, clear-headed, driven. Then came the ocean.
My first serious freedive was supposed to be a quiet hello. A descent to maybe fifteen meters. No stop, no drama. But in the water I found myself slipping. Past the first tug of pressure in my ears. Past the hum of ambient noise. I was somewhere else entirely. Deep, still, removed. And I wondered, am I dissociating?
That half-second of relief felt like being unzipped from the relentless rhythm of daily life. No phone. No deadlines. No persona. Just this vast weightlessness, enough that my reflexes, my heartbeat, even my thoughts, seemed to drift away.
This is what freediving does. With every meter, with every long breath, you choose to let go. There is no accident in this surrender. It is practiced. Cultivated. Controlled.
Dissociation is a word often spoken in whispers, attached to trauma, avoidance, even pathology. But it also describes something very human. When the body is under stress, or overstimulated, or overwhelmed, the mind sometimes steps back. It detaches, lets the senses blur, flattens emotion into a kind of fog. It is protection. In most cases, it is unconscious.
In freediving, something different is happening. The diver does not flee the body. They descend into it. Every breath, every contraction, every soundless pressure change is felt more vividly, not less. Yet there is a stillness that echoes what trauma survivors often describe. The slowing of time. The numbing of emotion. The sensation of observing rather than participating.
It is this paradox that makes freediving so psychologically compelling. You are in total control, but also radically vulnerable. You are fully present, but also floating just beyond yourself. It is as if the practice invites a certain kind of conscious dissociation. A temporary suspension of the constructed self.
Breath-holding is not just a physical act. It is a cognitive disruption. The brain is wired to panic when oxygen drops. Your heart races, your thoughts scatter. But trained freedivers learn to ride out that response. They breathe in rhythmically, calming the nervous system. They stretch the diaphragm. They prepare for the urge to breathe by rehearsing silence. And then they go under.
Inside the breath-hold, time distorts. The longer the hold, the more the world condenses. Thoughts begin to float. Priorities dissolve. The chatter of identity fades. This is not a dramatic loss of self, like one might experience in clinical dissociation. It is quieter. Chosen.
Some divers describe it as peace. Others as euphoria. Some say it is like being inside a lucid dream. But it is not fantasy. It is chemistry. The drop in oxygen triggers a cocktail of neurochemicals. Endorphins lift the mood. The parasympathetic system slows the heart. Brain wave activity shifts, sometimes resembling the calm states achieved during deep meditation.
For a moment, the diver is untethered. Not in danger. Not in delusion. Just momentarily unburdened.
This is where the psychological frame begins to overlap with the spiritual. Because what happens in the water, during these long minutes of silence, has echoes in prayer, in ritual, in altered states cultivated across cultures. Breath retention appears in yogic traditions. In spiritual fasting. In initiation rites. Humans have always sought transformation through limits.
But freediving is not merely transcendence. It has risk. Blackouts happen when hypoxia goes too far. Mental disorientation can arise from pushing past comfort. Some divers report feeling strangely hollow after a dive, as if the return to surface life is jarring.
Controlled dissociation, then, is not a freefall. It is a balance. It takes training. It takes intention. It must be done with support. With a buddy system. With recovery time. With reverence for the edge.
Still, it raises questions. Why does the body seem to crave this state? Why do so many freedivers speak about the ocean as if it is a mirror? Why do people return from the deep looking not just rested, but changed?
Part of the answer may lie in how we live above water. We are overstimulated. We are expected to be always reachable, always thinking, always producing. Freediving interrupts that machinery. It forces a reset. It offers a silence not just of sound, but of self.
The rituals of freediving are not random. They resemble the preparations for trance, or ceremony. The slow breathing. The calming of the body. The final inhale. The moment of letting go. These are the steps by which someone crosses into another mental landscape. And then, eventually, comes back.
That return is vital. You cannot live underwater. You cannot remain dissociated. The point is not to disappear. It is to go, and then re-emerge, with perspective.
Freediving, at its core, is about learning how to leave and how to return. It is about trusting that the body can handle more than the mind believes. It is about flirting with the edge of self, not to escape, but to understand.
In that way, yes, it is a form of controlled dissociation. But perhaps not in the clinical sense. More in the poetic one. A chosen forgetting. A soft unraveling. A way of stepping out of your story, so that when you return, you can tell it more clearly.
Not everyone who dives is looking for that. Some want records. Some want stillness. Some just want to play. But whether they name it or not, many find themselves caught by that quiet pull. That moment of recognition. That deep breath where the world narrows, and something inside them shifts.
And when they resurface, they are never quite the same.