Katie Wood
Freediver, Writer, Explorer
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Katie Wood
Freediver, Writer, Explorer
There is a particular kind of quiet bravery that rarely gets filmed. It does not happen at the line, or at the edge of the reef, or in the final seconds before the tag appears from the dark and a hand reaches to take it. It starts far earlier, in ordinary rooms and unremarkable spaces, with a chair, a clock, a notebook, and a willingness to get very curious about what fear actually is. Freediving is the visible tip of that practice. Small courage is the rest of the iceberg.
Small courage is not heroism. It is the daily work of teaching a nervous system to meet stress with skill, to map signals before they surge, to convert reflex into response. It is a method more than a mood, a way of climbing deliberate rungs of difficulty that raise your tolerance for intensity in a measured, reversible way. Psychologists call it graded exposure, fear hierarchies, stress inoculation. Freedivers know it as the slow apprenticeship to depth that happens on land long before a lanyard clips to the line. The ocean does not reward grand gestures. It rewards governance. Small courage is self governance.
If this sounds abstract, imagine a ladder you build one rung at a time. At the bottom, a seated breath hold, eyes closed, attention on the first flutter in the diaphragm and the instinct to flee. On a higher rung, a breath hold while you stand and reach, hips folded, hamstrings taut, noticing how physical tension pressures the mind. Higher still, a hold with mild cognitive load, reciting a series of numbers or spelling a phrase backward, watching how focus narrows and how calmly, with training, you can widen it again. With each ascent you get two things, a larger map of your triggers, and proof that the sensations you fear are bearable. When you return to the ocean, you bring that map.
The science behind this is both simple and deep. In many domains, from pain rehabilitation to anxiety treatment, researchers have shown that gradual, structured exposure reduces avoidance and recalibrates threat response. The idea is not to crush fear, but to renegotiate it in increments that your body and brain can absorb. Randomized trials of graded exposure and related methods show reductions in fear avoidance behaviour and improvements in function when people progress through planned steps rather than swinging between comfort and overwhelm. The mechanism is learning, not force. You teach the system that the cue you have been treating like a tiger is, in fact, a loud cat. You do it again tomorrow. You keep your promises to yourself. Over time the prediction error shrinks and so does the panic. In the water, that shrinkage shows up as an extra second of calm when the urge to breathe arrives, and then two seconds, and eventually a very long moment in which you can notice the urge without obeying it. The moment is small, the leverage is large.
Freediving physiology amplifies the case for small courage. Breath hold is not a stunt layered onto a normal body, it is a doorway into a specialized state with its own rules. The mammalian diving response slows the heart, constricts peripheral vessels, and preserves oxygen for the brain and core. The spleen contracts and adds a transient bolus of red blood cells to circulation, a trick that looks almost like nature’s own micro dosing protocol for endurance. The body is capable of these shifts, but it performs them best when you stop arguing with the reflex and start collaborating with it. That collaboration begins on land, not because dry training is a perfect substitute for the sea, but because it gives you repetitions without environmental risk. Reviews of breath hold physiology, and experimental work on apnea, splenic contraction, and oxygen conservation, repeatedly show that training can sharpen these responses and that the mind’s stance toward discomfort is part of the system. If you can lower the cognitive alarm when carbon dioxide rises, the reflex can do its work without noise. Calm is not decoration in freediving. It is a resource allocation strategy.
Small courage asks you to meet carbon dioxide like a coach, not a cop. CO2 is a messenger that gets blamed for the message. When partial pressure rises, chemoreceptors broadcast urgency. For many divers the signal arrives as a story, this is dangerous, you are running out, breathe now. On land you can work with this loop in a way that the ocean does not allow. Studies that raise CO2 experimentally in clinics and labs reliably induce anxiety, narrow cognitive bandwidth, and push the heart into faster rhythms. That is the bad news. The good news is that simple, behaviorally precise practices change your relationship to the same stimulus. Slow breathing at a person’s resonance frequency can increase heart rate variability, which is a proxy for flexible vagal control, and that flexibility correlates with the ability to recover composure after a stressor.
Cold water on the face adds another lever. The same system that preserves oxygen at depth can be toggled on the surface with a bowl of ice water and a towel. Cold facial immersion triggers trigeminal afferents, lowers heart rate, and, in multiple studies, reduces the somatic surge associated with panic. The point is not to create dependence on cold as a magic switch. The point is to give your system a strongly felt counterexample, a rapid state change that proves your arousal is malleable.
This is what a fear ladder looks like when you stretch it into a practice instead of a stunt. You start by deciding that today will be a data day, not a drama day. You sit, you breathe normally, you mark, you repeat. You are not chasing a personal best here. You are chasing predictability, the feeling that what you feel will be the same tomorrow. The next time you add a small demand, and the ladder rises. Care matters as much as content. Dry training does not confer immunity. Reckless apnea has risks in the pool and on land, and the point of small courage is precisely to avoid the macho shortcuts that lead to blackouts, near misses, and a long unpaid tax of fear. Risk is part of the sport, but risk literacy is part of the craft.
A ladder built alone is good. A ladder built in community is better. Skill transfer is not just a personal trait. It is a social phenomenon. Meta analyses of training transfer show that the environment around a learner powerfully shapes whether a skill practiced in one context will appear in another. In other words, if the people you train with value composure over spectacle, and if your debriefs ask what your mind did rather than what your watch recorded, you are more likely to carry your land practice into the moment it matters. If your club normalizes micro steps, then micro steps become cool, and if micro steps are cool, then injury and burnout lose their glamour. In the long run, culture dictates outcome. The divers who keep showing up are the divers who discovered that humility is a performance enhancer.
There is a question at the heart of all of this. Why train bravery on land for a craft that lives in water. The answer is twofold. First, because the physiology of breath hold can be rehearsed safely at the surface, and rehearsal is the currency of confidence. Second, because transfer is a design problem. If you want land practice to appear in the ocean, you must make them rhyme. Build rungs that echo the demands of depth, pressure, dark, cognitive narrowing, and the specific storylines that hook you. Then rehearse them until your body answers before your mind has time to intervene. That is how small courage becomes a habit.
It is easy to romanticize courage, to imagine it as a burst of will, a cinematic choice, a single decisive act that severs fear from action. In practice, most courage is maintenance. Courage is showing up for a process you designed on a day when you would rather improvise. Courage is allowing yourself to be seen as you are, an athlete in progress, not a highlight reel. Courage is talking about blackouts and near misses without shame and learning from them in a way that keeps your friends alive. Courage is skipping a dive because the story in your head is louder than the sea in your ears. Courage is taking the long way, which is the only way if you plan to be here in ten years.
Who owns your brave. Not the version of you that posts. The version that shows up to breathe and count and hold and write. The version that respects a ladder enough to climb it slowly. The version that knows the sea is not impressed by noise. Ownership is a daily act.
Small courage is portable. It follows you into work and parenting and injury and aging. The same rungs that carry you through a strong urge to breathe can carry you through a spike of anger or a wave of doubt. If that sounds grand, remember that the practice is small. You sit. You breathe. You feel something you do not like. You resist the urge to bolt. You endure with skill. You stand up, sip water, and move on with your day a fraction stronger. The next time at depth, the fraction shows up where it counts, in a slimmer gap between feeling and choice, in a cleaner turn, in a softer jaw, in a steadier ascent, in a calmer recovery, in the quiet satisfaction that the person you trained on land is the person who showed up when the water went dark.
None of this guarantees records. It offers something better, a path that respects risk, honors physiology, and keeps you in the game. Staying is its own goal. Small courage helps you stay.