Nick Pelios
Freediver, Creator
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Nick Pelios
Freediver, Creator
There has been a lot of talking lately about narcosis. What does it actually feel like though? In E1 of the Alchemy podcast, Harry Chamas gave us a glimpse.
This year, going deeper again, I don't feel like narcosis was affecting my decision-making abilities. I was super focused, in the zone. Everything was good. There are two ways I can describe it. If anyone ever fought or boxed, like this feeling when you get punched in the head really hard. Where you get these like vibrations all the way down your body. You know, like sort of like tingling all the way down. The same thing would happen if you hit your head really hard I guess. I'd be at the bottom and I was like, “boom”, the same sort of feeling. And the way to describe it is like if you took a huge hit on a bong, where you have this like very like buzzing, heavy feeling before you're even high yet, you know? But it's not the feeling of being high. It's the feeling of just taking a hit on a bong. I think it's just like how my body was reacting to the narcosis.
Like, I think it's similar if you do like an acid trip or a mushroom trip or whatever. If you get caught on a thought and you start just following that thought, you get completely lost in it. And it can be like a negative thought. It can be positive thoughts where you get lost and this is how bad trips happen. If you start thinking something negative and then the mind just fixates on this thing and it gets worse, worse, worse, worse… If you experience narcosis and then get lost in the positive thing, like how the feeling of the water or whatever, then it can be like kind of a nice experience, but you'll get distracted and potentially you'll do something wrong. If you just feel it and you just stay present at the moment and focus on what you need to do, then it's not really gonna affect it that much. And that's how I found my deep diving to be this year. I was literally just feeling what it was doing to me physically. It didn't change my decision-making ability.