Freediving Wasn’t Designed as a Mental Health Practice. So Why Are So Many People Using It Like One?

Freediving Wasn’t Designed as a Mental Health Practice. So Why Are So Many People Using It Like One?

I wasn’t trying to prove that freediving is therapeutic.

As a trauma therapist and freediving instructor, I simply thought it was worth asking why 42% of the freedivers in my 2024 Freediving and Mental Health were study intentionally using freediving as part of their recovery from a mental or physical condition.

I wasn’t asking the questions a typical freediving researcher might ask. I wasn’t particularly interested in how long people could hold their breath or how deep they could dive. I wanted to know how they felt afterward, how long those feelings lasted, whether they experienced more positive emotion, whether their relationship with themselves changed, and whether something they learned underwater followed them back onto land.

I wanted to know whether they felt braver. Because after a decade of working in mental health, I knew those weren’t soft questions. Those were recovery questions.

And the answers complicated the idea that the psychological appeal of freediving can be explained simply by saying that water makes people calm.

Among the 120 freedivers in my study, 86% identified a sense of calm as one of the primary things that drew them to the sport — but they also came for exploration, physical challenge, social connection, and even a reset from their digital lives. Eighty-five percent reported meaningful positive changes in self-concept through freediving, including increased confidence, self-awareness, resilience, and bravery. Among experienced freedivers, 89% said freediving helped them navigate stress more effectively in daily life.

The more I looked at those responses, the less interested I became in asking whether freediving simply makes people feel better. I became interested in why so many pathways associated with recovery seemed to converge in the same activity.

Recovery Cannot Only Be About Reducing What Hurts

Mental health is often described through symptoms and diagnoses — anxiety, depression, PTSD, panic, burnout — but that is only one way of understanding it.

In Behind the Mask: A Freediver’s Guide to Nervous System Regulation, Recovery & Resilience, I define mental health more broadly as the capacity of the nervous system to respond flexibly to stress, recover after challenges, remain connected to ourselves and others, perceive safety, and return toward balance across changing experiences.

Mental health isn’t synonymous with being calm. Sometimes health looks like rest; sometimes it looks like mobilizing enough energy to act, reaching toward another person, setting a boundary, changing direction, or recognizing that the plan we entered with is no longer the plan our body needs. At its core, mental health is about capacity, not performance.

That distinction matters when we talk about recovery. Recovery cannot only be about reducing what hurts. It also has to include restoring access to what makes life worth inhabiting.

A person can experience fewer panic attacks and still have very little pleasure. Hypervigilance can decrease while social connection remains difficult. Depression can improve while play still feels inaccessible. Someone can learn excellent coping strategies and still struggle to trust their body, experience curiosity, tolerate uncertainty, or believe a different life is possible.

Positive psychology has long pushed mental health beyond a deficit model: removing pathology is not the same as creating well-being. Recovery also involves building access to positive emotion, connection, meaning, curiosity, agency, satisfaction, and a changing sense of who we believe ourselves capable of becoming.

This is where my freediving data became particularly interesting.

Ninety-seven percent of participants reported heightened positive emotions following diving — including joy, curiosity, delight, wonder, and awe. Forty-three percent said those effects remained for two to four hours, while another 40% reported effects lasting as long as two days.

When I asked specifically how freediving expanded access to positive emotional states, 75% reported extended relaxation, 73% increased contentment, 66% greater awareness of positive emotion, and 52% improved self-satisfaction.

Those aren’t merely reductions in distress. They represent access to something.

And that distinction may help explain why some divers aren’t only using freediving to get away from anxiety, stress, grief, trauma physiology, or the relentless cognitive demands of ordinary life. They may also be returning because the water gives them access to experiences that distress had narrowed — or, in some cases, removed.

Play Is Not a Side Effect

One of those experiences is play.

Adults are remarkably good at treating play as optional, particularly once life becomes difficult. We turn movement into exercise, hobbies into accomplishments, rest into recovery protocols, and somehow manage to give recreation a performance review.

Trauma and chronic stress make that narrowing even more pronounced. Protective physiology is organized around survival, prediction, vigilance, and conservation — not experimentation for the sheer pleasure of discovering what happens next. Rigid protective patterns can make spontaneity, silliness, curiosity, and uncertainty feel surprisingly difficult.

Play asks something different of the nervous system.

In Behind the Mask, I describe play as the biochemical opposite of trauma — not because play erases what happened, but because play creates a different homeostatic environment. It introduces novelty without catastrophe, activation without necessarily becoming threat, and experimentation without demanding a particular outcome. Small doses of play can interrupt some of the rigidity that develops when a nervous system has spent too long organized around protection.

And freedivers play constantly.

We chase bubbles. We swim through rings. We photograph each other doing ridiculous things underwater. We glide through beams of light, hang upside down, imitate marine animals, explore caves and reefs, and sometimes abandon whatever serious training plan we brought because a pod of dolphins has arrived and apparently the dolphins did not receive our periodization schedule.

That isn’t extraneous to recovery.

It may be part of it.

When play occurs alongside the extended relaxation reported by 75% of the divers in my study, something interesting becomes possible: the nervous system isn’t only practicing how to come down from stress. It is gaining experience with curiosity, pleasure, spontaneity, and engagement.

Recovery needs somewhere to go after survival loosens its grip.

Play gives it somewhere to go.

Maybe the Mammalian Dive Response Isn’t the Whole Story

When the face is immersed and breathing stops, the body initiates a coordinated oxygen-conservation response involving bradycardia, peripheral vasoconstriction, and redistribution of blood toward vital organs. In my DIVE Method, I describe the MDR as creating a repeatable physiological pause — a shift that can scaffold restoration, integration, and safety without assuming that the reflex itself is automatically healing. What matters is what happens inside and after that physiological shift: what the diver notices, how the sensations are interpreted, and what the diver chooses to do with the information.

But I no longer think the MDR alone adequately explains why so many freedivers describe feeling profoundly different after diving.

I believe something else is happening alongside it.

Consider what a freediver actually does during a dive.

We manipulate the tongue, jaw, soft palate, pharynx, larynx, and glottis. We swallow and equalize. We listen internally for tiny changes in pressure while monitoring sensations in the face and ears. We coordinate eye position and orientation, control respiratory musculature, soften or recruit different muscle groups, and continuously adjust movement according to sensory information arriving from both inside the body and the surrounding environment.

Frenzel and mouthfill equalization alone require remarkably fine-tuned coordination.

These aren’t random structures or isolated movements. Many involve cranial nerves, sensory pathways, and motor functions that also participate in swallowing, vocalization, facial sensation and expression, orientation, breathing, social engagement, and autonomic regulation.

This has led me to a hypothesis that has become increasingly central to my work:

Freediving may feel regulating partly because we repeatedly recruit many of the same neural pathways, muscles, sensory systems, and cranial-nerve-mediated functions that we deliberately engage on land when practicing nervous system regulation — except underwater, we aren’t necessarily doing them as regulation exercises. We are simply diving.

The regulation is embedded in the activity.

We are looking, listening, swallowing, equalizing, orienting, sensing pressure, controlling the tongue and larynx, monitoring the chest, coordinating movement, receiving information through the face and ears, and continuously responding to the environment — all while the Mammalian Dive Response is producing its own powerful autonomic shift.

The diver is regulating through participation, often without realizing it.

I believe this convergence is one reason so many of us emerge from the water feeling different even when the dive itself wasn’t particularly beautiful, deep, easy, or technically successful.

We have spent an hour or two inhabiting our bodies in a remarkably detailed way.

The Water Gives Us Our Bodies Back

That embodiment matters because chronic stress and trauma can profoundly alter our relationship with internal sensation. Signals may become amplified, muted, confusing, or difficult to trust. A racing heart can become evidence of catastrophe; tension becomes something to suppress; stillness can feel unsafe; a body that once protected us begins to feel like an adversary.

Freediving makes internal information difficult to ignore.

The breath-hold demands attention. Pressure demands attention. Equalization demands attention. Muscle tension, air hunger, heartbeat, temperature, orientation, effort, and emotional response all become part of a constantly updating internal map.

This is interoception — not simply noticing sensation, but gradually becoming more accurate about what those sensations mean.

The goal is not to convince ourselves that everything uncomfortable is safe. Freediving carries real risk, and accurate danger detection is part of competent diving. The deeper skill is learning to distinguish discomfort from danger, effort from force, activation from emergency, and adaptation from threat.

That distinction can restore something trauma and chronic stress often erode: trust in one’s own signals.

The water becomes a place where the body is no longer merely something to control. It becomes a source of information.

Recovery Is Relational, Too

There is another reason freediving resists being reduced to a solitary self-regulation practice: we do not freedive alone.

A dive buddy is not simply an emergency protocol waiting at the surface. The buddy watches, follows, meets the diver during ascent, reads facial expression and movement, shares recovery, offers eye contact, and becomes part of the nervous system environment surrounding the dive.

In my study, 74% of participants reported stronger social connection through freediving, 85.7% described their dive buddy as essential to creating a relaxed and safe diving experience, and 49% described the freediving community itself as supportive and inclusive.

For people whose stress histories include relational injury, social anxiety, hypervigilance, or difficulty trusting others, that matters.

Freediving asks us to practice dependence without helplessness. We remain responsible for ourselves while allowing another person to participate in our safety.

That is a surprisingly sophisticated relational experience.

The dive becomes more than an individual interaction between lungs and water. It becomes a co-regulated space in which safety, trust, attention, communication, and recovery are practiced between people.

Then Something Deeper Starts to Change

The outcome that interests me most may not be relaxation at all.

It may be self-concept.

Eighty-five percent of the divers in my study reported positive changes in how they viewed themselves, including increased confidence, self-awareness, emotional resilience, and bravery. Seventy-one percent reported improved emotional regulation, and among divers with four or more years of experience, 89% said freediving helped them manage stress more effectively in daily life.

That suggests the experience may not remain underwater.

A diver who repeatedly discovers, I can notice discomfort without immediately reacting to it; I can turn when something isn’t right; I can ask for support; I can recover; I can try again; I can change my mind; I can play; I can trust someone; I can do difficult things without abandoning myself, is accumulating more than freediving skills.

They are accumulating evidence about who they are.

And self-concept is not a trivial outcome in recovery. If distress has taught someone that they are fragile, unsafe, incapable, disconnected, or unable to trust themselves, repeated embodied experiences that complicate those beliefs matter.

Sometimes regulation gets you deeper. Sometimes regulation helps you recognize that today is not the day to go deeper.

The capacity to know the difference may be the more important skill.

Maybe the 42% Isn’t So Surprising After All

Freediving wasn’t designed as a mental health intervention.

No one invented Frenzel equalization as a vagal exercise. The buddy system wasn’t developed as a clinical co-regulation protocol. The Mammalian Dive Response certainly wasn’t designed by a therapist — evolution got there first.

Nobody sat down and decided to combine physiological downshifting, intense interoception, sensory immersion, play, positive emotion, social connection, challenge, agency, awe, skill development, and the possibility of a changing self-concept — and then call the result a sport.

Yet freediving brings many of those experiences together.

That is why I don’t believe there is one answer to why 42% of the people in my study intentionally use freediving as part of their recovery.

Freediving doesn’t offer only one pathway into recovery. It offers several at once.

The Mammalian Dive Response may provide a physiological pause. The physical mechanics of freediving may embed regulatory activity into the dive itself. Interoception strengthens the conversation between body and brain. Challenge creates opportunities for agency and adaptation. Dive buddies make the experience relational. Positive emotion expands what the nervous system can access. Play restores experimentation and aliveness. Repeated mastery can gradually alter the story someone carries about who they are.

None of that makes freediving a replacement for psychotherapy, medical care, or appropriate mental health treatment, nor does every diver experience the water as regulating. In Behind the Mask, I write equally about the ways freediving can expose hypervigilance, performance pressure, shutdown, fear, and old protective patterns. Stillness itself can feel restorative for one nervous system and threatening for another.

That complexity is precisely why I find the 42% so interesting.

The statistic doesn’t prove that freediving is therapeutic.

It tells us that a substantial number of people are already choosing it deliberately as part of recovery — and that is worth taking seriously.

Maybe they aren’t only returning to the water because it gives them relief from distress.

Maybe they’re returning because the water gives them access to experiences that distress once made harder to reach.

Joy. Play. Connection. Agency. Challenge. Curiosity. Trust. A different relationship with their own body. A different story about themselves.

Recovery cannot only be about what hurts less.

At some point, it also has to become about what becomes possible again.

And I think that may be one of the most important things freedivers have been trying to tell us all along.

Professional Disclosure

Professional Note: This article is intended for educational purposes and should not be interpreted as medical, psychological, or freediving instruction. Freediving is an inherently risky activity and should always be learned under the supervision of a qualified instructor with appropriate safety protocols and a trained dive buddy. The ideas presented here are intended to explore the intersection of nervous system science, psychology, and freediving — not to replace individualized medical care, psychotherapy, or professional freediving training.

About the Author
Elaine Hicks, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, nervous system educator, researcher, and SSI Freediving Instructor. She is the author of Behind the Mask: A Freediver’s Guide to Nervous System Literacy, Recovery & Resilience, the first book to explore the intersection of freediving, nervous system literacy, and mental health through an integrated clinical, physiological, and educational framework. Her work examines how the Mammalian Dive Response, interoception, embodied learning, and psychological safety can inform both freediving instruction and our understanding of human recovery. She teaches internationally and is the developer of the DIVE Method™ and Trauma-Informed Freediving®.

If you’re interested in the science of freediving, nervous system literacy, and recovery, follow along here on Medium. This article is the first in a series exploring why so many freedivers intentionally use the sport as part of their recovery — and what that might teach us about being human.