Friday Five #6

Hey, good evening!

Here is your Friday 5 roundup of this week’s freediving facts, fun and f’ups…

💕 The ‘tend and befriend’ stress response…

• In Give in Take by Adam Grant, I read about a new stress response that differs from flight or flight. It was discovered by USLA psychologist, Shelly Taylor, and is called ‘tend and befriend.’
   
• “One of the most striking aspects of the human stress response is the tendency to affiliate – that is, to come together in groups to provide and receive joint protection in threatening times”
   
• Taylor’s research shows that when we feel stressed, the brain’s natural response is to release chemicals that drive us to bond. 
   
• That’s why when firefighters start to feel exhausted, they tend to invest their limited energy in helping their colleagues. 
   
• So one idea for when you’re feeling stressed in your life or in your freediving training, try to help others around you! It might help you too! 
  
  In one experiment for example, adults either gave massages to babies or received massages themselves. Post massage, those who gave had lower levels of stress hormones — such as cortisol and epinephrine — compared those who received.
   
• During depth / competition season, I like to coach one or two novice competitive freediver(s) while I’m doing my training / competing. It helps distract me from over-thinking / over-analyzing about my own problems (and from making mountains out of mole hills!), adds more meaning to my daily life and makes me feel happy to help another person which helps beat stress! 🙂

💪 How and why to improve your myoglobin?

• While on a freedive, there is a point when the muscles cannot extract enough oxygen from the blood to power the muscles, so they start to extract oxygen from a compound called myoglobin.
   
• Myoglobin is a protein in muscle cells that carries oxygen from the blood to the energy factories in the cells. So it is wise to train to improve the amount of myoglobin in your muscles, this way your legs / arms do not feel tired or lactic until late during the ascent. 
   
• How to do that? Here’s 5 ways to improve myoglobin (good for training on your off-season):
   
  1. repetition freedives / spearfishing 
  2. dynamic pool training
  3. cross-training activities (ie rock climbing, wind surfing, isometrics, etc)
  4. weight training – doing high weight low rep weight training increases the stored energy in muscles
  5. alactic sprint training – sprinting at full speed while freediving. Note, this exercise is stressful and should only be done in short periods of 5-10 seconds. (for example, dive to 25m, hang for 30 seconds, then sprint 14m in 6-7 seconds at an upwards angle, then slowly surface). 
     
     There’s a lot more about all of this in Eric Fattah’s Book, Holistic Freediving

😀 How freediving and meaningful activities contribute 40% to your overall level of happiness?

• In Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols, I found out what contributes and shapes our level of happiness:

1. Genetic predisposition accounts for around 50% of our level of happiness
    
2. Circumstances (the country we’re in, culture, demographics like age, gender and ethnicity, personal history, past disappointments or success, factors such as marital status, occupation health and socioeconomic level) contribute only 10% (!)
    
3. The other 40% of our happiness is shaped by voluntarily pursuing personal goals through meaningful activities, like freediving for example!!! 😀

💬 What quote I’ve been thinking about –

“You have only so much time and energy, so when you spread yourself out, you end up spread thin. You want your achievements to add up, but that actually takes subtraction, not addition. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.”

-Gary Keller, The ONE Thing

🐟 Psychedelic fish in the world’s first fish encyclopedia!

• When cruising around my new favorite blog, Brain Pickings, I came across this epic post about the world’s first-ever encyclopedia of fish!
   
• A strange and wondrous book, illustrated in color and who’s author identified himself as a secret British spy (not true, but clickbait existed even in 1719!)
  
  “They are seaborne butterflies, gilled and finned peacocks, psychedelic dragons of the ocean; they are candy-colored aliens, Earth’s proudest freak-flags, floating cosmoses of wonder; they are undulating living poems.”

• Looks like even mermaids might’ve existed back then! 🙂
   
• A rare surviving copy has been scanned and restored and now the artwork can be ordered as prints and face masks (with proceeds benefiting The Nature Conservancy’s effort and stewardship of this amazing and irreplaceable world.)

As always, it’s a pleasure and honor getting to spend some time with you, I hope you have a great weekend!

Renee