Hi everyone!
I'm writing my instructor thesis about the fight or flight mechanism in freediving. I'm new to the subjet and i'm still looking for a good angle of approach. Questions I ask myself are; What are the most common triggers? What's the relation of the fight or flight mechanism with the mamalian dive reflex? Can you supress the mechanism and how? Does fight or flight only affects beginners? What if it hits you during a deep dive?
Can anyone help me with insight or documentation?
Thanks a lot!
Kind regards,
Christophe
That's a very challenging sets of questions to answer..
I'd say that you shouldn't ever experience a F-or-F response at all during freediving. If you do it's because something went wrong.
-Common triggers is something/anything going wrong and the diver being aware of it.
-(it takes ages to find articles, so I'll leave that to you), but the dive response is 'technically' a stress response. The more stressed you are (F-or-F) the stronger it should be, however you'll still consume more O2, which is why diving stressed never works well. **like I said, can't find articles but there have been some experiments done on ducks and seals being forced to hold their breath, and the more stressed the animals were the stronger their DR. (These studies were quoted in the book 'Deep', by James Nestor.
-The mechanism can be supressed (in my opinion) by being well prepared for the diving you're about to do including bad situations. No matter what, if something dangerous and unexpected happens that you aren't prepared for, F-or-F will be triggered. If you've thought of, and prepared a solution to these potential problems, then F-or-F won't be an issue if they do actually happened for real.
- I think F-or-F can affect any level of diver, it's just much more likely to affect beginners because they have much less experience dealing with uncomfortable situations that may arise during a freedive, and are therefor more likely to panic than calmly resolve the situation.
in my case, I remember on one of my first dives to 25m, my lanyard got tangled on the bottom, and this totally freaked my out.. I yanked it a few times, then ripped off the wrist part and sprinted back to the surface extremely out of breath (complete 'Flight' response). Last year, this happened to me at 66m, and I had no reaction to it. I calmly sank back down to the plate, unstrapped my lanyard, untangled it, and then ascended with it in my hand. Overall, it was actually a really nice dive. So with experience, it's possible that 'bad' situations don't affect you as much or at all.
- If it hit's on a deep dive (let's assume a tangled lanyard panic, at 60m).. I think it's very likely to result in a squeeze, there are significantly increased chances of BO or LMC.. Most likely you'll get much stronger contractions, and you'll probably end up sprinting the whole way back the surface. Again, the idea is to at least psychologically prepare for these types of unexpected situations so that you can deal with them calmly and never reach F-or-F mode.
