What freediving taught me about paying attention [+Audio]

Freedivers plunge into the water on a single breath-hold with nothing but a wetsuit, mask and flippers (or sometimes, nothing at all). They can get pretty deep, too. The world record is currently held by Alexey Molchanov, who dove 131 meters, the equivalent of 39 stories, holding his breath for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. 

Descent into darkness

I’m an amateur freediver and have made it to 27 meters. It’s hardly comparable to Alexey, but I learned an important lesson during my first dive lesson: It’s not about how deep you can go, it’s about how you feel. (Here I go about feelings again).

My instructor told me to forget about depth. “This ain’t a competition,” he said, “and even if it was, you shouldn’t be thinking about it.” He continued, “Oh, and never-ever look at your wearable during your dive to track your time, depth or heart beat,” he warned me. In a world obsessed with data and measuring steps, calories, heart rate and so on, I was a little bit surprised. And then he explained. 

When you get overly concerned with a number, you lose focus on the more important questions. You know, like whether or not your lungs feel like they’re going to collapse (‘lung squeeze’), whether you’re equalizing your ears with the outside water pressure properly, and if you have an accurate gauge of how much breath you have left before things get dicey. These various “data points” are more crucial than any external goal you’ve set. Because when you get distracted thirty meters under water, this is precisely how people die.¹

Attention is our greatest asset and a lack of it is our greatest downfall. In Tokyo, there are a growing number of people getting injured while walking and texting. Usually they bump into someone or fall down the stairs. But sometimes this is fatal. Last year, a lady stopped right on the railroad tracks as she stared at her phone. She was probably playing CandyCrush or texting a friend. We don’t know. The train’s safety barrier came down and sirens and alarms went off, but she was completely oblivious. She died on impact. ²

This is an extreme case of attention spans being eroded by technology, and a really unlucky person. But some form of this happens on a daily basis, even if it doesn’t always kill us.

Numbers, in particular, tend to distract us. When I worked in sales I quickly discovered that paying attention to my revenue every day was counterproductive. It was only through actively disregarding this number that I could give my heart and soul to the job.

Counting calories is a distraction from enjoying your food and noticing more important factors, like the quality of your food (I wrote about the cult of nutritionism here).

Even when looking at a clock, which is an abstraction for the concept of time, we build up anxiety. How much time is this going to take? In doing so, we force ourselves out of the moment.

In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Harari says today the most important skill is knowing what to ignore. Data is abundant. Opinions are a dime a dozen. Information is commoditized. But what is important?

This important vs. urgent question is a little bit easier to answer when you’re holding your breath under water and the only visual cue you have is right in front of you — a thin rope. But on a day to day basis, it can be harder. With an exponential increase in companies and technology begging for our attention, it can be tricky to parse out. It's easy to blame “them”. It’s harder to take skillful action and figure out, on your own, what to pay attention to and what to ignore. But we must try. 

Skillful action is when you block out your calendar to think, contemplate and reflect, and actually stick to the schedule. It’s leaving your phone in a separate room and deliberately not checking it in the morning. It’s taking a hint from our sensitive friend Thoreau and taking a solo trip to ask yourself the question, why am I doing what I am doing? 

It’s when you prioritize the value you’re adding (am I helping someone?), and ignore the number of likes you get or the digits in your bank account. It’s choosing to focus on your daily emotional and spiritual and physical health, not doom-scrolling and obsessing over the end-of-the-world narrative on the news.

It’s listening to your inner compass instead of an idea society has given you. It's being okay with 100 unread emails and a few people being annoyed at you, because you are not trying to please everyone.

The theme here, if there is one, is paying attention to what’s happening internally instead of externally.

Whatever it may be, if we don’t take time to occasionally step away from what’s “normal,” if we never question it, then we default to what society, government, media, and technology have told us is important. And this has consequences.

You’ll be like the freediver that hops into the water staring at his Fitbit, the girl standing in the middle of the railroad tracks, the parent that misses their kid’s birthday because of their busy jobs, and the person climbing up a ladder chasing an imaginary goal post that moves farther and farther away. 

What am I paying attention to right now?

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Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you thought about this week’s newsletter. Drop me a comment below and let’s chat.

1. The fatality rate is quite rare for competitive freediving, about 1 in 50,000. However, it’s a fairly dangerous sport for amateur divers, with around 1 in 500 people dying. Many of these fatalities are from shallow-water blackouts and when the diver is by themselves. Always bring a diving buddy.

2. I had a business idea. What if Apple developed a function that shut your screen down when it sensed a certain type of movement like walking? There are motion sensors in our phones that make this possible. But then I realized maybe it wouldn’t have saved this lady's life, as she was standing still on the train tracks? I don’t know, but it would be worth a try.