The Mammalian Dive Reflex

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Before taking you through the how, let’s explore the mammalian dive reflex and why it helps relieve anxiety.

The diving reflex commonly referred to as the mammalian dive reflex, diving bradycardia, and the diving response is a protective, multifaceted physiologic reaction that occurs in mammals including humans in response to water submersion (Godek and Freeman).

Translation? When you are exposed to an environment resulting in apnea, a temporary cessation of breathing, your body responds by reducing its energy needs:

  • Blood is shunted to your core.

  • Heart rate drops.

  • Metabolism is reduced.

By slowing your system down, your body reduces the need for oxygen while you have a limited supply of it. You’ve done this in your car by not revving the engine while your gas tank was low. There is no sense in quickly burning fuel if there isn’t much around.

A panic attack is your mind pressing your metabolic gas pedal to the floor. Your heart races, blood thunders in your ears, and you feel energy cycling endlessly through your body. It would be nice to experience the opposite sensations of a steady, rhythmic heartbeat and a ratcheting down of excess energy. But a mind running away from itself cannot be thought out of overthinking.

One of my favorite examples of what anxiety feels like is to think of it as being on a roller coaster but you’re never allowed to get off. Sure, the first few times may be exciting, even energizing. After a while though, you want to stop moving. You want some time with your feet on solid ground. Problem with anxiety and panic attacks is that it’s tough to intentionally get off the mental roller coaster. Jumping off the ride in the middle of an upside-down corkscrew isn’t advisable, which is why I rely on this biological reflex to naturally put the brakes on my mind.

This is a reflex. You do not need to think about anything. There is no meditation involved. No mindfulness. No repeating a mantra. All you need is cold water. I’ve run cold water over my wrists before job interviews to bring my heart rate down. I’ve cycled hot and cold water in the shower after waking up into a panic attack in the morning to carefully bring my system under control. I’ve stuck my face into a freezer to shock my body into focusing on my immediate environment and not every possible avenue of error anxiety discovers.

No thinking required. Expose the body, or certain parts of the body, to cold water and the benefit of eons of mammalian evolution starts engaging the relaxation response. This will not solve whatever you’re anxious about. I still have to figure out the problem or problems in front of me, but I do not have to solve those problems while on the mental roller coaster from hell. I can take ninety seconds to calm my body and approach my issues with a, literally, cooler head.

See the videos below to see how I, and some others, trigger those calming sensations through this reflex.

A note before continuing: One of the methods I demonstrate requires breath holding for 40-60 seconds. If you do not feel comfortable, mentally or physically, attempting a breath hold of that length, then the second method is a better alternative.

Two Methods

In this video, I show different ways of triggering the mammalian dive reflex.

The first is submerging my face in cold water.

The second is pressing a bag of ice, or cold compress, to my face.

I hope you enjoy me being a guinea pig!

Ice-cold water

103 beats per minute - starting heart rate

47 beats per minute - after 20 seconds

Cold tap water in the sink

75 beats per minute - starting heart rate

54 beats per minute - after 20 seconds

41 beats per minute - after 1 minute and 20 seconds