How I Manage Anxiety As An Elite Athlete | Freediver Talya Davidoff

Hi everyone, my name is Talia Davidoff and I'm a Molchanov's athlete. Today I wanted to go through a couple of things for the people who suffer from anxiety. For those of you who suffer anxiety, you've often heard the people around you say just calm down, just breathe, just do yoga, meditate, and first and foremost I want to say that those are and can be very effective ways for dealing with anxiety. Of course there are certain things that all of us as competitive divers go through which is competition anxiety. I'm just going to personally discuss how I deal with anxiety. I find that having a routine is a truly anxiety causing situation. You've seen videos of me on the boat, I'm dancing, I'm having a good time, I'm joking. There's a very very good reason for it. The more time that I spend trying to relax, trying to calm down, trying to breathe, the less chance that I will be successful in any of that. It tends to ramp up my anxiety and make me more aware of the physiological responses that I have to anxiety. So I threw out the routine because it stopped working for me and here's why. You will often hear people have a morning routine, a night before routine, and I used to have one of those but I found that the second that I couldn't stick to that routine due to external circumstances, I lost control of the day, my dive, my ability to maintain my anxiety. So now I remain unfocused. I find that distraction is key. Distraction is the most important part for me so I'm not focused on anything. As soon as I've announced my dive, I pack it away and I will continue with this distraction, talking, having fun, being grateful, making jokes, dancing until four minutes to the dive. Four minutes to the dive, that's when I switch on 100% focus and then from four minutes is when I actually have a routine. I have a cycle of breathing that I do right up until official top and then I go and I make my dive. Often free diving is, and very successfully, is a means for people to find calm and to find peace but if you're one of the few who wants to free dive and you feel like you can't because you don't necessarily feel like you have those qualities, there are ways to work around it. I realized that if I tried to put more energy and more focus into what I was doing, I would end up draining myself, making myself more anxious, second-guessing myself. So now four minutes to the dive, that's when it's done. This also then brings into the account of warm-ups. Warm-ups are in fact very important. I start the beginning of my season with multiple warm-ups but I kind of wean off of them as we go because A, I don't really feel like they serve a purpose for me but B, because I have a mental issue or an anxiety issue, if I feel any form of like true discomfort or like I can't hold my breath or anxiety on that warm-up, it immediately spills over into my actual dive. So I find that to me losing the warm-up at the competition level has been very very effective for my anxiety because I'm gonna just do that four minutes and I'm gonna go do my best on the dive that I have set in front of me. Long story short, I know that I've had a lot of trouble in my past and I know that there are other people out there who really struggle with true anxiety. Mental illness is real, help is always out there, it's not just free diving. Go and get the help that you seek but also know that there is a place for you here in this competitive world and in this world of free diving and you are able to find ways like I have in order to succeed as someone with a mental illness. So please leave us a message in the link below, we'd love to hear more from you. Thank you.