6

Red Mind, Gray Mind, Blue Mind: The Health Benefits of Water

Water symbolizes many things connected with healing. Pouring forth from within the depths of the earth, it represents life and regeneration.

—WILBERT M. GESLER, HEALING PLACES

One of the most famous first lines of an American novel consists of three simple words: “Call me Ishmael.” But in the rest of the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s protagonist describes the power of water to heal his mental state:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

Ishmael seeks the solace of water to bring him out of the “November” of his soul. Melville’s sailor is a fictional character, but what he was onto is very real, indeed.

Yet instead of going to sea to manage our stress, like Ishmael, today we turn to the easier (but less effective) path: pharmaceuticals. As of 2013, according to the Mayo Clinic, antidepressants were the second most commonly prescribed class of drug in America, and opioid painkillers (which can be exceedingly addictive) were third.1

Making things even worse, analysis of FDA clinical trials show that at least four of the main selective SSRI—serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants—don’t perform significantly better than placebos in treating mild or moderate depression.² We’re taking (and paying for) millions and millions of drugs, both prescribed and self-administered, that do little more than offer the promise of addiction—one more thing to be majorly stressed about.

Monkey mind. Toxic stress. Chronic stress. Stress overload. Directed attention fatigue. Mental fatigue. When sustained over long periods of time the “always on” lifestyle can (and will) eventually result in memory problems, poor judgment, anxiety attacks, nervous habits, depression, loss of sex drive, autoimmune diseases, and overreliance on alcohol and drugs for relaxation in all but the most genetically gifted among us. Chronic stress damages the cardiovascular, immune, digestive, nervous, and musculoskeletal systems. It lowers levels of dopamine and serotonin, causing us to feel exhausted and depressed. Studies have shown that stress that lasts longer than twenty-one days can impair the function of the medial prefrontal cortex3 (which affects higher-level thinking), while it makes the amygdala (the fear and aggression center of the brain) hyperactive.⁴ Prolonged exposure to gluocorticoids, a type of steroid secreted by the adrenal glands during stress, can cause the cells in the hippocampus to atrophy—the same damage seen in people with post-traumatic stress.⁵ A 2012 report concludes bluntly that consequences of prolonged stress include an increased risk of premature mortality.⁶ Stress really does kill. And yet, off we go again—our knowledge that what we’re doing is unhealthy is yet another stressor.

We need some different strategies to deal with the stresses of modern life. So—what if Ishmael was right, and Blue Mind is a better cure for what ails us? What if time spent in or around water was as effective as (and more immediate than) an antidepressant? What if we could treat stress, addiction, autism, PTSD, and other ills with surfing or fishing? What if your doctor handed you a prescription for stress or ill health that read, “Take two waves, a beach walk, and some flowing river, and call me in the morning”?⁷

Red Mind

In 2011, prior to the Blue Mind 2 conference, Sands Research conducted a study to examine the responses of a focus group of forty-five women who were viewing videos that included commercials, Saturday Night Live skits, and three clips of ocean environments: a turtle swimming, an undersea kelp forest, and a shot taken over the shoulder of a diver. They measured brain response via EEG and by monitoring eye movements to assess what Steve Sands calls emotional valence: the positive/negative, approach/withdrawal reaction to each video. By tracking the electrical activity in both hemispheres of the inferior frontal gyrus of the brain, reported Sands Research VP Brett Fitzgerald, “We can see the level of emotion people are experiencing moment to moment when they are watching a particular image.”

The Sands EEG readings indicated that water images in the study evoked both positive emotions and sustained attention in the minds of the focus group. Interestingly, cognitive engagement was significantly lower when people were viewing the water videos. In fact, this indicated that the ocean images were a kind of “mental rest period” for the focus group—similar to the ways that many people experience a greater sense of rest and renewal when they are near water.8

Neuroscientist Catherine Franssen teamed up with World Surfing Reserves ambassador João De Macedo to further describe the differences between the two states I like to call Blue Mind and Red Mind, particularly how these two mental “maps” show up on or around water. Franssen, an expert on the biology of physical and mental stress, started off by further defining Red Mind as an “edgy high, characterized by stress, anxiety, fear, and maybe even a little bit of anger and despair.” This state is a result of the physiological stress response that evolved to help us survive. “Your neuroendocrine system has been built and evolved for a reason,” Franssen comments. “These ‘Red Mind’ hormones are essential for escaping predators, and finding and fighting for food and mates.”

That cocktail of norepinephrine, dopamine, and cortisol that flooded Jamal Yogis’s system when he thought he saw a shark is exactly what occurs in a Red Mind state. It allowed him to escape a perceived predator by heightening his senses and giving him access to a burst of physical power he didn’t have a moment earlier. Those Red Mind neurochemicals also can produce feelings of exhilaration and a hyperactive awareness that can be extremely useful in a range of extreme sports like skydiving, BASE jumping, rock climbing—and big-wave surfing. As João says, “We’re not doing lotus poses in the impact zone. It’s an extremely complicated area, with a lot of turbulence, and our wits need to be extremely sharp.”9

“We need to have the stress response; it’s important,” Franssen adds. “But today, non-life-threatening stressors activate the same biological systems, meaning the same physiological stress response that we use to run away from a lion on the Serengeti is activated when the mortgage bill shows up in the mail. As we encounter little stressors throughout the day, our stress hormones remain high and keep us in an agitated place. Thus, our Red Mind stress response is turned on all the time, repeatedly, every day. Unfortunately, some of those stress-related neurochemicals, such as cortisol, can damage our bodies for up to two hours after even the smallest single stress.” Repeated and sustained stress can wreak havoc from head to toe. In fact, the top ten causes of death around the world can either be caused or exacerbated by stress.¹⁰ By sensitizing the amygdala through constant, inappropriate arousal, and weakening the hippocampus and preventing it from growing new neurons, increased stress can affect our ability to learn, retain information, or create new memories. Increased cortisol and glucocorticoid deplete the norepinephrine that helps you feel alert. Yet they also lower the production of dopamine and reduce serotonin levels, ultimately leaving you feeling flat, exhausted, and depressed.11 Studies also have shown that the neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to even mild stress.¹² “Repeatedly activating the stress response system is killing us,” says Franssen.

So why are we not changing our ways?

Much Ado about Nothing

In the second decade of the twenty-first century it’s almost impossible to conceive of a life without any digital component. When I’m not on the water or too isolated to get a signal, I will check my e-mail at least once a day—if not hourly. I don’t have the fanciest phone (my kids remind me that I’m overdue for an upgrade and my screen is cracked), but what I’ve got can certainly do a lot more than just make calls. As you can see in the notes section for this book, my research has been made much easier by scientific journals and researchers posting their work online (often in open-access journals), so other scientists can have easy and immediate access to it. I’ve got a Twitter feed (though I can’t claim my dispatches match the frequency and reach of the most tech-savvy scientists) and my own websites have proven incredibly useful for spreading the Blue Mind word. The challenge is figuring out how to balance, or at least harness, direct, and control the wave of technology at our fingers, because with supervision comes focus, occasional creativity, and a healthy compartmentalizing of our Red Mind energies.

According to former Microsoft Research Fellow Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, over the course of a typical day you will send and receive more than one hundred e-mail messages. That’s an average of course, one that might be well below your daily total. But that’s just the beginning: on that same day you’ll “check your phone thirty-four times, visit Facebook five times, spend at least half an hour liking things and messaging friends… for every hour you spend talking to someone [on the phone], you spend five hours surfing the Web, checking email, texting, tweeting, and social networking.” All of this adds up to an incredible 90 eight-hour days per year.13 Pang also points out that recent studies have calculated that “a majority of workers have only three to fifteen minutes of uninterrupted working time a day, and they spend at least an hour a day—five full weeks a year—dealing with distractions and then getting back on task.”¹⁴

Stop for a second and think about that: over the past year you spent more than one month dealing with distractions. Author Daniel Goleman has pointed out that “routine disruptions from a given focus at work can mean minutes lost to the original task. It can take ten or fifteen minutes to regain full focus.”¹⁵ That means it takes many more hours just to get the stuff done than if you could have stayed on track.

But it isn’t just a question of adding hours to the day, as much as we try to do that in the hope of catching up. All-nighters, extra cups of coffee, weekends at the office—such measures can buy us minutes, but at a huge cost both to our physical well-being and our professional success. To see why, we need to look a bit more closely at what we call multitasking, which is really nothing of the sort.

Multitaskers Anonymous

Human beings have always been multitaskers. We can talk while we walk, we can sing in the shower, we can look toward the goal and shoot the puck, we can read out loud—and on and on and on. UCLA anthropologist Monica Smith believes that the development of such multitasking ability has been a crucial component of human evolution. “Multitasking in the modern era is at a whole new level of complexity, but it’s really built on the basic skill sets that people already had,” she says. That doesn’t mean she thinks all is well, however. “The negative aspects of multitasking are much worse nowadays than they were in the past.”16 So what’s changed to make everything worse? Let’s think about what “multitasking” means today.

When was the last time you were driving around and saw someone in another car talking on their cell phone or texting, multitasking as they rolled along? Actually, says Paul Atchley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, having a conversation with someone on the phone (or texting) while driving a car means performing two tasks at once, not one “multitask.” Indeed, says Atchley, most people don’t really multitask, they toggle back and forth between separate tasks.¹⁷ In so doing, something has to give. When a conversation becomes more dense and complicated, cognitive demand devoted to it increases, and that means less brainpower is available for driving. As Pang explains: “Multitasking describes two different kinds of activities. Some are productive, intellectually engaging, and make us feel good. Others are unproductive, distractive, and make us feel stretched thin.”18 Wonder which type texting while driving is? A study done by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that in 80 percent of car wrecks, the driver was distracted during the three seconds before the collision. As Peter Bregman, a columnist for the Harvard Business Review, puts it, “In other words, they lost focus—made a call, changed the station on the radio, took a bite of sandwich, checked a text—and didn’t notice something changed in the world around them. Then they crashed.”¹⁹

Remember a few chapters ago when we discussed how the brain has to filter out a great deal of incoming input in order to function? Even with all of our neurons, we can’t deal with everything—our cognitive capacity simply isn’t that great, as amazing as it is. Explains Atchley, when a conversation becomes more dense and complicated, cognitive demand devoted to it increases, and that means less brainpower for everything else.²⁰ You don’t end up being able to handle multiple things at once, so you distribute your attention. Former Apple and Microsoft executive Linda Stone sums up the situation this way: “Today, we know that the brain processes serially—so quickly, that it may feel like we are doing two things at once, but we are actually just shifting very quickly.… Continuous partial attention is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of simple multi-tasking.”²¹ Or as Pang explains, “During switch-tasking, your brain spends so much energy doing basic management that you have little bandwidth left for seeing previously invisible connections or making new associations.”22

Superficially, this seems almost ridiculous. Isn’t this the age of connection and association? Given how important some issues can be, isn’t it a good thing that we have twenty-four-hour-a-day access to certain people and information? Unfortunately, we’ve cloud-seeded a deluge that threatens to wash us away. The Carnegie Mellon University sociologist, psychologist, political scientist, and economist Herbert Simon once said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

The concept “the more we have to take in, the less we can handle” is supported by studies of the brain and our biochemistry. However, the harder our brain tries, the less information is actually absorbed. (If you’ve ever tried to cram for a test at the last minute, this reaction will be very familiar.) Among the scientists whose research has buttressed this conclusion is Michael Merzenich. When monkeys in his experiments performed mindlessly repetitive tasks, there was no lasting change in their brains. It was only when the monkeys paid close attention to the task at hand that strong new brain maps were established.²³ Our glucose-hungry brains, ever masters of efficiency, want to relegate as much as possible to autopilot to save energy, so that energy can be used on making maps of the new stuff. Trying to process multiple streams of information at the same time is no better for the brain. A 2009 study conducted at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab showed that people considered high multitaskers (who regularly used a lot of media at one time) had more trouble paying attention, poorer memory control, and less ability to switch efficiently between tasks than the low multitaskers.24 Overwhelmed, the high multitaskers failed to develop neural networks; their brains were like the flailing man at the bottom of a deep sandpit, scooping furiously only to find each portion of sand heaved upward was replaced by a comparable amount sliding back down, exhausted with not much to show for the effort. Peter Bregman acutely pointed out just how damaging such multitasking can be: “A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a ten-point reduction in their IQ. What’s the impact of a ten-point drop? The same as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.”²⁵

We’re getting the worst of all worlds: constant stress that taxes our bodies to the point of needing medical attention, and cognitive overwhelming that results in bad decisions. We lose focus, don’t notice something changed in the world around us, then we crash.

Attention, Distraction, and How Water Can Reshape the Brain

.… neuroplasticity is activated by attention itself, not only by sensory input. Emotional arousal may also be a factor… the same factor may be involved in activating neuroplasticity when we participate in an activity that is important or meaningful to us.

—BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, FINGERPRINTS OF GOD

The fact that most of the world now lives in urban settings makes the demands on our attention even worse. “When you walk down the street there are thousands of stimuli to stimulate your already overtaxed brain—hundreds of different people of different ages with different accents, different hair colors, different clothes, different ways of walking and gesturing, not to mention all the flashing advertisements, curbs to avoid tripping over, and automobiles running yellow lights as you try to cross at the intersection,” writes Arizona State University professor of psychology Douglas T. Kenrick. “Research shows that in the absence of natural restoration, the human brain copes with this clutter by going into overdrive…”26 And unfortunately, that mental overdrive creates the chronic stress that Catherine Franssen described earlier. Modern-day humans are drowning in a sea of overstimulation that exhausts us physically, mentally, and emotionally. To this scenario we often add coffee and sugar, powerfully caffeinated energy drinks, ever-brighter lights and screens, and even fast-paced music, creating an exhaustion factory—a downward Red Mind spiral.

Accessed in the proper way, Red Mind can actually help us learn to evaluate and reduce stressors in our lives more appropriately. An avid skydiver in earlier years, Franssen had noticed that jumping out of planes during the weekend helped her feel more peaceful, smooth, and calm during the week.²⁷ “I learned what was important and not to sweat the small stuff, whether it was a test or a paper or competition between my colleagues,” she said. She theorized that exposure to the heightened hormonal tempest of Red Mind in extreme sports can actually help their participants recalibrate their stress response to daily life. So she did a study of extreme climbers, tracking their cortisol levels when they were exposed to a typical stressful situation (taking a test). As predicted, the stress levels of the climbers were lower than those of the control subjects. However, most of us aren’t quite ready to “dial down” our stress response by bungee jumping or rock climbing. Could time in nature be an easier solution? Laura Parker Roerden, executive director of the Ocean Matters nonprofit, which immerses young people in the ocean through science and community service, explains, “Focused time in nature activates other parts of our brains, giving our fatigued frontal lobe [associated with executive function, cognitive control, and supervisory attention] a break. Areas of our brain associated with emotions, pleasure and empathy can now take over, providing a calming influence that is measurable in brain scans and blood tests alike.”28

In the 1980s Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, two environmental psychologists from the University of Michigan, named this exhaustion “directed-attention fatigue.” In a later paper,²⁹ they theorized that there are two kinds of attention: directed, which requires a great deal of energy and focus; and involuntary, which requires little to no mental effort. Directed attention is what you use when you focus on a task, make a decision, interact with others, pay attention to the road when you’re driving, take a call, send a text, or choose what you want for dinner. In environments where we must use directed attention almost exclusively, our brains become fatigued, and our mental effectiveness is diminished. On the other hand, involuntary attention occurs when we’re in an environment outside our ordinary habitat, with enough familiarity that it poses no threat but enough interest to keep the brain engaged. In this kind of environment, small things randomly attract our attention, but only momentarily, and usually require little focus or response—thus giving an exhausted brain a chance to replenish itself. The Kaplans theorized that when involuntary attention is highly engaged, direct attention can rest; and they believed that a natural setting was best for helping the brain to switch from directed to involuntary attention. “Our ancestors evolved in a nature-filled environment,” stated Stephen Kaplan. “[Such places] should feel more comfortable, more relaxed, more like home.”30

Over the years, the Kaplans and other scientists and psychologists have continued to do research on the restorative effects of exposure to natural environments. One 2008 study gave participants a test designed to fatigue their directed attention, and then had them take a fifty- or fifty-five-minute walk through either the university arboretum or the city’s downtown. After the walk, participants took the same test. The scores for those who walked through the arboretum were significantly higher than for those who walked through downtown.³¹ In 2013, researchers in architecture, environmental psychology, health studies, and urban design collaborated with Emotiv, a neuroengineering company that has developed a lightweight, multichannel wireless EEG that resembles a headset used by gamers. The researchers outfitted study participants with these headsets and had them take twenty-five-minute walks through three different areas of Edinburgh: a shop-lined street, a path through green space, and a street in a busy commercial district. The headsets sent back continuous recordings from five channels, indicating short-term excitement, frustration, engagement, arousal, and meditation (which, in technical terms, correlates to combinations of what neurologists call alpha, beta, theta, delta, and gamma brain waves). According to the study, when participants moved into the green-space area, frustration, engagement, and arousal dropped, while contemplation increased, and when they moved out of the green space, engagement rose.32 (These results were similar to those in the Sands Research focus group study.)

What is it about the natural environment that provides such “rest” for the brain? Not long after his talk at Blue Mind 1, Michael Merzenich spoke about this from the neuroplasticity perspective.

There are two parts to the process by which we create a model of the world. First, the brain is constantly trying to record and interpret the meaning of things and events, and it’s continually changing itself as it constructs the model of the things in the world that will matter to it. But second, it’s trying to control and indeed suppress the things that don’t matter. You can think of it as normalizing the background.

In a natural environment, and in particular, when we are on or by the water, there is a high degree of statistical predictability because it is so much the same from moment to moment. The background is fairly controlled and a little dreamy—in other words, highly normalized, which allows part of the brain to relax. Against that background, the brain is continually looking for perturbation, for something that doesn’t fit, something that moves, something that wasn’t there before and that doesn’t match with my reconstructed representation of the landscape. After all, the essence of survival in a landscape is the correct interpretation of the things that don’t fit. But when the brain sees a perturbation, it creates a sense of surprise and novelty.

Such novelty is a crucial Blue Mind advantage. As John Medina describes in his book Brain Rules, the quick-and-dirty assessment done by most animal brains regarding novel stimuli is: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before? Michael Merzenich explained it in a conversation—from the point of view of a primate brain—following Blue Mind 1:

Here’s how it works in terms of neuroplasticity. Studies with macaque monkeys have shown that the brain very positively changes itself to more strongly represent the perturbation against the normalized background. All of the connections that would be engaged when they represent the thing of interest are strengthened, and all of the rest is weakened. So in a sense the brain is suppressing the background while it’s heightening the perturbation in the moment. Now, natural landscapes are far less complicated than artificial human landscapes, and against a background that’s less complicated, the brain can really see the perturbations. Therefore, in this sort of natural environment, any event that occurs—a bird landing on the shore, or a fish jumping out of the water, for example—is going to immediately captivate the brain’s interest and attract its attention. In fact, the reaction to whatever it does see is heightened because the brain is able to focus more energy there. So the natural environment of being by the water is an ideal one for being engaged in a way that continually entices and intrigues the brain, and the brain responds to each perturbation with special interest and a wonderful little moment of neurological surprise.

And what, in the natural world, would be an ideal example of the ideal combination of background and perturbation? Think about it: water is changing all the time, but it’s also fundamentally familiar. It seems to entertain our brains nicely with novelty plus a soothing, regular background. Envisage yourself being by the water: the sounds, the sights, the smells, all changing moment to moment yet essentially staying the same. It’s regularity without monotony—the perfect recipe to trigger restful involuntary attention. It’s also the inverse of our current condition of monotonous suffocation.

Blue Mind… Take Me Away33

From the early Greek and Roman physicians who recognized the healing powers of nature and bathing; to stressed-out industrial workers in nineteenth-century England and the United States who were advised to “take the waters” by the seaside or at natural springs to recover; to men and women today who treat their drug and alcohol addictions or PTSD with the dopamine rush of surfing or with the endorphin serenity produced by long, calm hours with a fishing rod in their hands; to patients who stare at aquariums in dental waiting rooms and feel reduced anxiety after watching the fish; to the millions who step into a hot bath or shower at the end of a long day and emerge relaxed, refreshed, and renewed—all of these are examples of how water can help us transition from the Red Mind of stress or the Gray Mind of numbed-out depression to the healthier Blue Mind state of calm centeredness.

In examining the effects of water on the mind, there are three key questions to answer. First, how does being in or consuming water affect the brain? Second, how does being around watery environments support our mental health and well-being? And third, how do water, water sports, water views, water sounds, and so on help to heal our minds from the effects of chronic stress, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, depression, and addiction? In other words, how much truth is there in Hippocrates’s observation that “water contributes much towards health”34? Only a few steps from your bedroom is a place where you’d be perfectly suited to find out. Indeed back in 1980 Calgon described its bath products as a cure for the stresses of a hectic life: “lose yourself… lift your spirits… take me away!”

Water, Water, Outside and In

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

—SYLVIA PLATH

There are few humans who haven’t experienced some version of their own “immersion therapy.” The hot shower that wakes you up or unknots your body at the end of a long day; the hot-and-cold-contrast baths professional athletes use to ease strained muscles; the bliss of hot-tub jets pounding legs and arms and backs; or the delight of a long soak in a footbath or tub, perhaps filled with Epsom salts or essential oils designed to relax body and mind. As far back as the ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Roman civilizations, we have therapeutically immersed ourselves in water. The ancient Greeks, who viewed many diseases as being caused by spiritual or moral pollution, incorporated cleansing with water as a key element in healing rituals, and many of their temples, such as the one in Epidaurus, were situated near mineral springs. The Romans constructed spas in places like Bath, in England, where the water flows out of natural mineral springs at a constant temperature of at least 45 degrees Celsius, hence the location’s appropriately simple name. In the Middle Ages and beyond, places such as Baden-Baden, Saint Moritz, Vichy, and Evian touted the physical and mental benefits of drinking and bathing in the local waters. Hot springs used for therapeutic bathing exist across the globe, notably in Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Canada, Brazil, Iceland, and the United States.

Spa bathing also significantly decreased levels of salivary cortisol (an indicator of stress) in college students,35 and decreased both cortisol levels and self-reported mental fatigue in men who experienced “mild-stream bathing,” where the lower half of the body is continually massaged by a stream of water.³⁶ Back in 1984, psychologist Bruce A. Levine studied the effects of hot-tub immersion on fourteen patients diagnosed with anxiety disorders. To eliminate the placebo effect (in which people improve simply because they are told that an experiment is designed to treat their condition), patients were told that the session was designed only to measure their anxiety and they should expect no reduction in symptoms. After fifteen minutes of hydrotherapy there was a significant reduction of subjective anxiety, as well as a decrease in muscular tension as measured by electromyography (EMG) levels.³⁷ A study at around the same time showed that anxiety levels in test subjects dropped after a five-minute hot shower.³⁸ Several studies have shown that immersion in warm water during the early stages of labor helps lower anxiety, decrease cortisol levels, and promote relaxation in women.39 In a randomized and controlled study of the effects of hydrotherapy and three other treatments on 139 people with rheumatoid arthritis, the hydrotherapy patients not only had greater improvements in joint tenderness and in range of movement, but also exhibited improvements to their emotional and psychological states.⁴⁰ And as a sign of therapeutic potency, in Japan, where bathing is a social as well as a personal ritual, several contemporary studies have shown that hot-water immersion can increase activity in the parasympathetic nervous system while decreasing it in the sympathetic nervous system (an indication of relaxation)—the extent of such immersion sometimes no more than a footbath.⁴¹

When considering the mental health benefits of water, however, it’s equally important to examine how the lack of water (or indeed, too much water) affects the workings of the brain. Remember, the human body is 60 to 78 percent water, and the brain is even more “watery” (up to 80 percent by volume). It’s no great surprise that consuming enough water is a requirement of healthy brain function. Even mild dehydration can affect the brain structures responsible for attention, psychomotor and regulatory functions, as well as thought, memory, and perception,⁴² and has been shown to decrease reaction times in working memory, lower alertness and concentration, and increase fatigue and anxiety in adults.⁴³ Even scarier, there is some evidence from studies done in rats that cognitive impairment due to dehydration may not be completely reversible due to cellular-level damage.⁴⁴ As we age, dehydration becomes an even greater risk, and, according to geriatric medicine specialists Margaret-Mary Wilson and John Morley, has been shown to be “a reliable predictor of increasing frailty, deteriorating mental performance, and poor quality of life.”45 In children, the effects of dehydration on cognitive function are equally serious; this is especially concerning as some studies indicate that two-thirds of children in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Israel are dehydrated when they arrive at school.⁴⁶ Luckily, giving children additional water can improve performance on tasks involving visual memory, verbal recall, processing speed, and reaction times.⁴⁷ (Of course, too much water—or too much water consumed too quickly—can cause problems by upsetting the electrolyte balance in the body, causing the cells of the brain and body to swell and produce headaches, confusion, drowsiness, even changes in behavior. However, for most adults “too much water” would mean drinking more than 5 liters over two hours; most adults in the U.S. consume only around 2.5 cups of water a day.⁴⁸) It’s one thing to be psychologically in need of some Blue Mind, but if you’re physically parched, you can’t do much of anything at all.

How Being Around Water Improves Mental Health

… no person could be really in a state of secure and permanent health without spending at least six weeks by the sea every year. The sea air and sea bathing together were nearly infallible…

—JANE AUSTEN, SANDITON

In 1660 in England, a man known as Dr. Witte published a now obscure book titled Scarborough Spa, in which he described drinking and bathing in seawater as a “Most Sovereign remedy against Hypochondriack Melancholy and Windness.”49 In the 1700s and 1800s, Georgian and Victorian physicians prescribed visits to the seaside or spas as restorative for both physical and mental health. (It didn’t hurt that from 1789 to 1805, King George III visited the seaside town of Weymouth, ostensibly to relax and help cure his bouts of madness.)⁵⁰ Today, more than three and a half centuries later, a group of psychologists, medical researchers, and physicians in the United Kingdom are studying the effects of water proximity on physical and mental health, and one of them, Professor Michael Depledge, has been at the forefront of what I call the blue health movement.

Mike Depledge combines the professional and passionate assuredness of an acknowledged world-class expert with the composure and authoritative delivery of a BBC nature documentary host. In 2009, he and physician William Bird of the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth announced the establishment of a program called the Blue Gym.⁵¹ “Nature helps to stimulate us to be more active,” Depledge asserted in a video announcement of the program. “Coastal areas, beaches, and inland waterways appear to be particularly efficacious in this regard. Regular contact with these and other natural environments reduce health inequalities by providing three major health benefits: a reduction in stress, increased physical activity, and stronger communities.… The Blue Gym will help to connect even more people to the sea, rivers, canals, and lakes.”⁵²

In the years since then, Depledge and other researchers at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health have been exploring the effects of blue nature on health. In 2012, along with his fellow researchers Benedict Wheeler, Mat White, and Will Stahl-Timmins, Depledge analyzed 2001 census data for England’s 48.2 million residents. They looked at how many people who lived within fifty kilometers of a coast or estuary reported having “good” (as opposed to “fairly good” or “not good”) health as opposed to those who lived farther from water. The portion of those saying their health was good was 1.13 percent higher in communities less than fifty kilometers from a coast. While this is a relatively small increase, the health benefit of living closer to a coast rose as the socioeconomic status of respondents dropped; in other words, living near water may help to ease some of the typically negative effects on health caused by lower socioeconomic status. “Controlling for both individual (e.g. employment status) and area (e.g. green space) level factors,” the research team wrote, “individuals reported significantly better general health and lower levels of mental distress when living nearer the coast.”53

Where does this greater self-reported health come from? It’s possible that the simple fact that people can walk to, or readily visit, the water makes the difference. A 2013 paper tracked the activities and attitudes about the sea of fifteen families with young children (ages eight to eleven). “Although families valued the opportunities for physical activity and active play afforded by beaches, the key health benefits emphasized were psychological, including experiencing fun, stress relief and engagement with nature,” wrote study authors Katherine Joan Ashbullby, Sabine Pahl, Paul Webley, and Mat White. “Increased social and family interaction were also highlighted as benefits.”⁵⁴

Still, heightened physical activity was likely part of the equation, too. A study of Australians in New South Wales showed that those who lived in a postal code on the coast were 27 percent more likely than the rest of the population to report activity levels that were adequate for healthy adults (higher than the “sedentary” category), and 38 percent more likely to report vigorous levels of activity than inland dwellers.55 Back in England, “As over two-thirds of all coastal visits were found to be made by people who live within five miles of the coast,” Wheeler and his colleagues reported, “coastal communities may attain better physical health due to the stress-reducing value of greater leisure time spent near the sea.”⁵⁶ In a review of eleven scientific studies done of physical activity outdoors and indoors, researchers found that “exercising in natural environments was associated with greater feelings of revitalization and positive engagement, decreases in tension, confusion, anger, and depression, and increased energy.”⁵⁷ More important, a separate review of studies of the benefits of “green exercise” indicated that exercise in proximity to water enhanced both self-esteem and mood more than green space alone.⁵⁸

Water Heals the Mind

Kayaking is my medicine.

—ED SABIR, VIETNAM VETERAN

The Heroes on the Water video starts quietly, with an image of sparkling, golden-lit water, and on it, silhouetted, someone in a kayak, fishing rod in hand. A few minor-key notes from a piano play in the background as the picture switches to another man, in shorts, shot from the waist down, standing next to a row of kayaks lined up on a riverbank. Before you register that the man has only one leg, the picture switches again, to an overhead shot of someone sitting in a bright yellow kayak, paddle in one hand… and no arm below the elbow on his other side. A voiceover says, “Life’s not over after an IED.” IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were used extensively against U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and were responsible for well over 60 percent of coalition deaths.

Next you see three young men in their twenties, one in a wheelchair, all missing limbs. One of them—buzz-cut hair, T-shirt, with a prosthetic left leg, black and shiny, visible below white cargo shorts—looks at the camera and continues with the kind of confidence one exudes when imagining vast possibilities ahead: “If you can fish, hell, what else can you do?”59

Since 2007 Heroes on the Water (HOW) has helped more than three thousand wounded warriors and veterans to relax, rehabilitate, and reintegrate by taking them kayak fishing. According to Jim Dolan, HOW’s founder, kayak fishing provides triple therapy: physical (because the vets are paddling and fishing), occupational (as they learn new skills and a sport they can practice for life), and mental (due to the freedom and relaxation that accompanies being on the water). “I know when I’m out there on the water all the crap in my life goes away,” Dolan says, “and so I figure it’s the same for them.”

Dr. Jordan Grafman has studied the functions of the human brain for more than thirty years. As the former chief of cognitive neuroscience at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and currently as the director of brain injury research at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, he is a leading expert in TBI and the effects of TBI on PTSD. Grafman’s enthusiasm for his area of expertise belies the serious nature of the injuries he helps treat, and unfortunately, over the past decade or more he’s had a lot of people to study. “In civilian populations, between three to six percent of people tend to be eligible for a diagnosis of PTSD,” he reported to attendees of the Blue Mind 3 conference. “In victims of natural disasters, like earthquakes or tsunamis, it’s between four and sixteen percent.”60 However, as many as 58 percent of people who are exposed to combat are diagnosed with PTSD. According to a 2008 RAND Corporation report, more than 620,000 men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 returned with PTSD, major depression, or TBI.⁶¹

PTSD is the result of the brain’s dysfunctional response to a traumatic experience (or experiences), or the ongoing wear and tear of multiple stressful situations, or prolonged, persistent grief over the loss of friends and loved ones. “Someone is exposed to a traumatic event and responded with fear, helplessness, or horror,” Grafman says. “They lose their sense of personal safety or the feeling of being master of their environment. They may also experience shame or survivor guilt. Then they reexperience the event, either in similar situations, or in dreams or imagination, and become hyperaroused.” Every repetition of the event strengthens the connections between the event and the painful feelings, and tends to make people (often irrationally) fear that the same event will happen again in the future. Here we see another example of how the brain’s plasticity can be a curse, a neural map drawn and redrawn in Red Mind ink. “Many people with PTSD can’t sleep,” reports Bryan Flores, a member of the Monterey County Mental Health Commission who has fought his own battles with seasonal affective disorder (SAD). “Every time you close your eyes, you see that car crash or whatever caused the traumatic stress.” Good sleep is critical to good dreaming and good dreaming is fundamental to creativity, learning, and memory.62

In PTSD, as with all stress, the parts of the brain most directly affected are the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex. “The amygdala is concerned with emotions and fear, but also the relevance of what we see in the world to our personal safety,” Grafman continues. “The hippocampus is important for forming and retrieving everyday memories, which the amygdala labels with emotional content. The medial prefrontal cortex is important for storing beliefs, routine memories, and episodes we retrieve all the time. Both the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex seem to be most important in producing PTSD.”

So how might programs like Heroes on the Water help? Speculates Grafman, “Sometimes people just want to surrender to the soothing, pulsating rhythms of waves. Being by water both relaxes and stimulates us and therefore our brains, and it leads to positive emotional changes in human behavior. I suspect that brain activity in many of the same brain regions implicated in post-traumatic stress by the direct experience of water could help to calm people and enable them to produce an adaptive response to PTSD.” He adds that “multiple studies of brain activity show that the medial prefrontal cortex is quite active during moments of insight, but just as important, it is affected by a positive mood. The more positive mood someone has, the greater insight, and the more activity in that area of the brain. Helping someone to feel more positive moods is going to support brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.”

John Hart, a neurologist who is the medical science director of the Center for Brain Health in Dallas, and who works with the veterans at Heroes on the Water, says something similar: “Water impacts all five senses at the same time with a very positive, powerful image and memory. The good memories from their day on the water help override the bad memories and images that haunt them, and possibly help crack the shell, letting them rejoin the world.” And water isn’t passive: in most instances (and certainly in cases involving a kayak and a fishing rod) we have to interact with it. As Grafman notes, “We’re both in awe and curious about it, and it’s a challenge to master.” It distracts us in the best sort of way, allowing us to think of little else beyond what’s in front of us.

It’s not just that fishing produces a sense of calm and the release of endorphins associated with sustained pleasure; getting out on the water or into wilderness settings can be deeply restorative in itself, according to the branch of psychology known as ecotherapy. Being in the wilderness can produce feelings of respect and wonder, a greater sense of connection with oneself and with nature, of renewal and greater self-awareness. “Wilderness therapy” has been used with psychiatric patients, emotionally disturbed children and adolescents, survivors of sexual abuse, cancer patients, addicts, and AIDS patients, as well as individuals with PTSD.63 Indeed, programs like HOW, Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Rivers of Recovery (fly-fishing), and Casting for Recovery (fly-fishing for women recovering from breast cancer) provide what for many is a rare chance to participate in activities in beautiful, healing, calming locations. “[These programs] let Mother Nature do what she’s done for hundreds of years, and that’s to heal,” says Bruce Newell of HOW.

Rivers of Recovery (ROR) takes veterans on four-day trips to rivers in wilderness locations around the country, teaching fishing skills and relaxation techniques. In 2009 researchers from the University of Southern Maine, the University of Utah, and the Salt Lake City Veterans Administration studied sixty-seven veterans on three occasions: one month before, the last day of, and one month after an ROR trip. To assess physiological stress, the researchers measured salivary cortisol, urinary catecholamines, and salivary immunoglobulins. They also asked the veterans to self-report their mood, depression, anxiety, and perceptions of stress. There was significant improvement on every measure following the ROR trip. A month later, veterans reported that their PTSD symptoms and perceptual stress had gone down 19 percent; physical symptoms of stress decreased by 28 percent; sleep quality improved 11 percent; depression lessened 44 percent and anxiety 31 percent. Feelings of serenity increased 67 percent, assuredness by 33 percent, and positive mood went up 47 percent.64

These clinical results are borne out by anecdotal evidence. One young man, Eric, had been blown into the side of a helicopter while he was getting ready to parachute, cracking his helmet and putting a half-dollar-size hole in his head. His chute then failed to fully deploy, so he fell a thousand feet and landed on his head. He survived with injuries to both frontal lobes, no short-term memory, and panic attacks caused by severe PTSD. After Eric and his wife participated in an ROR trip, his wife reported that he hadn’t had a panic attack in almost a year. Another veteran, James, who returned to ROR as a volunteer, said that he had been able to eliminate all of his medication for depression and most of his pain medication after his time on the river. Jason, a vet who participated in HOW kayak fishing trips wrote, “I had a world convinced I was okay, but my demons won more battles than I did. I know kayak fishing saved my life.”

Other water sports also have been turned into therapy for veterans and civilians alike. Programs like Operation Surf (run by my buddy Van Curaza); the National Veterans Summer Sports Clinics, which offer sailing, surfing, and kayaking every summer; AmpSurf in Central California; and Ocean Therapy sessions offered to members of the Wounded Warrior Battalions at Camp Pendleton and 29 Palms, California, are designed to help those who have been injured in some way to overcome their challenges and heal through participation in water sports. As AmpSurf’s mission statement says:

One in five Americans struggle with a life-long disability.… Whether they are an amputee, visually impaired, suffer from PTS (Post Traumatic Stress), or have quadriplegia… whether they are a child with autism, or a young woman who has lost a limb to cancer, AmpSurf offers a unique program to bring the healing power of the ocean and adaptive surfing together for an experience that is both mentally and physically one of the best forms of rehabilitation on the planet. Our goal is simple, we want to help our disabled veterans, adults and children focus on their abilities not their disabilities.

A while ago I hit the waves with two British vets, Martin Pollock and Will Hanvey, who had come to Santa Cruz from the United Kingdom for one of Van’s Operation Surf camps (more on that session later). Martin had lost both legs and one arm in the wars in the Middle East, and Will was injured during an intense training exercise when heavy downward pressure was put on his knees, dislocating and severely injuring them and his hips. Like most camp participants, they had arrived thinking that there was no way they would ever be able to surf. But Van tells camp participants, “Look, you’re not going to surf like me; you’re going to surf like you. We’ll take your physical abilities and apply them to this surfboard.” Watching these vets in the water is something else. There’s a sense of achievement that destroys their perceived limitations, lifts their self-esteem, brings them together with others like themselves, and rebuilds their psychological strength.

On top of that, veteran and 2013 National Geographic Explorer of the Year Stacey Barr told a group of us at a meeting convened at the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco by the Sierra Club’s Mission Outdoors that “many veterans feel like the most interesting, exciting, and important experiences of their lives are behind them.” Feeling that there is no longer any need for (or physical ability to carry out) the suite of high-octane, adrenaline-rich, highly technical skills they’ve acquired can exacerbate detachment, lower esteem, and lead to depression and addiction. But Martin and Will found their Operation Surf sessions so transformative that they returned home and started Operation Amped U.K. in Cornwall.

A Texan named Bobby Lane came to Operation Surf to cross surfing off his bucket list; after returning home from the camp he planned to kill himself. Lane, twenty-seven years old, suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq. Back home, like so many others he battled PTSD and couldn’t sleep due to incessant nightmares. He says Operation Surf not only changed his life, it saved his life. Surfing also allowed him to get his first good night’s sleep in years. Dreams about water replaced his midnight terrors, Blue Mind at its most potent. “Giving up on life isn’t an option,” he says. “Now, as I see it, if life gets too hard, there’s always the ocean.”

In August 2013 Van Curaza asked the question “What is your favorite thing about the beach?” on his popular Facebook page. One person commented “the waves,” another “the sun.” The usual responses appeared as one scrolled down: “the air,” “the surfer dudes,” “the sound,” “the salt,” “the ocean,” “our kids.” Way down the list there’s Bobby Lane’s stirring comment: “The peace it brings to my life. When things get hectic in my life, or when things start to get bad again. All I have to do is go to the beach, and everything that is going on just seems not to matter anymore. So my favorite thing about the beach is the peace it brings me.”

Water Heals: Addictions

The waves of the sea help me get back to me.

—JILL DAVIS

Van originally realized the transformative power of surfing when it helped him overcome his addiction to drugs and alcohol. And he’s not alone. Jaimal Yogis tells the story of Jamie Patrick, who kicked a cocaine habit cold turkey when he discovered triathlons and ultra swimming.65 Today programs like the one run by pro surfer and recovering addict Darryl Virostko (also known as “Flea”—hence the name of his program, FleaHab) in Central California and Surfing to Recovery in Southern California use outdoor activities to help “replace the high of drugs with the endorphins of exercise.”⁶⁶ In such cases, healing on the water actually comes from replacing the rush produced by addiction and other at-risk behaviors with the more natural dopamine “high” produced by surfing, white-water kayaking, sailing, or competitive paddleboard racing. “The goal of surf therapy is not to teach people to be surfers,” says mental health commissioner Bryan Flores. “It’s to get them to use surfing to change their brain chemistry. You stand on the beach and get amped up and all kinds of chemicals rush through the brain. Different ones are in play when you’re paddling out or have a monster wave chasing you to the beach. All of those chemicals can have incredible effects on how people cope with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health issues.”

According to neurobiology studies, addiction is a reward prioritization problem that involves long-term neuroplastic changes in the brain. “Addiction is where people start exploiting just one mechanism of reward to the exclusion of other possibilities,” states Vanderbilt’s David Zald. “Drug-related rewards cause direct changes in the system—the same system that makes us seek more natural rewards like food or sex—and make us more and more exclusively linked towards the addictive drug.” Again and again we’ve seen evidence that addiction involves disordered dopamine systems concerned with reward and motivation. These alterations draw addicts strongly and selectively to the reward of the drug and overwhelm any sense of risk or consequences. Howard Fields calls this “an inflated value signal”: “Dopamine neurons and the nucleus accumbens (the ‘pleasure’ center of the brain) are activated by certain action outcomes, such as the use of an illicit drug, and the inflated value of the drug. Consequently, in future decisions, actions leading to drug use are selected at the expense of all other activities.” However, as we’ve seen, neurobiology is not destiny, and a brain that has changed in one way has the potential to change in another. To change an addictive behavior, “the person has to be able to identify a stronger alternative reward… to overcome the compulsion to seek or engage in the addictive behavior,” notes Zald.67

Surfing and other sports provide such alternative rewards by satisfying the brain’s desire for stimulation, novelty, and a neurochemical “rush,” while also getting addicts out of their typical environments (a critical aspect of most recovery programs)⁶⁸ and providing new settings, new friends, and new routines that are as fulfilling but more positive. States Fields, “ ‘Positive’ addictions that result in individual and/or societal gain are thus desirable behaviors—such as an ‘addiction’ to nature or being outdoors, which stimulates positive feelings in response to immersing oneself in the natural environment.”

In the summer of 2010, Kevin Sousa was lying in the guest room of his house in Manhattan Beach, California, stoned out of his mind. He had taken his first drink at age thirteen, been in and out of rehab for more than a dozen years, and at age forty realized that it was time to do something. “I am addicted to anything and everything that makes me feel good/bad, and I am tired of it,” he wrote in his journal. “I have never quit or accomplished anything in my life of true merit. So today, I start training for the great Catalina to Manhattan Beach Paddleboard race. I have been on a paddleboard once or twice, but I figure I need to trade one addiction for another.” For almost a year Kevin trained with a friend, paddling for hours in the ocean four days a week. He used AA, his “new addiction” of paddleboarding, and the creative act of writing music about his journey as the means of his recovery. On August 28, 2011, the day he completed the Catalina Classic paddleboard race, Kevin wrote, “Doing inspiring and healthy things has a curious way of spreading. I have never felt quite so alive and competent as a man and a human being.” Kevin has maintained his drug-free life while his wife has battled cancer, and he has become a fine therapist and an inspiration to others—all because, as he says, he chose to “return to the ocean, a place that has brought me immeasurable joy.”

Addiction is a complicated illness, and it would be irresponsible to claim that going Blue Mind is an inescapable means to purity. But for an increasing number of those struggling with the most merciless of addictions, the curative effects of water are impossible to deny. And if water can make such a difference in combating their ferocious demons, what might it do for you?

Autism and Water

Going into the water you leave autism behind…

—DON KING, WHOSE AUTISTIC SON, BEAU, BODYSURFS WITH HIM

While neuroscience and cognitive psychology have made great strides in understanding why being in or near water is so good for mental and physical health, there are some watery “miracles” that are yet to be explained. One of these is the positive effect of water and water-based exercise on children with autism. Clinicians who study aquatic programs designed for autistic kids discovered that parents and recreational therapists report increases not just in swimming skills, muscle strength, and balance in the children, but also greater tolerance of touch and ability to initiate/maintain eye contact.69 In a Taiwanese study, children had fewer negative behaviors, and demonstrated greater attention and focus and more appropriate conversations with peers following a ten-week swimming program.⁷⁰

But it’s on the beach, in the waves, that some of the biggest transformations take place. In Deerfield Beach, Florida, a fit, white-haired, fiftyish surfer dude named Don Ryan has been running a program called Surfers for Autism since 2007. Professional surfers and other volunteers come together with around two hundred autistic kids and their families for a day of surfing, paddleboarding, music, and games. Children with many of the classic traits of autism—including lack of ability to focus, limited communication skills and ability to verbalize, anxiety around others, lack of social skills and inappropriate responses, difficulty forming personal attachments, a sense that they are in their own world, and extreme sensory sensitivity to light, sound, smell, repetitive movements and ritualistic behavior—often approach the water with fear and trepidation. But time and time again, once they’re in the water, or on a surfboard or paddleboard, something good happens. Kids who have rarely smiled or spoken wear wide grins as they ride a wave to shore. They come out of themselves and start to relate to people around them. Dave Rossman, who volunteers with the group, comments, “Once they are on the beach, you can’t tell a kid with autism from any other child.” ⁷¹ One mother at a Surfing for Autism event said, “I will never forget the joy I saw on my daughter’s face that day, the pride she felt that she was enough just the way she was.” At these events, her daughter “isn’t a girl with Asperger’s—she’s just a girl who is seven, catching a wave.”72

There are all kinds of theories about why this happens: the water is stimulating visually, which fulfills some children’s sensory needs; water provides “a safe and supported environment” that surrounds the body with “hydrostatic pressure” that “soothes and calms”⁷³ (as another expert said, it feels like the “ultimate hug”⁷⁴). Learning new motor skills like swimming, surfing, or paddleboarding can have “a broad-ranging impact on the nervous system,” according to William Greenough at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois: “There’s increased blood flow to crucial neurons, and the reshaping of abnormal structures in the front brain. But beyond that, surfing may be a vehicle to an emotional breakthrough, a way of reaching under the mask and perhaps connecting to kids like these.” Trying to balance and ride waves also provides them with a clear focus and keeps them in the present moment—neurobiologist Peter Vanderklish believes that the beauty of surfing “turns the focus of these kids inside out. They’re pulled out of themselves by having to live in the moment, and all their anxieties are pushed aside.”

When he was all of thirteen years old, Naoki Higashida, who suffers from autism, wrote a remarkable memoir that was later translated into English and published under the title The Reason I Jump. In it, he lyrically speaks about the effect of water on himself and others who are autistic:

In the water it’s so quiet and I’m so free and happy there. Nobody hassles us in the water, and it’s as if we’ve got all the time in the world. Whether we stay in one place or we are swimming about, when we are in the water we can really be at one with the pulse of time. Outside of the water there’s always too much stimulation for our eyes and our ears and it’s impossible for us to guess how long one second is or how long an hour takes.… We are outside the normal flow of time, we can’t express ourselves and our bodies are hurtling us through life. If only we could go back to that distant, distant watery past—then we’d be able to live as contentedly and as freely as you lot!75

In 2012 former pro surfer turned Patagonia surf ambassador and documentary filmmaker Keith Malloy produced a film about bodysurfing that featured Don King of Kailua, Hawaii, and his autistic son, Beau. The pair were diving through the crystal waters off of Oahu, riding the waves together. “No one smiles like Beau underwater,” Keith commented. On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in a coastal town in New South Wales, Australia, another couple with an autistic son were at their wits’ end. Donna and Greg Edwards’s eight-year-old son, Kyan, had kept them from going to the beach for over two years—“The bright sunlight, sand and wind create a ‘sensory overload’… and most often he will scream and scream when we take him anywhere near the ocean,” Greg wrote in a letter to Keith.⁷⁶ “My wife and I both grew up surfing and we feel completely at home in the water. Some days, the two of us have wanted nothing more than to be able to take our kids down onto the sand and swim.” One day Greg, Donna, and their two boys watched Keith’s documentary, and Kyan couldn’t keep his eyes off of Beau King. After the program, the boy started running around the house with his arm outstretched, imitating the posture of the bodysurfers he had seen. Then he ran toward his mother, saying, “Beach… surfing.” The very next day the family went to the beach, and Kyan went straight into the water. “That day, and every day since, have been remarkable,” Greg wrote. “Our son has discovered the ocean. He now feels at home in the water. His confidence is growing and he is catching his first waves!”

“You deal with autism on such a raw basis every single moment of every day,” Donna added. “To be in the water and kind of leave that behind—it’s huge.” However, Michael Rosenthal, a pediatric neuropsychologist of the Child Mind Institute, who works with autistic children, comments, “As a clinician I’m always working with kids to find something that’s going to make them feel happy and safe and secure and relieve their anxiety. But it’s important to note that water in the ocean is therapeutic for a lot of people. I don’t think it’s necessarily an ‘autistic’ thing as much as it is a human thing.”77

I’ve sat with Jack O’Neill—wetsuit developer, businessman, and philanthropist—over recent years, in his home overlooking Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz, talking about Blue Mind and sharing personal stories. Many of the uses of Jack’s “Wetsuit Medicine”—from surfing to open-water swimming, paddlesports to scuba diving—are described in the pages of Blue Mind. Like many I’ve met, Jack has felt the healing power of H₂O.

Jack has made it a point to be in the water on the average of once a day for the last fifty years: “The surf has been my life and livelihood, and the ocean has been a great healer,” he commented. “I’m just a surfer who wanted to build something that would allow me to surf longer because being in and near the ocean was and is my medicine. It can fix what’s broken. Even today, at age ninety-one, I jump in the ocean and everything becomes all right.”

“Take Two Waves…”

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own.

—JOHN MUIR

In May 2012 I was driving our bright orange Kubota tractor with a brush-cutting attachment on back—a pretty big rig, weighing in at about a ton. I was clearing an old fire road we like to hike and run up that winds up Schoolhouse Ridge above Mill Creek. A stroll in the forest is good for mind and body, but a dash through the redwoods by water makes my neurons glow blue. With the spring rains, the plants had grown in like a jungle, with lots of nettles and spiny brush. I was zipping along the road as it climbed the hillside above the creek.

What happened next took a split second but felt like slow motion. (I discovered later that this is a neurological phenomenon called tachypsychia. It’s believed to be caused by high levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, and it alters our perception of time in moments of great physical or psychological stress.) The tractor rode up on a big log that had fallen in a recent fire and was hidden under the plant growth. When I bounced off the log, the tractor lurched toward the edge of the bank, which immediately gave way, causing the tractor, with me on it, to roll down the thirty-foot cliff. There was no time to think: it happened in the time it takes you to snap your fingers.

I remember arms, legs, orange steel, flashes of blue sky and green trees, then stillness. I was on my back in Mill Creek, looking up, a smashed, upside-down tractor next to me, still running. My first thought was “Am I dead?” I blinked hard, said “Hello” out loud, then, “Am I very broken or bleeding?” I felt my head and neck: all okay. I checked for blood: some, but not gushing. Next thought: my family. They don’t even know I was on the tractor today. They’re fine; they’re not worried because they don’t know I’m here under a tractor!

The next thought: “Is there a leak from the tractor into the creek?” I pulled myself out and up, found the tractor key, and shut it down. I needed rags, sponges, towels—something to make sure none of the oil from the tractor entered the water. I followed the creek downstream until it ran along a dirt road, climbed up the bank, and then started running the three-quarters of a mile toward home. I was benefiting from the upside of Red Mind, the physiological “fight or flight” storm of neurochemicals—adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine—coursing through me. My broken bones, dislocated shoulder, burned skin, rattled brain, torn ligaments were nonexistent. My brain chemistry and concern for the endangered salmon that call Mill Creek home overrode any possibility of reason.

When my partner, Dana, came home she found me, naked and in a state of shock, sitting in the redwood hot tub on our deck. (My first instinct had been to get in the water.) She took me to the hospital, and on the way we recruited my brother and our neighbors (who, unlike me, are experienced ranchers) to bring towels, bales of straw, and a big skidder and winch. They extracted the tractor from its precarious creek-bottom location among the redwoods and alders without harming the sensitive habitat.

At the hospital, under the gaze of doctors, nurses, and X-ray machines, the pain set in, bruises appeared, and every joint swelled and locked. I had a mild concussion, broken toes, torn foot ligaments, a hyperextended hip, a previously dislocated shoulder that had popped out and back in again, and bruises down to the bone on both legs. My brain had come down from its Red Mind high, and I felt exhausted and depleted. (The effects of an intense adrenaline/dopamine/norepinephrine dump linger in the bloodstream, and the letdown is dramatic.) For a month afterward I found myself in the throes of Gray Mind, a numbed, depressive state mixed with acute jitters. I kept seeing and reliving the accident, replaying those three seconds like a movie, micromoment by micromoment, and obsessing over all the ways I might have avoided going over the cliff. The doctor diagnosed post-traumatic stress; all I knew was that my brain and body were both a mess. I was an all-round, lifelong athlete with excellent balance and coordination, yet now I couldn’t walk down steep stairs or descend an escalator without the feeling of rolling off a cliff. I had been an impeccable speller, but now I was making mistakes on the simplest words.

The months since the accident were marked by a slow recovery, aided by water. I took long soaks in the bathtub with tons of Epsom salts at first, then later I could get into the hot tub, my girls beside me to lift my spirits. I hobbled around on crutches for a month and a cane for a couple of months after that. I went swimming (well, bobbing) in the cold Pacific—therapy for both my banged-up body and mind. One day I walked back to the place where the tractor and I had landed. Standing in the icy waters of Mill Creek at the base of the cliff also helped to heal the mental trauma.

Soon after the accident I embedded myself with Van Curaza’s team at Operation Surf. It didn’t take long before I was in the water, side by side with guys like Martin Pollock who had lost limbs in the Middle East. Of course, I had all my limbs, a clear advantage in the water, but a malfunctioning, rattled brain doesn’t care what did the rattling—tractor, IED, car crash, falling off a cliff or down a flight of stairs. The guys accepted me into their motley band of surfers, but each morning out on the waves I felt frustrated and weak. My balance was shot, and forward motion brought up that vertiginous feeling of rolling, falling, crashing, and a need to grab a rail. But still, we were all in the water, having fun, cheering each other on. Then Van said, “This one’s yours, J. Don’t think, no mind, eyes on the beach.” I paddled hard, hopped up, and rode it. No thoughts. No rolling. No falling.

That wave felt like a never-ending exhale, the opposite of a micromoment, a time warp, jazz, a painless birth, summer in my soul, catharsis, a lifetime somehow packed into a now. I looked over my shoulder and there was Martin surfing the same wave, all the way to the beach. Blue Minded and fully stoked, we smiled at each other and paddled back out.

The bath when I got home was pretty nice, too.