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8 Surprising Things Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You, According to a Sleep Doctor
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https://health.yahoo.com/wellness/sleep/articles/10-surprising-things-dreams-trying-204900671.html
8 Surprising Things Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You, According to a Sleep Doctor
The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes.After his daughter's diagnosis, Budimir Šobat gave up drinking and devoted himself to her care. Years later, he found a new obsession: holding his breath longer than anyone in history.
Budimir Šobat had been lying face down in a swimming pool for around a quarter of an hour on March 27, 2021, when something strange happened: he fell asleep.
Šobat, a 56-year-old professional freediver from Zagreb, Croatia, was aiming to break the world record for the longest breath ever held. He guessed he was approaching 17 minutes—roughly the point at which the body’s third, final, and most painful stage of oxygen deprivation began, when carbon dioxide would fill the body and the diaphragm would spasm violently, like a thunder sheet.
This approaching wall of agony might understandably have stressed out Šobat. But he had spent six years training his mind for this exact moment, developing the ability to enter a quasi-sleep state to conserve as much energy-sapping thought as possible.
Šobat wasn’t supposed to relax enough to actually drift off, though. Moments later, a bubble floated from his now-open mouth and brushed his eye, jogging him awake.
This isn’t good, he thought. For 30 minutes before the attempt, Šobat had filled his lungs with bottled pure oxygen. That meant he could go 20 or more minutes on a single breath, a near-magical feat. But it also raised the danger of blacking out, which could set off a deadly chemical chain reaction, toxifying the oxygen and destroying blood vessels, his lungs, or even his brain.
Šobat slammed his mouth shut. He assumed the worst. He saw his life flash by in a heartbeat.
Then he opened his eyes. He wasn’t dead. But he hadn’t dreamed the experience, either. He’d slept, and now he was stressed. Stress meant an increased heart rate, and a high heart rate meant certain failure.
Šobat repeated a silent mantra: don’t panic, don’t panic, it’s OK, it’s OK. His heart rate fell, and he felt the pre-agreed-upon tap of his coach’s finger on his back: 17 minutes. F.ck, he thought. I’m still here. It’s not a blackout.
Budimir Šobat had been lying face down in a swimming pool for around a quarter of an hour on March 27, 2021, when something strange happened: he fell asleep.
Moments later, the spasms began. Šobat closed his eyes. It was time to suffer.
When Šobat finally did lift his head out of the water, he’d held his breath for 24 minutes and 37 seconds. He pinched his right thumb and forefinger together. “I’m OK,” he said. A small crowd gathered near the pool edge clapped and cheered, and Šobat smiled. He hadn’t just broken the record. He’d crushed it—by over half a minute.
Others might have celebrated with a victory lap, a glass of wine, or the afternoon off. Not Šobat. He changed, packed his gear, and met his wife and daughter in the parking lot. They didn’t mention the record once. And besides, it was his turn to clean the bathroom.
Throughout his 60 years, Budimir Šobat has been many things—a soldier, athlete, model, stuntman, bouncer—but he has always been an addict. At first it was basketball, and he won a Yugoslavian scholarship to play the game. Then he got into bodybuilding and became a national champion in the newly formed Croatia. Booze took over, and for a while, Šobat couldn’t face the day without a swig of Johnnie Walker. Then, in 2000, his daughter was born, and his life found a new focus. She had brain damage, and doctors questioned whether she would ever be able to walk or talk. So he and his wife, Sandra, ditched their previous lives and poured everything into her.
In 2011, when he was 46, Šobat found a new addiction when a friend introduced him to freediving, the practice of remaining underwater on a single breath. He was good—especially at holding his breath, the sport’s foundational skill. Soon, he was winning tournaments and experimenting with pure oxygen. A team of international scientists discovered in him a genetic predisposition to the sport so rare that a pharmaceutical firm invited him to Canada to examine it. But greatness required mastery not only of the body but the mind too, an ability to silence what freediving legend William Trubridge calls “the chattering monkey that lives in my head.”
It took years for Šobat to realize: he’d been given a gift for that, too. And she’d been staring him in the face for almost 20 years.
On an unseasonably warm morning in January, sunlight pours through the glass facade of the Utrina Baths, an Olympic-size swimming pool on the outskirts of Zagreb, Croatia. Speedo-clad pensioners occupy most lanes, scrolling gently back and forth and gathering to gossip on pool-side bleachers. Somewhere beyond the changing rooms, a teacher warns kids to stop running. Tinny chart tunes drift across the arena.
In two lanes at the far end of the pool are the freedivers. Tall and muscular and decked in gray-black wetsuits, they look comically out of place, like superheroes at a bake sale. But they’re deadly serious. National trials are approaching and, beyond them, the world championships.
Šobat emerges after swimming 200 meters underwater and hauls himself onto the edge of the pool. He sits in silence for a couple minutes. Then he removes his scuba fins and nose clip, stands, and peels off the top half of his suit. He is six-foot-four-inches tall, with the lean, tan frame of a man half his 59 years. Only his hair, a silver, Sideshow Bob-esque mop that falls over his puckered face, betrays the fact that he’s closer in age to the elderly swimmers than his freediving cohort. Not that aesthetics bother him greatly, as he turns and heads for the shower, smiling wryly.
“Our beautiful sport,” he jokes.
Google “freediving” and you will encounter a multitude of slick, Instagrammable archetypes: Freediver Swimming with Shoals of Fish; Freediver Observing Shipwreck; Freediver Meditating on Beach, and (the classic) Freediver Thrusting an Arm Upward through the Ocean Toward a Sliver of Sunlight. Since Luc Besson’s 1988 French classic movie Le Grand Bleu, which dramatized the rivalry between two champion freedivers, the sport’s promoters and the media have pruned an image of freediving as a tango between beauty and death, whose stars are possessed with an innate, Poseidon-like geist for water.
Russian freediving world champion Alexey Molchanov, who has set 34 freediving records, says it was this that drew him into the depths. “It wasn’t just a sport, the way it was presented,” he told GQ in 2021. “It was already this whole lifestyle. Of travels and adventures.”
Trubridge, whose Bahamas-based Vertical Blue is one of the sport’s premier events, writes in his biography: “It’s every freediver’s dream to swim with dolphins across an open seascape, tumbling and cavorting in three dimensions.”
There isn’t much room in this palette for public pools or paunchy, suburban retirees. Perhaps there should be.
“Freediving is just a sport like any other,” Šobat says. “There is no mystique in it…’I’m floating with dolphins and I’m turning around and—’ blah, blah, blah … Don’t bullshit me. It’s just a show for the public.
“You go to the water, you hold your breath, you finish, and you go home,” he says, typically matter-of-fact. “If you find something good in it, good. If not, also good.”
This flippancy may have more than a little to do with the freediving community’s attitude toward Šobat’s breath-holding achievements. Competitive freediving events demand that participants inhale nothing but normal air prior to a dive. Šobat, however, belongs to a small cadre of so-called “apneists”—those who specialize solely in breath-holding—who supercharge their times by first breathing 100-percent pure oxygen.
Freedivers often believe this to be a form of doping, like taking beta blockers and other medication. Some have written off Šobat, and those competing for his “pure-oxygen static apnea” record, as “magicians.” And to be fair to them, the man who first popularized the record was the illusionist David Blaine, who held his breath for 17 minutes and 4 seconds on a 2008 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Trubridge, a champion in constant-weight-no-fins (CNF) freediving, widely considered the sport’s noblest discipline, told me that pure-oxygen static apnea is “somewhere on the spectrum” with more gimmicky breath-holding records, such as the Longest Underwater Kiss (four minutes, six seconds) or the Farthest Distance Cycling Underwater (22,007 feet, 9.96 inches). “It’s not a pure discipline,” Trubridge said.
Šobat does not see his technique as doping, but he understands the criticism. “It’s Guinness,” he says. “It’s a circus.” His longest breath hold without huffing O₂ is, unofficially, 10:17, which would place him fourth behind Serbian diver Branko Petrovic’s current world record of 11:54. And he admits he’d rather clock a freedive deeper than 130 meters, which he hasn’t yet done.
But peer respect wasn’t why Šobat broke the record. And the scorn for Freediving Culture™ probably has more to do with his upbringing, which involved very few dolphins and a lot of guns. Šobat was born in Zagreb in 1965, when Croatia was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and his academic mother, born in Croatia, and Serbia-born military general father were card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Šobat was unlike either of them. He was a talented basketball player but a bad student. He struggled in class, drank alcohol, and stole. When Šobat missed out on a place at Yugoslavia’s national basketball camp because of bad grades, at age 16, he took his father’s military-issue pistol and turned the barrel on himself, but it jammed.
At age 18, Šobat joined the Yugoslav special forces and spent a year undergoing grueling hikes and training exercises. Then he enrolled in law school, but dropped out in his third year. Šobat was a keen point guard, and he competed in Yugoslavia’s second basketball division. His military training instilled an almost maniacal pursuit of fitness, and for three years he moonlit as a stuntman, at one point doubling for American actor Christopher Reeve when the star shot 1985 movie The Aviator in Croatia.
It was grueling, heartbreaking work. Stretching Saša's fingers took 45 minutes alone
But in 1991, as the Iron Curtain crumbled, Yugoslavia’s six constituent states—Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro—tumbled toward war. The ensuing civil conflict transformed neighbors and even family members into enemies. People crouched on their stoops behind sandbags, and trained rifles on folks they’d played soccer or shopped with just days previous. Šobat didn’t much feel like killing his dad’s family on behalf of his mom’s. Instead, he scrabbled together some Deutschmarks and bought a ticket on the next flight out of Zagreb. It was headed for London. Buda’s best friend had vowed to join him, but backed out at the last minute. He was killed on his first day of battlefield action in Bosnia.
Šobat scored a job at a grocery store in London’s glamorous Little Venice neighborhood, and spent almost every penny of his salary on rent and booze—Johnnie Walker Black Label if he had cash; Red if not. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Šobat looked like a vacuum-packed Adrien Brody, with long, black hair and abs like cinder blocks, and a girlfriend bagged him a brief gig as a catalog model. But when he browsed his agency’s portfolio—full of towering, classically handsome stablemates—he gave up.
Šobat returned to Zagreb in 1995. But he had lost friends and family to the war, and his father was a broken man: Yugoslavia, the project to which he’d dedicated his life, had cascaded into chaos and genocide. Threatening letters and bullets arrived in the mail, and he started to drink heavily. “And I realized,” says Šobat, “I’m losing him.”
Soon afterward, a parachuting accident left Šobat with extensive back injuries that ended his dream to play top-level basketball. To maintain his fitness obsession, he turned to bodybuilding. It was strict, and measurable, and he loved it.
“You have to wake up at the same time, you have to eat this, you have to work on that,” he says. “You have to go to sleep, you have to put on paper: Did you eat well, did you not?” Šobat quickly climbed the ranks in Croatia. He worked out so hard one time that he broke his shoulder. The pain didn’t faze him. But parading around half-naked at competitions felt demeaning. So he stuck to the gym.
Šobat’s mother had a second home on the Adriatic Coast, near her hometown of Dubrovnik, and he loved being in the water. He landed a job running a couple of nightclubs nearby and put in occasional shifts on the door. In 1996, at 31, Šobat met a Zagreb woman two years his junior named Aleksandra, “Sandra” for short, through a mutual friend. They partied, fell in love, and, in 1998, married. But Šobat’s drinking was getting out of control. Every night he drank, oftentimes alone in one of his bar’s back rooms. “I had a huge problem with alcohol,” he says. “I couldn’t count the money in the morning without being drunk. My hands were shaking.”
A year later, Sandra got pregnant. But things weren’t easy. She spent the second half of the pregnancy in the hospital, and at seven months, doctors discovered bleeding in the baby’s brain. They gave Sandra drugs to hold off a premature birth, but the baby girl, whom they named Saša, still spent the first five days of her life in an incubator, then another nine days in the NICU. It’s not good, doctors said. Her brain is damaged. The brief joy of fatherhood was buried in fear. “We knew everything was wrong,” he says.
The first diagnosis was cerebral palsy, a condition medics warned could confine Saša to bed or a wheelchair for her entire life. Her motor skills—the movement of her muscles—were underdeveloped, and she could move only involuntarily. (She would later be diagnosed with autism as well as epilepsy.) A specialist told the couple their daughter would need round-the-clock care forever. She might stand a slim chance of walking, he added—but only if they trained her muscles, via an intense program of stretching and occupational therapy, five times a day, for five to seven hours.
The news stunned Šobat. “How does anyone do that?” he asked.
“It’s simple,” the therapist replied. “She eats, she sleeps, she practices.”
Sandra and Šobat left the therapist’s office and burst into tears. Šobat knew how to train hard. But five hours a day, for years, with no guarantee that Saša would walk? There would barely be room for work, let alone a social life. They smoked half a pack of cigarettes in the parking lot. They understood, right there and then: life, as they had known it before, was over.
Šobat rationalized it as he’d done with basketball, bodybuilding, or the special forces. This is a project, he told himself. I won’t give up until it’s done. The first thing to go was the drink. Šobat knew he wasn’t the kind of guy who could enjoy one glass of wine—it was all or nothing. So he chose nothing.
“I forgot about parties, I forgot about everything,” he says. At first, he saw Saša as a project, too. “I said, ‘I love you, Saša,’ 2,000 times in the first two or three days,” he says. “But I didn’t feel it.” Sometimes he’d go for a coffee or a cigarette and forget everything, just for a moment. And then he’d remember, Oh, I have to work.
It was grueling, heartbreaking work. Stretching Saša’s fingers took 45 minutes alone, but that was easy. The tough part was relaxing the muscles in her tiny neck, which meant pinning Saša on the ground and rotating her shoulders around her head. It hurt the little girl, and she bucked and screamed, and Sandra wailed at Šobat: “Please let her go, please.” But he had to keep going, to keep hurting Saša, or she’d need an operation. So he did, for a whole month. “It’s traumatic,” he says. “Really traumatic.”
The couple spent every moment they weren’t working training Saša, and every cent on doctors who visited five times a week. They lived more like roommates than spouses: when one practiced, the other slept, and vice versa. All parents mourn their pre-kid lives in some way, watching the wild nights and lazy days grow smaller in the rear-view mirror. For the Šobats, that life fell clean off the face of the earth. Sandra would go days in the same pajamas, not brushing her teeth, not washing her hair. “I was so, so worried,” she says. “I was a complete mess … a little bit savage.”
But the thought of giving up never crossed her mind.
Saša “changed everything,” she adds. “She became the purpose.”
Pretty soon, Šobat didn’t have to say “I love you” over and over. The feeling was there, and it stuck. Two-and-a-half years later, Saša took her first step. But she still couldn’t speak. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with autism, too.
“Imagine yourself on Mount Everest, and it’s morning, and you wake up,” says Šobat, describing the condition. “There isn’t enough air to breathe, so you’re fighting with that. And there is a guy next to you, and he’s talking some language you don’t understand—Nepali, Chinese, whatever. Next morning, it’s a French guy.” This was Saša’s world: confusing and exhausting. And because autism isn’t homogeneous—each experience of it is unique—a parent can never fully understand the world their own child inhabits by observing others. There is only one road, and it is a slow one.
“I’m not talented, I’m just stubborn. I don’t want to give up. You can be better than I am, but you’ll never beat me.”
Doctors taught the Šobats to communicate with Saša through pictures. They would hold up images of animals, then ask her, “Which one is the cat?” It could take five, even ten minutes for Saša to point or nod her head. It was excruciating. “Saša,” Šobat would cry, “you know what a cat is!” But each new sentence, each fragment of information, made it worse, because Saša hadn’t processed the original question. And too much information could tip her into a traumatic meltdown.
There were long periods when he felt weak, says Šobat—when everything felt unfair, when he wanted to run away. I didn’t expect a life like this, he thought to himself.
I can’t handle it.
It’s too much for me.
I’m f.cking angry.
But, over and over, love propelled him onward. Šobat came to think of Saša’s mind as a messy, windowless room, filled with dirt. He could help her sweep up the dirt; keep it in a neat pile. But it would always be there. “It doesn’t go away,” he says. “Sometimes you have to clean it again.”
The ocean helped. Multiple studies have shown that children with autism are especially drawn to water: it is not only visually stimulating, but it’s also a sensory escape from the sights, sounds, and smells of an overwhelming world above the surface. Saša loved it when the family visited the Adriatic, and Šobat loved being there with her.
In 2012, when Šobat was 46, a friend introduced him to the concept of freediving. He told Šobat to dive five meters to the seabed and come back, which he did with ease. Then he did seven—still easy. Over and over he dove, for around ten days, until he realized: I’m enjoying this. Freediving was simple and quantifiable, like bodybuilding. And the further he slid into the darkness, the more he felt enveloped by a profound sense of peace.
Šobat needed to go deeper. He’d found his new addiction.
For millennia, breath has been understood not only as the cornerstone of human life but as a path to spiritual enlightenment. Tibetan Buddhists believe in combining breath work with visualization and muscle contractions as a form of meditation, while pranayama, first mentioned in Sanskrit literature around 700 B.C., is meant to influence energy in the body through controlled breathing.
Modern gurus brought these philosophies back into the fold. Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof has produced entire books and an app to encourage a program of guided breathing to help with stress, sleep quality, and other health issues. The 4-7-8 breathing method, devised by celebrity doctor Andrew Weil from ancient yogic practice, is peddled by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to ex-military tough-guy influencers.
But until the early nineties, breath-holding wasn’t a sport but a means to a living. The Bajau people of Southeast Asia have evolved for freediving: they possess enlarged spleens that provide more oxygenated blood, as do Korea’s Haenyeo women, who harvest mollusks and seaweed. It was only after Le Grand Bleu, and the 1992 formation of the Association Internationale pour le Développement de l’Apnée, the governing body of competitive breath-holding events, that people began to think of breath-holding as a sport. “Static apnea is the basic skill of freediving,” says Aleix Segura Vendrell, a Spaniard who held the record before Šobat, in an interview on the website Underwater360. “Breath holding is to freediving what running is to athletics.”
You need to be fit to hold your breath for the kinds of mind-bending times that place in the record books, of course; lung capacity is an obvious metric. But just as important—if not more so—is an ability to control the mind. In short, the brain requires oxygen to make energy. To hold your breath for extended periods, you need to maximize your oxygen intake and minimize its use. The brain accounts for two percent of body weight but consumes 20 percent of the body’s oxygen. Put simply, says Trubridge, “The more you think, the more you’re consuming oxygen.”
Key to this is to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and put the body into a “business-as-usual” mode that keeps basic functions going, including your resting heart rate. How to unlock this chemical calm varies from freediver to freediver. “It could come from meditation,” says Trubridge. “It could come from a past in yoga.”
Natalia Molchanova, one of the greatest-ever freedivers (and Alexey Molchanov’s mother), developed a technique called Attention Deconcentration, a kind of body scan. Croatian Goran Çorlak, who has held his breath for 23 minutes, visualizes a black dot on a white wall. “I don’t actively pursue any thoughts,” he says. “I just stare at the blank wall.”
When Šobat got serious about freediving, he had a bodybuilder’s physique: ripped, at five percent body fat, and weighing 275 pounds. “I was looking silly in the eyes of the other freedivers because they’re so slim,” he says. Zagreb was nearly a hundred miles from the ocean, so he practiced in Utrina. He cut weight and focused on static freediving, a discipline where athletes hold their breath while remaining still at the water’s surface, rather than swimming lengths of a pool or diving down into the ocean.
Five minutes.
Six minutes.
Two years in, Šobat was close to Croatian national times.
Seven minutes.
Incredibly, he was still smoking 40 cigarettes a day, oftentimes on the walk between his car and the pool. The smoke may have handed him a counterintuitive beginner’s advantage, having acclimatized his lungs to 25 years of CO₂ poisoning. But to improve, his coach told him he’d have to quit. So just as he had done with booze, he did—overnight. At first, his times plummeted. But a few months later, they began to climb back up.
He hit national squad times—and they improved. Šobat slimmed way down and trained five days a week at Utrina. But he didn’t have a coherent plan to calm his mind. Static isn’t like other forms of freediving. You’re not working at depth: you have only to lift your head an inch, and the pain is over. You’re not fighting the water; you’re fighting yourself.
First, Šobat tried to calm himself actively, to think himself into sleep mode. But it didn’t work. His mind would always wander to Saša—whether they had the money to pay for her therapy, what they’d buy her, or when they could take her to the sea—and it jolted his heart rate. Then he tried thinking about sex. Same problem.
Yoga was a nonstarter. Nothing seemed to work. And then it hit him. He’d been getting himself into that state for over a decade with Saša. Waiting for her to acknowledge a question, craving a conversation with her, or a hug; for her to live in his world, for once. It was love, but it was suffering, too. In those moments with Saša, Šobat says, “I’m completely out of my body. I’m looking at myself from outside.”
He transferred the feeling to the pool. The effect was almost instantaneous, like turning a key in a lock.
Eight minutes.
This will, in a way, become an experiment—testing how long a 60-year-old athlete can remain competitive against young athletes in peak sports condition.
In 2018, he placed third in the Static division at the Apnea Indoor World Championship in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy, with a time of 8:17. He was 52 years old. He’d felt at ease until the final 30 seconds. “Saša gave me that patience,” he says. “Because it’s painful to sit in front of her and wait five or ten minutes. Saša gave those things to me, and I transferred them into my freediving.”
That same year, scientists from Croatia, Canada, and the United States gathered 16 local freedivers in Split, Croatia, to learn about apnea under varying conditions, including the use of huffed pure oxygen. For 15 of the divers, oxygen consumption in the brain decreased in the final minute of their breath-hold. But Šobat was different. After 18 minutes underwater, he heard somebody say they thought he’d had a seizure.
But he knew what seizures looked like: Saša suffered them semi-regularly, and they were the most horrific thing the family had to endure. What had actually happened was that Šobat’s brain had increased its oxygen intake, helping him combat rising levels of CO₂ and stay in the water for longer. When he lifted his head, Šobat had held his breath for 21 minutes and one second. The experts were stunned.
The Guinness World Record for pure-oxygen static was 24:03, held by Aleix Segura Vendrell. Šobat had topped nine minutes in regular apnea, and hoped to rank highly in other freediving disciplines. But taking the world’s longest breath could bring attention not just to him but Saša and others like her.
Guinness gave the greenlight for the attempt, and on February 24, 2018, Šobat spent 30 minutes taking pure oxygen from a tank—forcing extra gas into his lungs—before dipping below the surface at a Zagreb pool as part of a campaign called “I’m Not Breathing,” which raised money for Saša’s local autism center. He played music through earplugs—the Rolling Stones, Tchaikovsky—at minimum volume. Then he centered himself. When he could hear the music, he could hear his own heartbeat, and he was ready to suffer. When he resurfaced, the time on the digital clock beside him read 24:11. He’d broken Segura Vendrell’s record, but it was considered unofficial due to a recording mishap.
Scientists wanted Buda to attempt a 30-minute breath hold in Canada, but his commitments to Saša, and ultimately the COVID pandemic, put paid to that, and it hasn’t been revived since. In 2021, in Sisak, he set the record again. He still wants to go deeper in regular freedives, but pure oxygen is something different. “I don’t know how to explain,” he says. “You can feel the whole of your body, but you can’t move … You are kind of in space.”
Freediving is Šobat’s job now, and he works training athletes in Zagreb. He has three coaches and proselytizes freediving in Zagreb and across Croatia. Šobat has no doubt he can pass 30 minutes. But he’d rather create more awareness for Saša’s conditions by adding 20, 30, or 40 seconds each time, like an Olympic high-jumper.
“He’s one of those people, when they die, there’s going to be a thousand people at their funeral,” says Dragan Biskic, one of Šobat’s protégés. “He’s touched so many lives, and he’s so generous. When he’s doing something with you, when he’s coaching you … you really see that he’s passionate about you succeeding.”
Šobat still works out like a madman; he’s still addicted to the suffering. His lung capacity is at around eight liters (the average is six). His latest craze is static rowing; he’s competing on a national level. He obsesses over the concept of the perfect stroke. Sometimes he even rows while holding his breath. After this, his heart rate has reached 202 beats per minute.
“Buda is the most motivated athlete I have ever met in my life,” says Ivan Drviš, a Croatian coach and academic. “The challenge is not getting Buda to train; it’s the opposite … Because Buda still shows no signs of stopping, this will, in a way, become an experiment—testing how long a 60-year-old athlete can remain competitive against young athletes in peak sports condition.”
For Šobat, it’s just a job. “I’m not talented,” he says. “I’m just stubborn. I don’t want to give up. You can be better than I am, but you’ll never beat me. You remember Terminator 2, the guy who was chasing? I’m like him.”
But he’s not the T-1000, he’s a father—and his prime motivation is Saša. He doesn’t think she’ll ever know he’s a world record holder. She still has seizures, and she can’t go to sleep at night without first watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on DVD. Her parents know every line.
Šobat never had a close relationship with his folks, and they’ve never discussed freediving. One day, not long after he took up the sport, his father called him on the phone. He’d never stopped drinking. “Come for a smoke,” he said. So they met. “Can you go it alone from now on?” he asked Šobat.
“I realized he was saying goodbye,” he says. Three days later, Šobat’s father died from a stroke. Šobat didn’t cry, and he’s never visited the grave. “There is no life after death,” he says. “You are not in a better place. You are just a piece of dust.”
That’s the worldview. Suffering. Pain. Death. Hold your breath. Take the pain. Get the record. The legacy is Saša’s. It’s almost a kind of guilt. “We taught her to live in our world,” says Šobat. “The experts are saying it’s much better in their world. They see colors different, they see movements different, and maybe they also hear different, and it’s maybe cruel to teach them to live here.”
But he and Sandra won’t live forever, he adds. So, unless anything in the science of autism changes dramatically, “I guess this is the world, unfortunately. It could be possible that there’s a place like the moon, like Neptune—some satellite where they’re living happily.
“It would break my heart, but I’d put her there,” he says. “But there is no such place.”
Šobat turned 60 years old in February. He is twice the age of most people with whom he competes. He recently guested on a Croatian podcast, and commentators mocked his age on social media. The idea that he might be running out of time and energy scared him. “I feel like I’m young, but I’m not,” he says. “I look like an old man.” He knows he doesn’t have forever. “You can’t fool nature,” he says. “I’m scared of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t compete.” Play golf? He laughs.
“If everything’s OK with Saša, I will be OK,” he says. To die? “I’m not trying to say I want to kill myself,” he adds. “But I’m aware it will come. And if it comes, I’m ready.
“If it happens, let’s do it in the sea.”
Editor’s Note: On June 14, 2025, Vitomir Maričić broke Šobat’s record with a time of 29 minutes and 3 seconds under water. At time of publication, Šobat was training to break the record once again.
Sean Williams is a British journalist who has written for several publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Neuroscience behind the ‘Parenting Paradox’ of Happiness
Separate brain processes cope with moment-to-moment versus big-picture experiences, which helps explain how parenting both increases and decreases aspects of well-being
By Anthony Vaccaro edited by Daisy Yuhas
Deciding whether to have kids can be one of the most momentous decisions a person makes. Countless factors can sway this choice. How will it affect your finances, your relationships or your career? Are you feeling pressure from your family or community? But one of the simplest, most personal considerations is whether, and how, having a child will affect a person’s quality of life.
Here, psychologists studying well-being have encountered what’s sometimes called the “parenting paradox”: parents report lower mood and more stress and depression in their daily lives than adults without children; yet parents also tend to report higher life satisfaction in general. How do we make sense of this contradiction?
My colleagues and I have conducted research that can help us answer that question—and, along the way, highlight the complexity of what makes for a good life. I’m an emotion neuroscientist by training, and I want to use brain science to understand the messy and complicated feelings that people experience in modern life. Feelings such as bittersweetness in reminiscences about an ex, simultaneous excitement and fear before a performance or ambivalence about a big life change are not easily quantified in the positive-negative scales scientists use in research—yet they can tell us a lot about how we process emotion when it matters the most. During my postdoctoral training, I worked at the University of Southern California in a laboratory focused on the parenting brain. That team has been following a group of first-time fathers through their partners’ pregnancy and their development as parents. I realized that studying these new dads over time would give me a chance to investigate how parenting relates to a meaningful life and what occurs in the brain as people’s life changes.
Focusing on “meaning in life” allowed me to study an aspect of well-being that transcends daily stressors—because parenthood is famously stressful. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what the meaning of life is, but in psychology, it’s measured using people’s subjective reports that their life is coherent and has an overarching purpose. This abstract feeling of “things make sense” has been shown to be a powerful predictor of overall well-being and mental health, even when people are going through objectively difficult times. People who feel greater meaning in life are often more resilient against larger mental health problems that might arise from adverse events such as global pandemics, severe disease and war trauma, research has shown.
In our study, my colleagues and I predicted that most new fathers would report an increase in meaning about six months after the birth of their first child compared with their reports during their partner’s pregnancy. Instead, in 88 fathers, we found a roughly even split in those whose sense of meaning increased or decreased. Clearly, only about half felt that life was more purposeful because they had become a parent. But that was just the first of several important insights.
Of our participants, 35 agreed to be scanned with a form of brain imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) both before and after the birth of their child. We used these brain scans to calculate how in sync each part of the brain was with the rest. For people with strong functional connectivity, when activity increases in one area, it also ramps up in the rest of the brain. Other scientists have conducted fMRI studies with hundreds of people and found that this measure is related to increased meaning in life, potentially because greater connectivity in the temporal lobe and other emotion-related regions of the brain allows for better integration of emotional, self-oriented and abstract thinking.
We wondered if this connectivity changes during a major life event such as having a child and, if so, whether this related to one’s sense of meaning and purpose. By comparing scans before and after our participants became fathers and reviewing people’s reports about their experiences, we modeled whether functional changes in different parts of someone’s brain predicted either their sense of meaning in life or their (positive or negative) feelings about parenting.
People with positive parenting feelings exhibited more connectivity changes in parts of the brain that are important for self-control (the middle frontal gyrus) and empathy (the supramarginal gyrus). Those with more negative parenting feelings showed changes in the sensory cortex and cerebellum, which may relate to hyperemotional sensitivity to sensory information. (If a baby’s cry always triggers a hyperstressful response, parenting is going to be very difficult.) Meanwhile fathers who maintained or increased their sense of meaning showed increased brain connectivity in regions such as the insular cortex and temporal pole. These areas are crucial for integrating a person’s emotions and senses with their broader sense of identity, suggesting that fathers who more effectively engage in this contextualizing process during this new life stage tend to flourish.
With these differences, we can start to think more deeply about the parenting paradox. A father might feel overwhelmed by sleepless nights yet still contextualize this as part of a meaningful existence. In other words, the challenging emotions people deal with in the short term can become independent from a long-term sense of satisfaction, potentially because separate brain processes underlie the two. Without this cognitive translation, day-to-day stressors may dictate overall sense of well-being, or the mix and shifts between positive and negative parts of parenting may make life seem overall incoherent for these fathers. Integrative regions such as the temporal poles and insular cortex allow both positive and negative events to fit together, potentially into a framework that facilitates long-term well-being.
This distinction fits into a larger body of research about how people build what scientists call a “coherent self-narrative,” or the story individuals tell about themselves. For example, past research has found that simply viewing oneself as being on a “hero’s journey” increases resilience. When someone can situate their feelings in a story that makes sense to them, it may not matter whether a particular situation is positive or negative so long as it fits into their longer-term goals. It seems the answer to whether parenthood makes people happier therefore has less to do with the children themselves (sorry, kids) and more to do with whether that goal of parenthood aligns with the individual person.
A recent analysis of a dataset that followed German adults from 1984 to 2021 actually found no average difference in the well-being of middle-aged adults with or without kids, though there was more variability for parents than there was for nonparents. What was really interesting, however, were the results for young adults. The most important factor for understanding their well-being was not whether they had kids but the importance they placed on the goal of having kids. Childless young adults who placed high importance on having kids experienced lower life satisfaction as they grew older—if their perceived importance of this goal remained high as they aged.
But those were a minority. Most of those child-free adults deemphasized that goal as they aged, and their happiness was then no different from adults with kids. This finding might highlight the takeaway for our study’s dads and for those questioning whether they want children: meaning can be created regardless of the choice made. The adaptive brain can shift journeys, reimagine stories and help people thrive, even when life throws us a curveball—or a screaming infant at two in the morning.
How Childhood Relationships Affect Your Adult Attachment Style, according to Large New Study
A large new study reveals how early relationships with parents and friends influence how we relate to those closest to us in adulthood
By Rachel Nuwer edited by Allison Parshall
We come into the world screaming and vulnerable—entirely dependent on adult caregivers to keep us safe and teach us how to connect with others. The nature of these earliest relationships influences how we behave towards others and see the world long after we’ve grown—but in more complex and nuanced ways than researchers previously thought, according to the results of a large, decades-long study examining how the quality of children’s interactions with parents and close peers went on to influence their relationships in adulthood.
In particular, early dynamics with mothers predicted future attachment styles for all the primary relationships in participants’ lives, including with their parents, best friends and romantic partners, the study found. “People who felt closer to their mothers and had less conflict with their mothers in childhood tended to feel more secure in all of their relationships in adulthood,” says Keely Dugan, an assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study, which was published in October in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “That’s a really striking finding because it demonstrates the enduring impact of that first person who is supposed to be there for you.”
Early childhood friends also played a strong role in predicting how participants approached their future close friendships—and their romantic connections. “When you have those first friendships at school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” Dugan says. “Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.”
The idea that earliest relationships have an outsized impact on our lives was popularized in psychology by Sigmund Freud. British psychiatrist John Bowlby later incorporated some core Freudian elements to create attachment theory, which helps explain variations in how people approach close relationships. “Some people are quite comfortable depending on others, opening up to them and using them as a secure base, whereas other people lack that confidence and trust,” says the new study’s co-author R. Chris Fraley, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Researchers today define attachment styles by where people fall along two dimensions, each shaped by early experiences with caregivers. The first, attachment anxiety, measures your level of confidence in the availability and responsiveness of those you are close to. People high in attachment anxiety might have more intense fears of abandonment or need for reassurance. The second factor, attachment avoidance, involves how comfortable you feel opening up to others and depending on them for support. Those high in avoidance may believe that people cannot be counted on or trusted, so they avoid asking for help or emotional support—even if they need it. A relationship with high attachment anxiety, avoidance or both is defined as more insecure, while a relationship that is low in both attachment anxiety and avoidance is considered to be secure: “You feel comfortable and close to the other person, you trust them to be there for you, and you feel supported,” Dugan says.
It can be difficult to study exactly how early relationships go on to influence attachment style, though, because people’s retrospective reports of what happened to them in childhood are skewed by memory failings and emotional and cognitive biases, Dugan notes. Of the relatively few studies that have examined associations between early caregiving experiences and adult attachment styles, she adds, all have focused almost exclusively on a single early relationship: the maternal one.
To more deeply understand how early relationships with a wider variety of people impact attachment styles, Dugan, Fraley and their colleagues turned to a landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families from around the U.S. It began when the children were infants and ended when they were 15 years old. Once the young participants were old enough to speak, they were surveyed about the quality of their relationships with their fathers, mothers and best friends. Researchers also surveyed participants’ primary caregivers—who were mostly their mothers—and observed them interacting with their children. That study showed robust evidence that early experiences with caregivers matter for social development.
Between 2018 and 2022, 705 of the original participants, who by then were 26 to 31 years old, agreed to a follow-up study to collect information about their current relationships with their parents, best friends and romantic partners. For those 705 participants, Dugan and her colleagues analyzed associations between the quality of early relationships and later attachment styles in adulthood. They found several notable patterns. First, a person’s relationship with their mother tended to set the stage for their later attachment style in general, as well as for their specific approaches to individual relationships with friends, romantic partners and fathers. For instance, people who had more conflict with their mothers, were less close to their mothers or had mothers who were reportedly harsher and showed less warmth during childhood and adolescence tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships.
The researchers didn’t find many associations between participants’ relationships with their fathers and their future attachment styles—perhaps because most identified their mother as their primary caregiver. “This cohort’s first assessment was in 1991, and even though the burden of caregiving still heavily falls on mothers, fathers were even less involved back then, on average,” Dugan says. “In cases where a father was the primary caregiver, the results might be flipped—but we don’t have that data.”
Early experiences with close friends, though, were an even stronger predicter than maternal relationships for determining participants’ approach to—specifically—romantic relationships and friendships in adulthood. “In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends in childhood, then you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugan says. People who enjoyed increasingly close and deepening friendships across childhood and adolescence also showed significant gains in those departments as adults, she adds.
The study’s decades-spanning data are “uniquely valuable” and allowed the authors “to show, using sophisticated analyses, how early social experiences affect later adult personality and close interpersonal relationships,” says Phillip Shaver, a distinguished professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis.
Omri Gillath, a social psychologist at the University of Kansas, describes the new study as “exceptionally rigorous and methodologically sound.” The authors “provide some of the strongest prospective evidence to date supporting a foundational assumption of attachment theory: that early relational experiences shape how adults relate to others”—not just in general but also within specific types of relationships, he says.
The participants were still in early adulthood in the most recent analysis, Gillath adds, so future work could examine whether the same early-life factors continue to be so influential throughout life—and how major life transitions, such as parenthood, bereavement or divorce, might reshape those dynamics. Single-parent families, multigenerational households and same-sex couples should also be studied in future research, Dugan says. Participants in the current study were nearly 80 percent white, so more racial and ethnic diversity is needed to get a truly representative sample, she adds.
Dugan also emphasizes that the findings do not mean the past inexorably dictates the tone of a person’s relationships in adulthood. “You’re definitely not doomed,” she says. Evidence supports that adult attachment styles can change in response to later life events and can even fluctuate month to month in response to both positive and negative relationship experiences. “These findings show attachment styles are malleable,” Dugan says. “You can have a not-so-great relationship with your parents and still develop a secure and healthy bond with a close friend or romantic partner in adulthood.”
To that end, Dugan and her colleagues are building a research-based interactive app for promoting secure attachments in both romantic relationships and adult friendships. “It starts with easy first tasks, like hugging a partner or sending an encouraging text to a friend, and then works up from there,” she says. “There’s always an opportunity to change your attachment style, and I’m excited about finding the most effective practical, concrete strategies for doing that.”
The neural reward that makes avoiding your fears feel so good
by Muhammad Badarnee and Mohammed R Milad, behavioural neuroscientists
We’re told that facing our fears can help us overcome them – but this misses the other intoxicating part of the equation
We’ve all been there – a challenge lies ahead of us, looming on the horizon. Maybe you’ve been invited to a work meeting that you’re dreading because of all the ways you fear it might go wrong. You spend days debating in your head whether to go. Then, at the last moment, you decide to send a text to say you are unwell and can’t make it.
Many psychologists and neuroscientists would frame this avoidant behaviour through the lens of anxiety – you were catastrophising about the meeting and this triggered a fear response. If you needed support, a therapist might focus on helping you see work meetings as less daunting. But that’s not the whole story. After sending the cancellation text, imagine you suddenly feel a wave of calm and even a bit of happiness – the tension melts away. Does this sound familiar?
Every time you face an approach-or-avoid choice – be it a work meeting, a dental appointment, a trip or a difficult conversation – your brain effectively runs a cost-benefit calculation, balancing the potential harm of confronting the threat against the comfort and safety promised by avoidance. You can think of it like a toggle in your brain that switches between approaching the challenge versus avoiding it and plumping for safety.
Let’s return to the meeting example. You know you ought to go to the meeting, but you hate these experiences so much, especially the risk of saying the wrong thing. Your toggle leans towards avoidance, and you reason that you’ll attend next time. What’s more, you find that the brief rush of relief you feel after cancelling your attendance is intoxicating. That sense of calm washing over you is not random. It is your brain’s way of saying: ‘Great job, you dodged a threat’. Unfortunately, it can come at a cost. That small moment of relief can encourage you to cancel again and again. If the cycle repeats and your brain’s toggle gets stuck in avoidance, then much bigger consequences accumulate: eventually your manager notices your recurring absences and your position at the company is endangered.
Thankfully, most of the time, the intoxicating relief of avoidance wanes – the toggle doesn’t get stuck. This is because the brain thrives on surprises. The first time you avoid a threat and nothing bad happens (at least in the moment), the subjective relief is powerful. Scientists call this process ‘prediction error’. It’s why subjective rewards feel stronger when they are unexpected and weaker when they are predictable. Your brain is flexible and it quickly adjusts its predictions to match the new reality, making that gap and the resulting happiness smaller over time. So typically, the second time you avoid, the reward is still present but weaker because the feeling of relief is now familiar rather than novel. By the third or fourth time, it barely registers in the brain. As avoidance becomes routine, the payoff fades, and your motivation to avoid weakens. Your brain’s toggle shifts gradually further toward the approach position. Sometimes, this can be a good thing – it nudges you to re-test your fears. You finally muster your motivation to make it to the next work meeting.
Avoidance can stop being helpful and instead becomes a heavy burden
Unfortunately, for some people, their avoidance can become excessive, their brain’s toggle gets stuck, and it can take a serious toll. Avoiding talks, social events, networking opportunities, leadership roles, difficult conversations or even feedback may feel safe at first. However, the long-term career costs are significant. It’s a similar story with specific phobias. Imagine you are scared of driving after being in a car accident: avoiding driving might seem a smart and safe choice at first, yet relying on public transportation could add hours to your daily routine and limit your work options. Or picture someone afraid of using an elevator. Taking the stairs may be a healthy option if they live or work on the third or fourth floor. But avoiding the elevator when they have a meeting on the 30th floor quickly becomes exhausting and impractical.
In fact, avoidance is a common and often excessive behaviour in many anxiety and fear-related disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias. Frequently reported examples in these conditions include washing hands dozens of times a day (to avoid contamination), avoiding social contact or refusing to leave home. In all these cases, avoidance stops being helpful and instead becomes a heavy burden. Unfortunately, the mechanisms underlying the persistence of avoidance in psychopathology – even after the original threat has passed – are not fully understood.
We propose that the subtle but blissful reward associated with avoidance may be an important – and, until now, often overlooked – contributing factor, as we recently outlined in our theoretical paper in the journal Communications Psychology. In an earlier study, we found that the feeling of relief associated with avoidance usually faded for most people the more times they avoided, but interestingly this drop in relief didn’t happen in people who are vulnerable to stress. Their brain keeps prioritising avoidance, giving it more weight than the potential reward of facing the challenge. In terms of the prediction error, the brain fails to update the reward expectations to match reality, so avoidance keeps triggering reward. This ongoing reward fixes the brain’s toggle, reinforcing and maintaining avoidance behaviour. This finding led us to think that the usual drop in reward that would normally curb avoidance might be absent in some mental health conditions.
If we are right, this could have exciting implications in terms of new treatment approaches
We are currently investigating this idea in the laboratory. Using fMRI, which records brain activation, we have created artificial situations in which participants must decide whether to avoid a threat. First, we condition participants to associate the appearance of a red light with a mild electric shock. Once they learn that the red light predicts receiving a shock (in 62.5 per cent of the cases, while no shock is delivered in the remaining cases), we give them the option to avoid it by pressing a button. However, pressing the button comes at a monetary cost – about five cents per press. This setup allows participants to weigh the benefit of avoiding the shock against its cost. During this process, we measure brain activation in reward-related regions, such as the striatum, and collect participants’ self-reported feelings of relief when they successfully avoid the shock. This allows us to track how the brain responds to the reward of avoidance over time – to see whether the toggle gets stuck or not.
To test our hypothesis that some psychiatric conditions may involve a reduced decrease in brain reward responses during avoidance, we are currently collecting data from both healthy control participants and patients with psychiatric diagnoses. If we are right about the brain processing the reward of avoidance differently in psychological disorders, this could have exciting implications in terms of new treatment approaches.
Traditionally, psychologists treat excessive avoidance by focusing on how people perceive the potential threat. One of the dominant therapeutic approaches is called exposure therapy. Here, patients are gradually reintroduced to the feared object – in the case of driving avoidance after a car accident, the patient would be gradually exposed to being in a car again – in as safe an environment as possible (at first, perhaps while stationary). Through repeated exposure to the perceived threat, but with nothing bad happening, whether in imagination or in real life, the fear response can fade, a process psychologists call ‘extinction’.
Another dominant approach is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), where clinicians also use a similar, threat-focused strategy. Therapists work with patients to examine the thoughts and feelings linked to the threat: Is driving always dangerous? Under what circumstances? What evidence supports or contradicts this fear? How might it be reduced? By reframing these beliefs about cars and driving, CBT aims to loosen the grip of fear and improve emotional wellbeing.
Exposing yourself to what you fear is not always enough to break the cycle of avoidance
While these treatment approaches help many people, they don’t work for everyone. We believe this could be because a crucial element often remains in the background of these traditional approaches – namely the reward of avoidance. We propose that clinicians should address not only the way their patients perceive the threat, but also the hidden ‘payoff’ that reinforces their avoidance. By bringing this reward into patients’ awareness and helping them to weigh its costs, we can make it part of the therapeutic process.
If you’ve struggled with fears or anxieties yourself and undergone traditional psychological approaches, such as exposure therapy, yet found them to be ineffective or only partially successful, we hope to have given you a fresh perspective that might help explain why. It’s not because you haven’t been trying hard enough or because you are simply too fearful. Rather, it may be because exposing yourself to what you fear is not always enough to break the cycle of avoidance. A key part of your difficulties might have to do with the persistent and rewarding sense of safety, relief or control you get from steering clear of the challenge.
Ours is early experimental work into the brain processes that contribute to excessive and harmful avoidance, but if you find this way of thinking about the problem helpful, you could try gently challenging yourself to help break free from being overly avoidant. Imagine that toggle in your brain that we described – the one that switches between approach and avoidance. Each time you face a challenge, your brain weighs the risks and rewards of confronting the challenge or avoiding it and staying safe. If you find yourself consistently avoiding fears and challenges, it suggests your toggle is stuck in the avoid position – perhaps because on some level you are weighing the reward of avoidance too highly. To shift your behaviour, you could intentionally ask yourself some questions to help reset your brain’s risk-reward calculations.
For instance, the next time that dreaded meeting looms on the horizon, pause and ask yourself: What would I gain by avoiding this? Consider the question gently, without self-judgment – remember, a balanced level of avoidance is adaptive, while excessive avoidance becomes harmful. Can you feel yourself anticipating that rush of relief, or sense of safety or control that will come from flaking on the meeting? If so, consider how strong that reward is, whether it is truly helpful, and if it is worth the cost. After all, avoiding certain situations can limit your opportunities, harm your career or strain social connections. By examining the ‘payoff’ of avoidance – rather than just confronting the threat itself – you can start making choices that move you forward instead of holding you back.
If you have a trusted friend, relative or therapist, it might help to discuss these considerations with them – they can act as a sounding board to help you consider what is in your best interests. We hope this kind of reflection, focused not only on threats but also the allure of avoidance, will help you process past experiences, and strengthen your ability to face future challenges with greater clarity and flexibility.
Muhammad Badarnee received his PhD in psychological sciences from Tel Aviv University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He studies brain mechanisms underlying fear conditioning and recall of emotional memories.
Mohammed R Milad is a John S Dunn Endowed Chair and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is a behavioural neuroscientist with extensive expertise in brain mechanisms of Pavlovian fear conditioning and extinction, with a focus on psychiatric conditions.
Women folk healers were branded as witches, but their treatments may have been medically sound
“Double double toil and trouble” is a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that conjures images of evil witches making potions in giant cauldrons. But the truth was that women persecuted as witches were probably legitimate healers of the time.
Prior to the 14th century, female healers were generally tolerated throughout Europe, offering one of the only kinds of medicine available at the time. But from the 14th to the mid-18th century, with the rise of university education, coupled with the increasing power of the church, female healers were often demonised.
University graduates were favoured instead. Female folk healers were now commonly labelled as “witches” and subjected to torture and execution.
Valuable medicinal knowledge may have got lost along the way. To rediscover this ancient knowledge, researchers are looking in more detail at some of the major ingredients used in these medicines and assess their scientific worth through a modern lens.
Some of the most famous potions documented in records of medieval treatments were said to contain exotic ingredients such as eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog and adder’s fork. But these were actually synonyms for plants and not animal parts.
Although, animal parts such as frogs and toads were indeed also used in other recipes used by the healers of the time, often for their psychoactive properties.
The majority of the plants folk healers used were native to Europe. But there were also some exotic ingredients, obtained through the spice trade, which began as early as the fifth century.
Eye of newt is mustard seed, most likely the European species Sinapis alba. Modern research has shown it has anti-cough, anti-asthma, anti-inflammatory, anti-nerve damage, anti-androgenic, cardioprotective and anti-tumour effects.
The classical formulations containing dried mustard seed, handed down from ancient medical books or ethnic medical experience, are now widely used in herbal clinics.
Wool of bat is common holly leaves, and has been shown to reduce high levels of fats in the blood, including high cholesterol. It also contains some compounds that are toxic and so self-medication isn’t recommended.
Tongue of dog is actually a plant known as hound’s tongue, attributed to the long leaf shape. It has a history of use across the world for a variety of ailments including malaria, hepatitis and tuberculosis.
The presence of group of natural compounds called pyrrolizidine alkaloids render it highly toxic to the liver. This means that any research showing medicinal promise has to be viewed with some caution.
Adder’s fork refers most likely to the fern, English adder’s tongue, primarily used in folk medicine for wound healing and for promoting healthy blood circulation. It has also been exploited for its skin-enhancing properties by the cosmetic industry.
Witches’ brews
Witchcraft and folk healing are two different arts. However, medieval folk healing did involve elements of superstition, astrological lore and even pagan ritual and so the line between compassionate healer and witch could easily be misrepresented by those in power.
Flight ointments, sleep potions and love potions are often mentioned both in historical records and fictional literature. Commonly containing a potent class of chemical compounds called tropane alkaloids (a class that also includes cocaine), these concoctions would have had some interesting effects.
Flight ointments were applied to a broomstick and to parts of the body with blood vessels close to the surface to aid absorption. There has been much colourful debate as to the exact parts of the body that these ointments were applied to, but the extremities are most frequently mentioned.
This could be viewed as an early form of transdermal application, now found in the delivery of some drugs such as nicotine patches.
These alkaloids, derived from plants of the Solanaceae (potato) family, including deadly nightshade and henbane have intoxicating psychoactive effects, including feelings of lightness, delirium and hallucinations. These effects could easily be experienced as feelings of flying.
Sleep potions often used extracts from foxglove and extracts from the plant Indian snakeroot, containing the drug reserpine, the world’s first drug treatment for high blood pressure. It was reportedly rediscovered after the founder of the Indian herbal medicine company, Himalaya, observed its calming effects on restless elephants during a trip to Burma in the 1930s, hundreds of years after its use in medieval times.
Together these plants and their compounds produce symptoms such as reduced heartbeat, inhibition of adrenaline release and drowsiness, all things that might aid in a restful night’s sleep.
Love potion recipes called for ingredients such as the mandrake plant Mandragora officinalis. The root is a rich source of the same alkaloids found in the sleep potions.
This may appear counter-intuitive but higher doses of these compounds are known to produce increased heartbeat, palpitations and sweating rather than drowsiness. Other plants such as Ephedra sinica (containing a stimulant called ephedrine) and psychoactive Areca catechu (betel nut) have stimulant and euphoric effects linked to increases in adrenaline and serotonin.
A sleep potion can be transformed into a love potion, and should love turn to hate, a further increase in dosage would transform these plants into poisons. So it’s unsurprising that accusations associated with poisoning and witchcraft were more commonplace during the heightened witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries as a means to prosecute female healers under the law.
Prosecutions for witchcraft didn’t come to an end in England until the early 18th century when the 1736 witchcraft act repealed earlier legislation and made it a crime to either pretend to be a witch or to accuse someone of practising witchcraft.
Following the 1736 act, the witches (and folk healers) were left alone for a while although still encountered difficulties from the church and establishment at times. Nonetheless the act of prescribing potions continued.
The practice of prescribing herbal pills, potions and salves as a herbal medicine practitioner eventually became a legitimate occupation. It’s one still dominated by women to this day.
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You'll be logging more miles in no time.
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/relationships/a63012521/what-is-gray-divorce/
Gray Divorce' Is On The Rise, And Relationship Experts Think This Is Why
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