|NICK BRIGHT| Imagine you're standing on a clifftop, 27 metres high for the men, 21 metres for the women - the equivalent of an eight-storey building. You're looking down at the water, impossibly far away. Maybe your toes are curling over the edge. This is what you do for a living. You're preparing to compete at the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series and you've done this hundreds of times. And yet, once again, you're feeling utterly sick. There's a reason why even professionals with long track records of success can't escape the feeling of fear as they work at such heights. At any given point in time, your brain is processing a number of signals just to help you keep your balance – the feeling of the ground beneath your feet, the vestibular system in your inner ear, and, of course, vision. All of that can get a little confused when you look down from a great height.
|NICK BRIGHT| You're listening to Beyond the Ordinary from Red Bull. My name is Nick Bright and throughout this episode we'll explore what it means for athletes to operate at extreme height, bringing in experts and athletes to delve into the psychology of fear.
|AIMEE HARRISON| Everyone's thinking it. It could happen on any dive at any time. It doesn't have to be the hardest dive, just get lost in the air, something clouds, something changes, you can smack on any dive.
|GARY HUNT| It's not for everyone. You have to really have a love of the sport and, and be really self-motivated.
|DR JAMIE BARKER| What can we do in the moment to not overthink, not underthink, not worry about what it means, what it doesn't mean, who's watching?
|NICK BRIGHT| And remember, if you want more stories from Beyond the Ordinary, make sure you follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
|DR JAMIE BARKER| Dr Jamie Barker, I'm Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at Loughborough University.
|NICK BRIGHT| Jamie works with athletes and people from professions where there is an element of the extraordinary about their day job. He's used to working with fear.
|DR JAMIE BARKER| If you think about where fear evolves from when we were running around being chased by saber-toothed tigers, the popular parlance is fight or flight. You know so we have two options - we either stand and fight or run away to fight another day. What happens there is, you know, we get lots of hormone changes, we get an increase in blood flow, we get a release of either adrenaline or cortisol. That's broadly, I guess, where it's kind of come from. So it is evolutionary, it's protective. So what is a fear response is to protect us, actually. There's some uncertainty here. This might lead to some sort of injury or accident, but we also know that that fear, particularly the fear of failure, can be particularly motivational to enable people to perform. They firstly probably need to appraise the fear and then, secondly, need to develop strategies to enable them to overcome that fear because we know that fear can, for example, be very paralysing. That rabbit in the headlights, you know too much information, possibly as well too many things to think about, paralysis by analysis. The more I think, the worse it gets.
|NICK BRIGHT| So how can an athlete work to get over, or offset, that fear?
|MAN 1| All crew approximately five-minute warning.
|NICK BRIGHT| Meet Rhiannan Iffland. She's an Australian high diver and champion of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series four years in a row between 2016 and 2019. With the Covid-19 pandemic shutting down competition last year, Rhiannan had a bold new idea.
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| We're arriving at Three Mile Dam, and I am going to attempt to become the first female to dive out of a hot air balloon. It's an idea that I came up with at the beginning of the year. And considering there were no events able to happen this year due to the circumstances, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make it happen. To be honest, when I first found out that the 2020 season was cancelled, I was, honestly, I wasn't surprised, but I was in shock. I was really excited to compete in 2020 because I wanted to continue to ride the same wave of confidence that I was on in 2019.
|MAN 2| Rhiannan Iffland unstoppable, unmatchable. Two 10s.
|MAN 3| On fire this season.
|MAN 4| The stats are just insane right now and well deserved.
|NICK BRIGHT| Diving out of a moving hot air balloon means your diving platform is not stationary but moving. It's something new and nerves are heightened. But before the dive, Rhiannan has her own way of managing nerves.
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| It's a bit too early to be nervous. I actually try not to get nervous until I'm actually standing there. But we're having a little run through, going through a little safety brief, and what's going to happen tomorrow and, yeah, kind of get sorted and ready to be in the moment.
|AIMEE HARRISON| Everyone's thinking it. Well, no one wants to do it. It could happen on any dive at any time.
|NICK BRIGHT| This is the voice of Aimee Harrison, Canadian cliff diver and Red Bull Cliff Diving competitor. She's also studying for her master's in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Victoria. She explains how groups of athletes have an unwritten rule: it's fine to joke, but only to a point.
|AIMEE HARRISON| It doesn't have to be the hardest dive. It can be an easy dive where you just get lost in the air, something clouds, something changes. For whatever reason, you can smack on any dive, you can totally blend, you can forget what you're doing. So we're all thinking it and we're all feeling it. I think I can speak on most of our behalf in saying that we don't, we don't talk about smacking. I think sometimes people will say I'm nervous that I'm going to forget what I'm doing along, along those lines. And they say it to the friend, and then it's just positive reinforcement, like, you know, you know what you're doing. It's not so, it's a, it's a very extreme situation. So there's not a lot of joking about bad things happening up there.
|NICK BRIGHT| Jamie Barker gives us the psychologist's perspective.
|DR JAMIE BARKER| And I think one of the things that we sort of hear in psychology a lot is the power of 'don't'. You know, don't fall off, don't make a mistake. But, of course, that is very ironic. And we know that if I said to you now don't think of a pink elephant, you're thinking of a pink elephant. So, so often the power of irony and the power of don't in our self-talk and how we communicate can be very hampering and can be very unhelpful. We can develop ways in which we can help people to, I guess, reduce the negative thoughts that would go in there, get them to focus on cues that are relevant and helpful to them, you know, during their performance, which, in some ways, doesn't detract away from the fear.
|NICK BRIGHT| What are those cues? What practical steps would Jamie advise to an athlete in the final seconds before a dive?
|DR JAMIE BARKER| First and foremost, I'd like to think I wasn't given just a minute with him. Sometimes we can fall into that. The psychology is a quick fix. And, of course, a lot of these things, you know, do take a lot of time, but it is kind of a real scenario, isn't it? You know, what are some of the things that you could do? I think it would be, you know, what are the three things that you can do that will help you to deliver this performance, you know, and that could be around, I don't know, checking equipment. It could be around looking at a certain thing. It could be around regulating the breath. But, but it's like three things that will help you to deliver a performance that often in that moment is quite critical. Because once people are in the performance, it's like when you, you wrote in the exam paper and you read the question, sometimes the nerves generally quite kind of go, because you kind of like, well, I mean it now and, therefore, things will, you know, hopefully, the, the learning will, will take place. It's just the apprehension that people sometimes need a helping hand to get over. What can you do in those first three minutes to get you into the performance? In, in a similar way, with the athletes you're talking about, you kind of need to get that helping hand to, to get them into their performance because I'm guessing once they're in, into that, they're highly proficient, highly skilled. They, they kind of know what to do or you probably wouldn't be doing it. What can we do in the moment to not overthink, not underthink, not worry about what it means, what it doesn't mean, who's watching, just be very process-driven and pick up on the right cues.
|NICK BRIGHT| Jamie says that a good athlete is a mixture of the innate DNA that makes someone up and also the socialised aspects that makes a cliff diver or a rock climber better at handling fear, but are some people just built to withstand fear better than others?
|NICK BRIGHT| This is an extract from Red Bull's How to Be Superhuman, a podcast series which looks at incredible people who have pushed the limits of human endurance. In this clip, Emily Harrington, who free-climbed the iconic El Capitan in just 24 hours, describes how fear is a very real thing, despite what some people might think.
|MAN 5| You said you're able to rationalise your fears. But when you're suddenly faced, not necessarily with El Cap, but something of that ilk again, do you feel fear?
|EMILY HARRINGTON| Yeah. I feel fear all the time. I think that a lot of people think that athletes, like myself, don't feel fear, that we have some sort of, like, glitch in our brains that doesn't allow us to feel this emotion. I think it's a little bit unrealistic. I'm afraid all the time. I just have a really good relationship with, like, sort of allowing it to happen. Not really like shaming myself for it, not feeling bad about it. I used to beat myself up so much when I was younger when I got afraid. And just like go to battle with all of my, like, demons and just kind of like, feel bad and feel like I wasn't good and – and all these things. And now I have sort of recognised that my fear can actually be a really interesting way of being strong, if I sort of allow it to exist. What I like to do is, is like I tell people that I actually like feel the fear, like if I'm feeling afraid of something, I let it exist there, like I let it be very prevalent in my, in my consciousness, and I sort of ask myself, like, why is the fear there? Like, am I in danger? Or is it more that I am afraid of exposure? Because I haven't, you know, been in this situation in a long time. And, if that's the case then, like, how can I sort of, like, push the envelope, little by little, like not, like, launch into the zone of discomfort really dramatically and, like, feel traumatised and never want to go back? How can I sort of, like, take baby steps to push that level slowly, and so that the comfort just keeps growing little by little by little? I have a little mantra that I like to say when I'm, when I'm climbing and that is slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So just slow down, down, down, down, really think about what's in front of me, like the individual move in front of me and not the 3,000 feet of granite that I still have yet to climb. But that said it is a, it's a constant balancing act. And it's a constant process. And I think that that is at, you know, going back to the beginning of this conversation, that's part of why I do it. I don't want to eliminate risk and danger from what I do every day. And that's why I climb in a lot of ways.
|NICK BRIGHT| Red Bull cliff diver Aimee Harrison again.
|AIMEE HARRISON| I came from the 'you can't be scared' phase, like, not allowed to show the fear to the, you have to acknowledge that it's there, if you're going to be able to do this. But I do also understand that people who still are incredible athletes do all these ads and say you can't be scared because they just need to block those thoughts out. Some people, like, there's, I guess, different approaches. Some people succeed when they block those thoughts out. They just ignore them. They pretend they're not there. And, for myself, it's okay. I hear you. You're there, you're scared? How do I respond to this? And, and acknowledge it and work with it? How do I transition this very obvious feeling into something that can be positive, or something that can be turned into the reinforcement or the correction that I want to perform?
|NICK BRIGHT| Jamie Barker says that nerves or worry can actually be a good thing.
|DR JAMIE BARKER| I guess it's having a routine of what are the things I need to do to make sure I can be as safe and consistent as possible. And that's probably routine-based. While recognising that, you know, I have to be considerate of the weather conditions, the environmental conditions, etc., you know, have I prepared my kit appropriately, all those type of things. So, in sport, we never want somebody who's 100% confident. We often want people that if we could rate them are around about 85% confident and 15% of worry, doubt, anxiety, we know is really helpful because it, that element of concern is motivational. People that are concerned about things will prepare. And if you go the other way, if you said, you know, 85% fearful and 15% confidence, that wouldn't work at all. You can see how that would lead to being paralysed, whereas actually 15% of worry and doubt, I'm concerned, I'm going to check my kit, I'm going to check the weather, I'm going to rehearse, I'm going to do what I need to do, that's where that, that 15% of worry and doubt is, is really helpful.
|NICK BRIGHT| So, how do you manage that 15%? Gary Hunt likes to juggle. Gary's a world champion and Commonwealth Games bronze medallist. But if he didn't make it as a diver, he might have had a very different career.
|GARY HUNT| I feel personally that my juggling training is a big help to me, especially during the competitions, during the time that we're, we're waiting around for, for the competition, it's very easy during the competition to, to get stressed out to get to be thinking and overthinking the competition, the nerves of the competition and I found that when I juggle it, it really keeps my brain sharp. It keeps, keeps my reactions very, very quick. But, at the same time, it takes me away from all the stress of the competition, and just keeps me on my toes, but, at the same time, a very good distraction from, from, from the tiring, nerve-racking wait that we have to go through at each competition. Yeah, almost, almost every competition I'll have some, something, the juggling clubs or juggling balls, more often juggling balls, because they're easy.
|NICK BRIGHT| Juggling isn't for everyone. But each athlete has their own ways to cope with the pressure. And sometimes that's just running through every single element of a dive before it happens in pursuit of an elusive goal: muscle memory.
|AIMEE HARRISON| You rely heavily on muscle memory to offset the, the mental peace and trust in the process. Muscle memory is, is, essentially, the process of reorganising and rewiring our nerves to make the, the brain-body connection stronger and faster and more accurate. We practise a new movement, we do it over and over again. We are, we are literally fabricating a new neural pathway. It's definitely something that we rely on. And I think that it could help our cognitive processes when trusting what we've, we've learned is trusting the fact that, even though our brain is sending these, maybe these untrusting messages or these negative messages, we know that if we're telling it, okay, I'm doing, I have to do a double half, I'm telling my brain I have to do a double half. My brain goes no matter what's happening in here and all the other spots, my brain is going to send double half to my muscles. So it is coming from the mental area, the cognitive area, it's saying to you in those moments might be fearful or negative.
|DR JAMIE BARKER| You know muscle memory, in particular, is, is a popular psychological term that is, is based around the idea that our bodies remember certain movement patterns. But, of course, that's not the reality of what happens. What, of course, has happened – it is through repetition, and repetition and experience and experience, you know, our brains build up a database of movement and spatial awareness and decision-making. That, of course, then when we're called upon when we, when we put it into competition, or when we put our body and our brains into certain situations, those things happen, because they're well ingrained, and they're well trained. You know it's that idea between an expert and a novice. If you think about what is an expert, an expert has that memory bank. They've been in lots of different situations. People often talk about flow state, or ‘I was in the zone’. And when, when things happen effortless and easy, people often talk about this altered state of awareness where they're not really thinking about what's going on. And, of course, sometimes when we go into high pressure, Olympic finals, World Cup finals, you know, whether it's life or death, there can be that, that element of where we overthink and that idea of paralysis by analysis. Where do my hands need to go? Where do my feet need to go? When we start to go to that level of thinking, we know skill breaks down, what we call reinvesting. And that's the term that we use in terms of skill breakdown, under performance, we reinvest in to help our brain and body make sense of the situation in what we're doing. And that reinvestment basically uses up our, our mental capacity, our working memory, which then leads to us panicking or freezing or stopping.
|NICK BRIGHT| So why, why do athletes keep coming back to high diving? It's an extraordinary discipline, and not for everyone, taking years of training in a highly specialised field.
|GARY HUNT| For me, personally, I'm 36 years old now and 10-metre diving is kind of a young sport. You have to be so fast, so fast twitch, and it's a lot more physical, I would say, compared with 27 metres, which is a lot more mental. More risk involved. And, and that's why you don't see a lot of – there's only a few – a small percentage of 10-metre divers or three-metre divers who transfer into cliff diving. That is the usual path – a diver grows up in the diving pool training for the Olympic Games. And then at one point, they will decide to, to do high diving. And now it's becoming more of a blurred line. Like, you see people like Constantin who's, who's now trying to compete in both the 10-metre and the 27 metres and myself also. But it's, yeah, there's a lot less athletes doing the seven metres. It's not forever on. You have to really have a love for the, for the game for, for the sport and, and be really self-motivated. You made that choice. If you wanted to be a high diver, you stopped your regular diving training. You went to do a diving show. But there'd be a small tank of water and then a big ladder, you could go up and, and get used to the height. But there wasn't really the option to, to keep training and competing in 10-metre at the same time as, as learning the high diving. But now there's a few more options. There's a place to train in, in Austria, AREA 47. There is a place in, in England. You know there's a place in China. There's now somewhere in America that's being built. So you're, you're getting a few more options for, for training and the level of high diving is, is increasing a lot. And you're getting more and more divers that are coming directly from 10-metre to high diving and doing both at the same time. So the level of competition is, is rising.
|NICK BRIGHT| And if you do love it, and you grapple with the fear enough to pull a jump off, the highs can be extraordinary. Just ask Rhiannan after her dive out the hot air balloon.
|MAN 6| Here it comes.
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| Ready. Five, four, three, two, one.
|MAN 7| Woo-hoo! Way to go, Rhi! Yeah, baby!
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| Thanks. That was awesome.
|MAN 8| Right on.
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| Woo! That was so fun.
|MAN 9| Yeah.
|MAN 10| Yeah.
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| Yeah, it was awesome.
|MAN 9| It didn’t seem high?
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| No, that felt so awesome. Saw everything coming around.
|RHIANNAN IFFLAND| This project came about from a simple Instagram message. Yeah. Now for it to come to life today is, is so amazing. So for the last couple of months, I've had this in, you know, in the back of my mind. And although I've been preparing for the World Series, I've also been preparing for, for this balloon dive today. So now that this is over, it's a weight off my shoulders. I'm relieved. I'm happy. I'm excited and ready to start training harder and harder for the World Series.
|NICK BRIGHT| A cliff diver is one of the only athletes in the world who has the chance to understand a feeling like this. And that's what makes the sport so great. Years of planning, training, thinking, meditating - all incredibly necessary for the privilege of turning all off for three short seconds and simply feeling the rush of pure movement. A moment where somehow while you're spinning hundreds of degrees per second while dropping faster than you would normally drive a car, time seems to simply stand still. Fear? That was something you left behind on the platform. Don't worry. If you're smart, you'll find fear again in just the right dose to keep you safe. The dive is over, you stop spinning, and the world starts turning again, until the next time.
|NICK BRIGHT| This episode was adapted from articles on RedBull.com by Josh Sampiero. Aimee, Gary and Rhiannan are just some of the competitors preparing for the new season of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, which began in France on June 12th. The next stop is August 14th in Oslo, Norway. They'll be diving off the rooftop of the Opera House. You can watch the event live on RedBull.com or the Red Bull TV app.
