Blue health, or why voices drop at the water's edge

When I walk down to the Pointe Rouge with a group that has just come off the metro, the same thing happens every time. We reach the sand and the voices drop. Nobody has asked for quiet. Someone stops, watches the surface for twenty seconds, then turns back to me almost apologetically, as though drifting off were rude. Apparently there is a name for this now, and a whole field of research sitting behind it: blue health.

I would rather be straight about what I know and what I don't. Blue health studies what the presence of water does to our mental and physical state. The field is young, the researchers careful: they talk about observed associations and stop well short of causes. I mention it this early because the line 'water calms you down' travels very fast on Instagram, where it has quietly become a sales pitch.

What counts as a blue space

A blue space reaches well past the ocean. Any stretch of water you can see or hear from where you happen to be standing counts: the sea, a lake, a canal, the pond in a park, the fountain on a village square. Teams working in this area compare self-reported health, stress levels or sleep quality across people with more or less exposure to those places, and the positive associations come back with a consistency that makes you sit up. Associations, and I do mean that word. Living near water usually also means living somewhere greener, where people walk more, and nobody has untangled that properly yet.

Plenty of explanations are on the table and they probably stack up together. Water holds your attention without spending it: your eye follows a reflection, then a wave, then nothing in particular, and none of that costs you a thing, whereas an hour of screen leaves you hollowed out. It also makes you look into the distance, something our days almost never ask of us, and I think that point is badly underrated. It lays a steady wall of sound over the noise of the city. It gets us moving and talking too, since we walk further along a quayside and say something to a stranger we would have walked past anywhere else.

I know nowhere else where your gaze travels that far without you having to decide anything.

Getting in, or just staying on the shore

People run the two together constantly and it irritates me, because anyone who hates cold water writes themselves out of a practice that never asked them to get wet in the first place. Going in, cold water especially, sets off an immediate response: the breath catches, the skin tightens all at once, the body objects, and then something rearranges itself. It is engaging, often demanding, and it suits some people and not others. Staying on the shore runs along a slower line, open to anyone, with no kit and no particular fitness. On a paddleboard you get a third thing again, carried by the water without being in it, with a wobble that keeps you awake to where you are. Nobody dozes off balancing on a board. I refuse to put a group into cold water on a first session, whatever they ask me for. Four things come back whatever the format.

• The breath changes before the mind does. People turn up talking at speed, then ten minutes facing open water and the breathing lengthens by itself, without a word from me.
• Time bends. An hour out on the water is nearly always remembered as shorter than an hour in a studio.
• People speak to each other differently, corporate groups included, whose debrief on the beach turns blunter and far less polished than anything we would have got round a meeting table.
• How well you do makes no difference. The woman who falls in three times leaves as loose as the one who holds every posture. Often looser.

If you live nowhere near the coast

1. 01Find the water that already exists around you: a canal, a pond, a park basin, a fountain. Size matters far less than you would imagine.
2. 02Take a short, regular appointment over one big outing a month. Twenty minutes every week will do more than a whole day each quarter.
3. 03Once there, start by doing nothing. The phone stays in your pocket, no podcast in your ears and no counting of breaths. Let your eyes work on their own.
4. 04Then add one simple breath: in through the nose, out for longer than you breathed in, about ten times over.
5. 05Finish by naming one thing you heard and one thing you saw. That tiny anchor beats a long internal debrief.

Marseille gives me a place to watch all this that I would not have anywhere else, and I don't believe for a second that the Mediterranean holds a monopoly. If there is water within twenty minutes of your home, go once this week with no goal at all. I will be at the Pointe Rouge at first light, wrestling with a wetsuit I still cannot get into first time.