Anxiety, Panic and how to deal with it

[Landlocked123]

Thanks for the links.

 

[aquacat8]

There’s one thing in diving that causes me bad anxiety, and it’s part of the reason I moved across the country so I can dive warm, and that is wetsuit claustrophobia! When I am wearing seven or eight mil it happens on the surface, and also gearing up, when the suit is fully expanded, and eases off when I descend and wetsuit compression kicks in, and I get more flexibility.

So many of my cold water dives started with an anxiety that would ease off as soon as I descended. If I was trapped on the surface too long sorting things out for one reason or another, that could get to feeling kind of panicky. I used to joke that other people feel panicky underwater, but I feel panicky on the surface! It did reinforce the idea that I belong down there. Being trapped in thick wet suits makes me feel helpless, I think partially because I am petite and so it really is hard to move in them, and sometimes I feel like I’m choking in them.

I love the beautiful kelp forests and the cold water environment but screw those wetsuits!

 

[bowlofpetunias]

As usual there is some great advice here. I prefer not to repeat things and try to add something different to think about. It is great you are researching and trying to turn this into a learning experience. Posting here means others will also get to learn from it.

Something that stands out for me is your response. You followed your training, calmed yourself done and did not actually panic. I think this should offer some reassurance that you are "in touch" with your state of mind and able to respond without going into full panic. While it is possible for anyone to panic, some people are less likely to panic. The best indicator of future behaviour/response is previous behavior/response in similar situations. With this in mind, I applaud your search for answers but encourage you to remember your positive response suggests you have the right frame of mind to cope if it does happen again.

 

[OMANDIVER]

The trouble is you don’t know if you are going to panic or not until you hit a really adverse situation. I got really stuck in a restriction cave diving. I mean wedged. I did not panic, but I would not have known that beforehand. Good training, experience and good team work, finally got me free. But it was unpleasant. I don’t think there is much you can do in the moment it happens other than have previously got a really good skills grounding and dive with people you know and trust. Recreationally this is often impossible and why the buddy system is quite problematic in that sense.

 

[ANDYCA]

With close to 200 dives I can say that overall I am very comfortable in the water. Spent most of my teen years free diving and spear fishing so for me Scuba was just an extension of an already familiar thing. This weekend I experienced a strange occurrence. on the 8th dive of a 3 day long weekend of diving I experienced what I can best describe as an anxiety incident. I am not in the best of shape and I don't know if the 3 days of consecutive diving had anything to do with this. I was tired from the other dives but nothing that I have not felt before. I dive Nitrox 32 and I am used to getting 3-4 dives in on any given day. We were planning a dive to 80 feet at Dutch (Pump House) I dive to that 70-90 foot range all the time so this was just another dive for me meaning I had no stress at all going into the dive. HP133 and 30 Bail out. I usually get two dives out of the HP133. So again air was no concern = no pre dive stress. It was the first dive on day 3. At about 10 feet I got a strange feeling like my reg was not breathing like it normally was. The venturi was on its normal setting that I use so i eliminated that. The feeling started to get worse. I had checked air twice already as I always do both pre-dive and at 5 feet. No issue there. Finally I had to pause my descent at bout 15. Feeling got worse. I made a decision right there that I would not descend further unless I got this sorted out. I never got into heavy breathing etc. I chilled out at 15 for a minute or so and it all went away. I told myself ok to try to descent but if any sign showed back up I would abort immediately. Descended down from there with zero issues. Found my usual happy place and had a great dive. Came back with 2000PSI after a 30 minute dive which is right around average for the profile we dove for me. I have been researching trying to find out what may have caused this. I came across this article below and thought it would be a good read. Also would like to know if anyone out there has had a similar situation and if so did it manifest itself on the back end of consecutive dives.

How To Deal With Panic While Scuba Diving

When someone describes an issue to me I always concentrate on the first and last thing they say to get to the root of their problem... people will often try and give their initial concern first then provide lots of ancillary detail then try to come around and get back to their primary concern; doctors call it "the doorknob question".

Sorry if I'm just projecting but, based on your post you are highlighting you are a bit out of shape and you think the consecutive dives may have over-stressed you. If you are concerned about being an out of shape diver you can employ techniques to allay that concern or you can get back in shape and knock out the root cause of this issue. I was always the butt of jokes about being a fat diver, then I saw this lecture and it really made me take stock of my diving practices and the risks I was taking, being lighter I'm exerting myself much less before during and after dives.

Sorting your physical fitness will have a positive impact on your mental fitness and help prevent panic... if panic still occurs then the other posts on this thread have covered techniques to cope with it nicely.

 

[Saniflush]

You might find this thread interesting: Panic in the experienced diver?

Thank you for posting that link. Reading through that thread I now feel comfortable admitting my own story albeit not as harrowing as many, although it was for me.

So as many of you know I finished my DM at the end of last year and at least for the parts involving water, had breezed through it in regards to comfort level. The swimming, the exchanging gear, all of it. I have always been VERY comfortable in the water so those things were no problem for me to stay calm and work my way through.

Here I am in March a newly minted DM and my sister who is not nearly as adventuresome as I am (although just as comfortable in the water) sees how much fun my wife and I are having diving and decides she want to get certified as well. She goes through all the bookwork, pool work, and her open water dives pretty flawlessly but afterwards is like most people who have just gotten their C card in that there is not a lot of confidence about her abilities or what she has learned. To help remedy this, we take off to the coast the first part of April to get some practice.

I jump off the boat first and she follows. We meet up on the surface go through our final surface check with each other before we begin descending. I know it is going to take her a little longer to descend then it will me since she has a little trouble clearing her ears so I stop about the 15' mark to wait on her. Then it starts. I begin to get a short of breath feeling like my 2nd stage isn't giving me enough air. I closes my eyes and concentrate on deep breaths for 6-10 seconds and still feel like I can't get air. I give her the "Something Wrong" hand signal and go to the surface almost (but not quite) gasping when I get there. I signal to the boat crew that I am ok but had a problem clearing my ears (ok so I lied to them, sue me) I waited about 30 seconds on the surface then began descending again. This time I descended with no problem, no gasping, no feeling of impending doom, NOTHING. Dive went off with out a hitch as did the 2nd one that day and two more the following day.

I have zero idea why it happened? I cannot tell you how much thought I have put toward that incident after it happened but has been a lot. Mostly trying to determine if there were environmental factors that could have been at play? The water was a little chilly (67F) but we had protection on. Maybe some stress of wanting to get my sister comfortable with something I dearly love doing. I have not been able to pinpoint any single cause and it has not happened since in the next 60 or so dives I have done. I only know that it was as close to terrifying as I have ever experienced underwater and it made me go back and try to question everything!

 

[Landlocked123]

Thanks for all the great feedback and sharing. Regarding fitness..Interestingly about a month ago I decided to begin a modified low carb diet.My goal is to be back to my 30's fitness levels and I am giving myself a full year to do it. I am down 9 and have about 35 to go. I was extremely fit most of my 20's and 30's ; So I am shooting high. Bottom line I like to dive a lot on weekends. Its 8-9 dives period and for sure getting in better shape will make that safer. If fitness is the reason this happened it needs to get nipped in the but. About a week ago there was a post on the board about how diving is more of an exercise in managing uncertainly vs risk. The jist of the article which was really well laid out is that given we cant foresee all the combinations of variables that can come into play at any one given time we cant predict the outcome and therefore we manage uncertainly more than risk as risk is tied more to predictable out comes based on a set of "X" variables and factors coming into play and the assumption that we know what the outcomes will be given stated "X" set of variables. This is resonating with me even more now. I am truly starting to believe that this is one of the reasons folks get into trouble. Bottomline never once in any of my classes was there discussion of how would "YOU" handle panic or its precursor? It's something that just was never on the radar. So it sounds to me like unless something similar has happened to you and you lived to learn from it you are literally unaware that it could even happen to you. To me this is a major flaw in the training programs out there.