The Psychology of Pushing the Limits

[TracyN]

There is no reason to dive to the ungodly depth of 350 meters without a submarine other than to have bragging rights and the ability to thump your chest and say "been there done that". Pure foolishness bordering on madness. Why? What contribution to society or knowledge does a stunt like that contribute? Another record for some fool to attempt to break and possibly lose their life in the process? I saw a facebook post about that proposed dive.

 

[undrwater]

I push the limits of inner space, but I'm having trouble getting camera crews in there.

It's dangerous because, the longer I spend in there, the higher the probability my wife will kill me.

 

[kensuf]

There is no reason to dive to the ungodly depth of 350 meters without a submarine other than to have bragging rights and the ability to thump your chest and say "been there done that". Pure foolishness bordering on madness. Why? What contribution to society or knowledge does a stunt like that contribute? Another record for some fool to attempt to break and possibly lose their life in the process? I saw a facebook post about that proposed dive.

20 years ago people used to say the same thing about diving past 100m. I am not saying I condone 350m dives, I'm just saying our perspective has changed as our benchmark of what is "safe" has changed.

I will not pretend to have answers to the questions asked in this thread, but.... Some people just really enjoy the mental and physical challenges associated with "pushing their limits". Others are drawn to exploration, the drive to see what is around the next corner is incredibly compelling for many people. And of course, certainly, there are also a few that need to be in the limelight, but I don't think those guys stay around very long.

 

[boulderjohn]

Limits can be pushed by careful risk management and planning or by being a loose cannon. The difference between "let's see how deep I can go" and "what do we need to do to push the end of the line further". I've observed there's a small portion of divers who come to the sport of diving, proceed fast and dive a lot in short time, get all the gear but don't bother with getting the skills and taking the baby steps.

Someone on here has in their signature a Gary Gentile quote from Dark Descent that nicely sums it all up: "Many people in extreme sports do not recognize their limitations, and when they do, they are about to die." Gentile means it as a caution, and it should be taken as such by all of us. But it's also a promise with a corollary: that survival when things go sideways under such conditions likely means you've learned something about yourself worth knowing. We're all born and the hammer cocks...while most if not all of us very much wish to avoid an untimely demise, there are worse things in life than miscalculating your limits.

I think the ancient Greek term for "miscalculating your limits" was hubris. Anyone who has completed an OW course can complete a dive to 350 m with ease--it's coming back from it that is the hard part. Before embarking on a dive at the edge of the limits you have to make an appraisal of the challenges involved and your ability to meet them. If you overestimate your abilities while underestimating the challenges by too great a degree, you are guilty of hubris, and Aristotle cited hubris as a natural flaw in a great man's character that could lead to an error in judgment and cause a tragedy.

On the other hand...

Nearly 20 years ago I was intrigued by a study I read related to this issue. As I recall, it examined three types of people:

• GROUP A consisted of people who typically underestimated the difficulty of a task and overestimated their ability to do it.
• GROUP B consisted of people who accurately estimated the difficulties of a task and accurately evaluated their ability to do it.
• GROUP C consisted of people who overestimated the difficulties of a task and underestimated their ability to do it.

These people had remarkably different levels of success. The group A people were by far the most successful, and the group C people were by far the least successful. As a career educator, I know that research on student achievement strongly supports that research. Successful students, buoyed by the positive reinforcement of a lifetime of success, work confidently on the most difficult assignments, while habitually failing students quit in despair at the first sign of difficulty.

Perhaps an overestimation of one's ability is at the heart of diving to the edge. Perhaps without some level of overestimation, none of the boundaries would have been successfully pushed. I am thinking now of David Shaw, whose fatal dive was, IIRC, his 333rd logged dive. I would bet that almost all of the people participating in this thread have more--some have that beat by many multiples. His death was in large part caused by an error in his judgment (intentionally letting his light head dangle while he worked) that few of us would have made. We can call it hubris, but on the other hand, until that dive, he was celebrated for his achievements in pushing the boundaries of diving.

 

[TSandM]

I think, for some people, adrenaline is addictive. We know dopamine is, so it's not too much of a stretch to posit that there are people who require higher adrenaline levels to feel good. (After all, some antidepressants raise norepinephrine levels.). Think of a group of kids: There is the one trying to balance on the fence top, and the watchers, and the one kid who runs off to get the adults before the daredevil gets hurt.

I'm not an adrenaline addict. In fact, I don't much care for it. Yet I work in emergency medicine, which is a field thought to attract such folks. I used to jump horses over pretty big fences, and now I cave dive. But in all those activities, I spend or spent a ton of energy trying to reduce the likelihood that anything that happens will cause me to have an adrenaline surge. My stated goal for cave diving is that I do not EVER want to be frightened in a cave, and I try to make conservative judgments to ensure that. In cave diving, John, I'm one of your C people. In fact, it may well be that in everything I do, I overestimate the difficulty and underestimate my ability to cope with it, but what that motivates me to do is improve my capacity, not eschew the activity.

Group A people, in some pursuits (diving among them) are playing Russian Roulette. You can spin that barrel quite a few times without finding the bullet, if you happen to hit a good probability day. But eventually . . .

 

[boulderjohn]

I had the good fortune to spend a half hour or so talking with the principal of the school where Scheck taught. According to him, many of Scheck's colleagues had no idea of what he was doing. They knew he dove, and he'd disappear for a weekend to do it, but they had no clue that he was setting multiple records. Whatever doing that brought him, it was either enough for him to know it, or for the members of his particular world to know it. He apparently had no need to share it with everyone.

That does not surprise me at all. In fact, I would say it is common. There are different audiences, and there are audiences that count and audiences that don't count. I think that in life in general, we do not talk about the details of our highly engaged pursuits to people who would not understand. I used to be a pretty serious volleyball player--I even had an official ranking in doubles play. I never talked about that to friends, neighbors and fellow teachers, who I assumed had no interest in it. I talked intensely about theory and strategy with fellow players, but not anyone else. Later I took up citizen ski racing and was on a ski team. We sometimes roomed together in a house on trips, and we had social gatherings outside of the season. It was on such a gathering that I mentioned that I was thinking of getting scuba certification. It turned out that almost every single person on that ski team was an active diver--I had had no idea before that.

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

World record stuff aside... It's important to also mention that everyone has different limits. While one person might be challenged by a cavern dive, another diver might not be challenged by a cave dive with 5,000 feet of penetration. Some might say doing solo dives is pushing the limits, but I don't feel that way at all. I'm not stressed, or on adrenaline, I'm just enjoying the solitude. So I accept that just because a particular dive might be pushing the limits for me, doesn't mean that it's that way for everyone. I can't get 5,000 feet back in a cave, but there are cave divers out there that can. Some of those same divers think that solo diving is unsafe. So in effect we're both doing dives that we feel comfortable doing, while looking at the other guy thinking he's 'pushing the limits.' So when someone says that solo diving, or diving beyond certain limits is unsafe, I have to ask, unsafe for who? This is why I've always advocated that there should be different limits for different levels of diving. This is where I part with the training agencies, trying to hold all divers to the basic open water diver limits that were established more than 30 years ago is crazy. Eventually, change comes, albeit too slowly for me. PADI now even teaches tech, others teach solo diving. Who would have thought that 20 year ago? If divers weren't pushing the limits, we wouldn't have the diving options we do today.

 

[boulderjohn]

World record stuff aside... It's important to also mention that everyone has different limits. While one person might be challenged by a cavern dive, another diver might not be challenged by a cave dive with 5,000 feet of penetration. Some might say doing solo dives is pushing the limits, but I don't feel that way at all. I'm not stressed, or on adrenaline, I'm just enjoying the solitude. So I accept that just because a particular dive might be pushing the limits for me, doesn't mean that it's that way for everyone. I can't get 5,000 feet back in a cave, but there are cave divers out there that can. Some of those same divers think that solo diving is unsafe. So in effect we're both doing dives that we feel comfortable doing, while looking at the other guy thinking he's 'pushing the limits.' So when someone says that solo diving, or diving beyond certain limits is unsafe, I have to ask, unsafe for who? This is why I've always advocated that there should be different limits for different levels of diving.

Good point.

A couple years ago, a Cozumel dive shop owner, Opal Cohen, went with one of her divemasters and another man on a planned 300 foot dive. They were using single tanks, and they were breathing air. A planned dive to 300 feet in Cozumel is nowhere near pushing the established limits of diving. I have done it, and it was pretty much a ho-hum dive. In fact, it was a training dive for two students who were part of the team. On the other hand, for a group of divers with no technical training, no timix, no redundant gas, no decompression gases, and no knowledge of decompression stops, it was far beyond the limits. As a result, Opal died and the DM is permanently paralyzed.

---------- Post added September 5th, 2014 at 11:45 AM ----------

I think I am talking primarily about people who are fully aware of the established limits of technical diving, have at least something close to required training, and make a conscious decision to go ahead with the dive.

 

[p1p]

This kind of reminds me of a climb I did once with the Mountaineers on a pretty simple climb for me. One particular part of the climb I did as lead and set no protection on the way up.. It was easy, I felt comfortable, well within my limits.

The climb lead later reported me for unsafe climbing, as I didnt put in protection, making it dangerous for the second (which was stupid, unless I fell on him). But in either case it was a point of my limit may be different from yours.

Either training,experience, ability, or all the above.

When my dive buddy and I talk to recreational divers, and mention regularly doing 200ft+ deep dives, they think we are totally crazy and pushing every limit they know of. But in fact its a matter of training,experience, and ability.

I look at divers doing greater than 300ft dives with a quizzical eye, but thats because to me the margin of error becomes so small doing really deep dives.

Ok, maybe I think they are a little crazy too

 

[mathauck0814]

I don't know if we're "pushing limits" but we're diving between 110-130m on a fairly regular basis. We're not doing it because there's something magical about the depth, but rather that's where the wrecks are so that's where we dive. As to what's driving me personally? I like the fact that more people have been to the moon than have been to some of the sites we dive. The world is such a small place, it's nice to go somewhere that very few others (I can count them on my fingers) have been. I suppose I'd go deeper if that's what was required. I suppose I'd also not be as excited if they became more frequently dived sites.