Diver Stress & Rescue
The day you become a certified open water diver. You take the responsibility for you and your buddy’s well-being underwater indirectly. That mutual responsibility demands your dedication to the sport. The stress and rescue course enables you to recognise, handle and prevent stress-related situations during scuba diving.
Diving accidents and diving emergencies are usually the results of either stress before the dive or stress during the dive. You can easily handle these situations for you and your buddy by educating yourself with the unique rescue skills and informative academic session of SSI diver stress and rescue specialty course. It is easy yet reasonably affordable to learn scuba diving in India.
Stress in Diving — Causes & Prevention What is stress?
Stress is defined as the result of improper pressures or demands which is beyond a person’s ability or capacity to fulfil them. One can detect stress at any point as it starts developing. The earliest you can detect stress the easiest it becomes for you to respond to. Stress can be positive and negative too.
The tolerance level of stress is different for everybody, and it can be either positive or negative stress. Positive stress helps you perform better under the desired demand. Negative stress leads you to an uncertain situation and one can meet with an accident too. There are three factors, which define whether the stress is positive or negative.
- The choice of your sense
- Your degree of control
- Your ability to anticipate the consequences
Just beneath the surface, one can get a bunch of surprises such as thermocline, leg cramp, loss of your mask, and malfunction of any equipment. These positive stress can turn into negative if you are not able to anticipate these situations.
We can’t get ready for a surprise but we can consciously recognise the stress and respond to it calmly with our experience and knowledge. The academic sessions of the course only teach you the techniques and theory. Detecting stress and gaining control over it comes with practical experience during scuba diving in Andaman.
Stress is a familiar feeling for most of us. While for some of us it may be triggered by having to meet a work deadline, for others it may be brought on by another non-life-threatening task like asking someone out on a date.
Stress is a very human response to situations that appear difficult thereby triggering the flow of adrenaline. The sudden stimulus we feel when frightened, startled, or threatened is called the fight-or-flight syndrome.
The flight-or-fight response developed in early humans as a means of survival. It gave them the sense to run from danger or to fight it if they find themselves trapped.
Since the modern human doesn’t find itself fighting off dangerous animals regularly or trapped in the wild. The fight-or-flight response has modified itself.
The modern human still feels stress and has a similar response to a different set of circumstances. Whether you are a person that meditates extensively or a sensitive or easily agitated person. Recognising the signs of stress is the first step towards learning how to control it and respond to it logically. Early warning signs include:
- Warm or flushed complexion
- Perspiration
- Stomach butterflies or nausea
- Rapid heartbeat
- Shortness of breath
- Muscle tension
We have been experiencing stress for our fear and anxieties since we are born. We have also been learning what to fear or avoid through watching our parents, TV, Movies, reading books, and environment. A few of these anxieties may or maybe not reasonable, and either stay with us throughout the life or fade away as we grow up.
There are bad experiences like touching a hot stove, falling from a cycle, and getting hurt in an accident. These experiences let us avoid situations known to have pain or the risk of losing a life.
The physical and psychological causes of stress and how they relate to a diving
One should be able to identify the source of stress to prevent it. If you can understand the several reasons which bring stress in diving. You can manage to avoid the situations and even can deal with them quietly with your knowledge, and experience while scuba diving in Havelock. These five reasons can usually set you under stress.
1.Physical weakness
2.Physiological issues
3.Equipment issues
4.Environmental conditions
5. Lack of knowledge
A physically fit body lets you dive longer comfortably and functions better underwater. It can also provide a sharp mind to respond to the stress quickly if they appear during the dive. On the other hand, poor physical fitness can lead you more susceptible to fatigue and a few mental stressors.
It becomes more difficult to deal with mild current and a long swim to the boat or the beach to exit the water. The worst part of being unfit is you will have a hard time helping or rescuing a buddy if needed during the dive.
Physiological causes stress you due to lack of mental preparedness, mental control, and mental coping. It can be either your buddy or you showing signs of mental unpreparedness during the dive. This course material and your instructor make you well informed about how to handle or avoid this kind of situation.
Misuse of equipment, unserviced equipment, improperly suited wetsuit-BC, leaking mask, and carrying improper weight system are the most common equipment-related issues you might face during your deep-sea diving in Andaman. Which can bring stress even if the underwater environment presents a pleasant condition for scuba diving.
Poor environmental situations include low visibility, strong currents, thermocline, the choppy surface of the sea, storms, and shivering cold water. These conditions can set you very stressed if you don’t have a proper plan and experience to avoid or handle these conditions. We strongly recommend that if there is cyclonic weather or a storm warning or diving conditions beyond your control “ Do not dive or do not recommend to dive anyone “ until the weather gets better.
Lack of skills, knowledge, and experience are most stressful during a diving emergency. The SSI stress and rescue specialty course fill all the required info and training in you. Your instructor insists you repetitively practice the skills to get them habitual. The academic session and skills you learn from the course, let you perform a rescue operation or even assist your buddy whenever needed.
There are a lot more things to learn such as how to plan for accident management, performing rescue drills in real scuba diving situations, and the conditions that complicate the search-rescue operations. Your instructor teaches you all the skills and drills calmly. You need to go through all these steps day by day and experience them in a real diving environment.
We provide at least ten dives for your course but 20 dives are recommended for you to enhance your ability to handle stress and rescue. It is also recommended to complete the emergency first responder specialty course along because these two courses are interlinked together and the scuba diving course price is reasonably cheaper than anywhere else in the Andamans.
Thank you so much for your interest in learning scuba diving. We will be publishing the next blog about the emergency first responder specialty course soon. Stay tuned till then. Thank you.
Originally published at http://seahawksscuba.wordpress.com on August 18, 2021.
