Outdoor Swimming - What are you afraid of?
Everyone, yes everyone, me included, has something that makes them anxious, even fearful about swimming outdoors. I’ve heard many from clients, friends, other water users and landowners.
These fears often revolve around uncertainty of some kind. A fear of the unknown is a deep-rooted human trait. Evolutionarily designed to keep us alive by kicking in our fight or flight response (1). Yet it reduces our overall cognitive function, can make us unable to fully enjoy or even participate in an activity and can skew rational decision making.
Through years of guiding and coaching, I’ve seen that encouraging clients to be open and to voice their fears can have a powerful effect. Sharing those concerns makes them feel less alone and often helps to re-frame the significance of a fear. On a personal level I’ve explored it through therapy and it’s been a powerful tool in overcoming some stumbling blocks for me too.
It can be awkward, tough, embarrassing to share fears. We often perceive that our own fears are irrational and silly. That you’ll be belittled for having them. But fears instil a real reaction to the person, whether logical or not. They’re uncomfortable and few are happy feeling that way.
With that in mind this piece is designed to try and alleviate and normalise fears and anxieties around outdoor swimming by sharing common fears of my own as well as some of the most common amongst others. I don’t aim to offer solutions to tackle the fears, I’m no therapist, but by sharing I hope to help others feel less alone and more able to tackle them.
To start I want to share a couple of my fear highlights. One rational, one definitely not.
I have fictitious monsters in my head when I swim! Perhaps fuelled by an excessive consumption of natural history programmes as a child or just an over-active imagination. My biggest fear in the water is that a large, possibly prehistoric being, is going to come up from the depths and swallow me. The shadow of my own arm, the sight of a rock out of the corner of my eye, a strand of weed, have all prompted me to panic that something’s creeping up on me.
I’ve come to realise that this only now happens when I’m in unfamiliar waters. In home waters the monsters rarely appear. Put me in a new lake, reservoir or the sea and the monster’s return. A bit of research points to this being a common trait for the brain when we put ourselves in less familiar surroundings (2).
Confrontation. People telling me I shouldn’t be there. That I shouldn’t be doing what I love. Whilst very, very rare it does happen. It’s caused me to adapt the way I swim and how I operate my business but it hasn’t stopped me. A little more on this here https://openwaterwheway.wordpress.com/2020/06/21/breaking-the-law-to-swim/
When you begin to speak to others the fears become wide ranging including, in no particular order:
· Dirty water
· Dead bodies
· Leeches and small burrowing things
· Standing on something weird
· Getting trapped in mud
· Not being a strong enough swimmer
· Swimming too slow/fast
· Liability if something goes wrong
· Getting too cold
· Not knowing what I’m doing
· Being too fat/thin/tall/small
· Being too old/young
· Not being able to get in a wetsuit
· Getting ill
· Crocodiles/sharks/squid/octopuses/insert other potentially deadly animal
· Currents washing me away/pulling me down
· The plughole at the bottom
· Having to manage/deal with other people
· I’ll crash into a swimmer
· Deep water
My intention here isn’t to put new fears in people’s minds (apologies if I have) but what I do want to say is, you’re not alone. Everyone has fears and anxiety’s around outdoor waters. That doesn’t have to be a full stop on you getting out there and giving it a try, swimming more often or in new places. You might just need a helping hand to get there from friends, strangers or a coach.
If you have any more to add to the list here I’d love to hear them. The more we air them the more we can break down the fear barriers to swimming outdoors and get more people reaping the benefits.
References
(1) https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-fight-or-flight-response-2795194
