Breathing under stress

[DeepDark]

As a non cave diver, i was wondering:

1. How do you breathe when you get into a dicey situation such as silt-out and/or lost line?
2. What breathing techniques are you taught and have you experienced a real-life situation where it worked?
3. How do you stop the snowball effect of negative thoughts?
4. Are you able to turn a knob-thingy on your bottles to induce more CO2, much like breathing into a paper-bag?

I presume the mind goes into over-drive when stressed in a cave and fuels a negative feedback loop of short breathes and hypoxia. I'm interested how you're able to stop this in a stressful situation.

I read a post where someone said you breathe from your stomach and breathe deep and exhale straight away...then you pause. I always thought you pause when you inhale; which method is correct?

Thanks in advance.

[deepdiver4]

take a cave course and you will learn and experience how to work threw a emergency.

[skip]

You stop, breathe, think. you may breath some more while stopped. you don't act until the breathing is under control and the thinking is on the problem at hand, not bugaboos about problems not at hand.

And you do not want more CO2, inhale and exhale a bit deeper and slower than normal.

How do you stop the negative train of thoughts and events? You get training and your instructor puts you through the situations and resolutions until you get it right. There is nothing better than training in preventing anxiety and panic in emergency situations. In fact, it's about the only way to prevent and to deal with them.

inhale pause exhale, pause, inhale, makes little difference...a bit deeper and slower than normal - the kind of breathing you do when you are relaxed.

skip

[w ripley]

It's different for every diver.

For me it's all about going under the surface with the confidence that my tanks are filled, that all of my gear works, that my muscle memory has been built on a solid foundation, and that I have planned for all of the "what-ifs" I can think of. Then, when things go south, I can have the confidence to STOP what I'm doing & settle down, for however long it takes to settle down. Could be 30 seconds, or could be 5 minutes.

Open water or cave: It's really about using the skills that you have learned to stop an elevating stress level from ever going over the top to panic.

I think after a while - after you've been in these situations more than once - you discover that going any farther when something bad happens just never works, while depleting your air supply & energy levels (physical & mental).

You push it = you pay the price; You take the time to settle down = your breathing goes back to normal, your head clears so you can think & you tend to get out alive.

[gschaut]

I know I'm going to screw up this quote (I looked for the original reference, but could not find it).

Somebody around here once said:

"Cave training focuses intensely on safety, comfort and skill. You learn very quickly that as long as you are breathing, all is groovy. With the right instructor, cave training can be as much fun as a barrel of methed-up monkeys."

You deal with silt-out's, lost line, etc by training, training, training. And when the "real thing" happens, you're first thought (or at least mine) is "this is just like training, I've done this dozens of times before".

This is also why untrained (open water) divers have such a high fatality rate in caves. They don't know what to do, and panic ensues.

Last time I was at Ginnie, there had been a fatality the day before. An open water diver got less than 200' into a cave system that had 3+ miles of passages, got disoriented and drowned. He ran out of air less than a minute away from the exit. When he got silted out, he had known what to do, and where to go.

[Tegg]

You would really benefit by simply taking some time to find a local cave instructor (there are instructors all over the world) and asking to buy them some lunch and having a discussion with them to get all of your thoughts and questions covered.

Any stress management course / technique can be applied towards a stressful situation. Obviously, the more you have experienced something with a positive outcome, the less stressful it "feels" to you the next time you are in the same situation. As such, getting training, and diving often helps in those same situations.

[spelodiver]

Do we know who is asking this question? With the recent problem of untrained divers entering caves and having bad results. Should we be telling a unknown about this? That is the problem with the last fatal
The person asking should only get this answer. "Seek instruction. It's adorable and fun". Then offer the instructor of your choice.


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[rddvet]

Do we know who is asking this question? With the recent problem of untrained divers entering caves and having bad results. Should we be telling a unknown about this? That is the problem with the last fatal
The person asking should only get this answer. "Seek instruction. It's adorable and fun". Then offer the instructor of your choice.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

He posted previously he had a medical condition that keeps him from diving. I think the consensus is he's not a troll, but feel free to use your own judgment as to how paranoid to be that he'll learn enough from the internet to kill himself in Indian.

[next gen]

You deal with silt-out's, lost line, etc by training, training, training. And when the "real thing" happens, you're first thought (or at least mine) is "this is just like training, I've done this dozens of times before".

My father and I were doing a dive in JB yesterday and we went to a pretty small passage. On the way out the vis got really bad. The first thought that went to my mind was, "I've trained for this," and it was smooth sailing from there.

[DeepDark]

I'm not a troll, i'm intrigued.

I have asthma and fear water. When i was young, we went to the sea-side and i remember doing the back-stroke not far from the beach and i suddenly felt something hard on my shoulder...i shat myself thinking i'd inadvertently swam into deep water and i'd hit a whale or something. I looked around and realised i was 2ft from the beach and it was the bottom i'd hit, d'oh. That first panic associated with water has left its mental scar.

If i didn't have asthma, i'd love to try cave diving just to face my fear, but i wouldn't want to jeopardise anyone around me so here i am...asking asinine questions of a World i'll never know after watching the film Sanctum - it seemed to have lit a fire within me.

I've been reading the IRAP to identify patterns of behavior for how it goes pear-shaped and how people cope with the stress. I've just read this one that show's how lost-line training kicked in and saved two lives. He kept his composure when he knew things could quickly 'go south' and his mind was trying to trick him into fear.

My first thread was about safety as it seems the line is a wolf in sheep's clothing; it can save your life or it can take it just as easily (getting tangled or missing a marker). I'd prefer my caves lit up like a christmas tree similar to the paino room - have electroluminescent strips along the wall pointing to the exit that you could activate from your computer. In a plane, when you come into land at night, you can click the radio button and it lights up the runway, this would be great in a cave.

The above is ironic as you could kit out the cave at key intersections with fancy exit signs or electronic way-point beacons your computer could ping, but they'd i) defeat the purpose of the adventure and ii) make it easier for noobs to go deeper beyond their skill level.

So the antithesis of these safety measures is to have none. Blank the cave entirely, so only those who know what they're doing, dare venture beyond. It's when OW divers find the gold line 50ft beyond the entrance, perhaps they feel a sense of safety; what if there was no line? Would they dare go beyond the visual of the entrance?

The only solution to safety is education, but that's not a panacea. The only definite way to alleviate unnecessary death is to make it impossible to enter the cave, i.e. no line and a gate with a universal code only certified divers know, like a secret hand-shake.

There i go again, spouting a wall of text about stuff i've never done...soz.