Facing My Fear of Scuba Diving in the Perhentians

Thanks to my longtime fear of scuba diving, one thing I never, ever thought I would do is enrol in a course to get Open Water qualified. Which was a problem for me because ever since I watched The Little Mermaid as a child I longed to explore the home of Sebastian and Flounder. 

As well as being an aquarium-going, Disney-loving child, I was terrified of water. To such an extent that even bath time gave me the creeps and I didn’t learn to swim (properly) until university. My primary school swimming teachers were content with my panic-stricken attempts at doggy paddle to hand me two ‘Dolphin’ certificates for my efforts. My high school swimming experience was an entirely different kettle of fish. Although I’d shaken off my fear of water by this point, I remained wary of water and swimming pools. My teachers were neither supportive nor encouraging. Ironically, my confidence “floundered”.

As a teenager, swimming pools freaked me out more than natural water. Even now I have recurring dreams about empty swimming pools that wake me up in a sweat. As a child and teenager I loved being near the ocean just not necessarily in the water itself.

After – finally –getting my head around breaststroke at university it still took a few more years for me to feel at ease in deep water or to jump into a pool. The first time I went snorkelling, in Thailand, I was ramrod straight with anxiety. As anyone who suffers from chronic anxiety will understand, I was so self-conscious of being one of the few on my trip to wear a buoyancy aid that I couldn’t let myself focus on enjoying the experience.  

Back to scuba diving, the other thing that made me wary about submerging myself 18 metres below the surface was my history of panic attacks. I’ve suffered from these since my days at university. One of the earliest ones occurred while I was in the deep end of a swimming pool learning how to swim breaststroke.

My scuba-fear was a cocktail of the worry about a panic attack striking underwater and my childhood aversion to water. I wrote off scuba diving as one of those things I would never experience.

Facing my fear of scuba diving

My childhood fear of water comes as a surprise because nowadays I love swimming and can vanish into the ocean for hours. Or give me a lake, a river, even a deep pond full of eels! While I’m not a fast or strong swimmer, I’ve found my confidence and have decent stamina. 

When I spent a week onboard a boat in Croatia I gleefully hopped into the depths of the Adriatic for a daily swim. Mind you, I’d monkey-swing my way down the ladder rather than leap off the deck. 

While backpacking around Southeast Asia I felt I was missing out by not scuba diving. All those turquoise waters with their promises of coral, sea turtles, and graceful sharks. By this point I did feel confident when in deeper water.

Two factors were pivotal in this. One was regular yoga practice. Learning breathing techniques helped me with my swimming (as well as other exercise exploits) and keeping up a frequent practice seemed to ease the symptoms of my panic attacks. 

Another was getting laser eye surgery. Having the eyesight of a mole always made me feel vulnerable and I hated wearing contacts around water. That’s just asking for conjunctivitis. 

During my house sit in Kuala Lumpur, I researched scuba diving in the Perhentian Islands. This is considered one of the best places to learn to dive in Asia. It’s affordable as well as being one of the most beautiful archipelagos in the world. I poured over reviews of dive shops, scoured diving blogs, and lapped up YouTube videos. This way, I could know (almost) exactly what to expect in the water and get a handle on my anxiety. Unfortunately, I’ve not managed to ‘cure’ my panic attacks and anxiety as I have my water phobia.

From my personal perspective, my anxiety about scuba diving was that I’d forget to do something or my equipment would fail and I’d have a panic attack (and die an extremely embarrassing death – the public shame being far more troubling than the death part).

I spoke to my scuba-loving travel friends, who (in agreement with The Internet) were in unison that learning to dive is totally dire. That’s due to the skills tests involved, like having to take your mask off underwater and put it back on. Just thinking of that gave me palpitations although I realised that at least I wouldn’t be alone with this fear. These same friends also said that the experience of diving is out of this world and was totally worth a few days of discomfort.

The logic 

The thing about learning to scuba dive and being afraid is that it’s a completely natural reaction. We humans are not designed to breathe underwater; we are land dwellers and we belong on the surface. 

As I researched the stages of the Open Water Diver Course I realised that the training is preoccupied with teaching divers how to respond should an accident or emergency arise. Taking off your mask underwater, purging your regulator, and switching the tank off isn’t really the normal day to day of diving. It’s basically survival skills, should the worse happen. And generally speaking, scuba diving is actually really safe. 

When I started thinking of it in this mindset I felt less nervous. Not totally chill but calm enough to think that I probably wouldn’t end up in a real-life situation where I’d need to remember how to do something, fail, have a panic attack, and drown. 

Anyway, I decided to ‘dive’ straight into an Open Water Diver Course and pay for it all upfront. I could have booked a taster dive but that would give me the chance to back out. Fortunately, as I said, the Perhentian Islands is one of the most budget-friendly places to learn to dive. This way if I gave up before I got my eyebrows wet, at least it wouldn’t leave a dent in my bank balance.

Facing Scuba-Fear in the Perhentian Islands

By the time I heaved myself out of the speedboat onto the jetty at Pulau Perhentian Kecil and got my first sight of this beautiful tropical paradise, I’d psyched myself up to give scuba diving my best shot.

Come my first lesson, I was far less nervous than I expected to be. I was lucky that my first couple of levels ended up being one-to-one. This actually happened because I had to make a trip back to the mainland to get a doctor’s consent note. Because of my history of panic attacks the dive shop said I needed a doctor to provide written consent from a doctor before I could dive. So that meant I had to schlep around looking for a doctor open on a Friday… in an Islamic country. Meanwhile, my dive buddies (a pair of sisters from Germany) were already getting down with the fishes.

At least that meant I didn’t have to worry about a class of people watching me thrash around!

I will add that if anyone else is planning to scuba dive but has a medical condition (psychological or physical), you will need to get that doctor certification before your dive shop signs you off. If you forget, or decide to go scuba diving on a whim, you can chat to the instructors about condition before you complete the medical declaration. 

Mistakes were made 

Oh so many mistakes…

The first time I went underwater, my first faux pas was my nose. You’re taught that the most important thing to NOT do when you dive is to hold your breath. So, I was focused on breathing through my mouth into the regulator but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my nose. After some splashing and mild panicking, I bobbed back up to the surface. My instructor told me to just ignore the nose, it’s redundant during scuba diving. This was the bit I found most difficult. You need to breathe exclusively through the mouth whilst the nose does nada. It felt weird, but eventually, I did get used to it.

I managed to drag myself through the course stages. Clearing the mask, was, of course, the worst of it. For this, you need to let some water trickle into the mask and then blast it all out by exhaling through your nose without surfacing. If you manage to get through it in one piece, then the next level is even worse. You need to remove the mask in its entirety and swim a lap around your instructor before putting the mask back on and clearing it. Even if you don’t have a fear of scuba diving, this isn’t a barrel of laughs for anyone.  

I can testify that at the time, clearing the mask was awful and I wouldn’t want to do it again. Although when I reflect on the module, I can’t remember exactly how bad it was so it can’t have been that bad!

Also, when you clear the mask whilst you’re swimming around, it’s not uncomfortable at all. If you feel any moisture creeping around your eyes, you just apply the clearing technique and any leakage clears out sharpish. It’s honestly not anywhere near as bad as the skills test which is pretty extreme.

Farewell to scuba-fear

I didn’t take to diving like a fish to water. Sometimes I was crazy nervous and it took me a while to psych myself up to complete the tests. There’s so much theory to learn too (not forgetting all the hand signals which are basically a whole second language). I’m not a natural student and my memory is lousy. But, I got through it and passed my Open Water Diver and I even enjoyed it for the most part. 

And yes, the perks of diving made the training levels completely worth it. It’s so much fun! Few things compare to the feeling of gliding through a coral reef whilst curious fish dance around your mask. Apart from the freaky under-the-sea sounds, it’s so quiet. No yapping dogs, no car noises, no lousy music, no humans crunching on crisps. It’s similar to something like yoga where you are so focused on what you are experiencing that it’s almost meditative. 

If anyone reads this and feels on edge about learning to dive or has a fear of scuba diving, I’d urge you to at consider a taster dive. After Malaysia, I continued to dive in both Indonesia and New Zealand. And it’s something I definitely want to keep doing in the future.

It still frightens me and I have to mentally prepare before a dive; the fear is still there. But, as with my panic attacks and other manifestations of my anxiety complex, it’s something that I can work with. 

Tips if you have a fear of scuba diving 

I feel massively under-qualified to give advice to anyone with a paralysing fear of scuba diving. If you are extremely anxious but want to try it, I’d suggest talking directly to a dive shop (and your therapist, if you have one) to help curb your worries. I’ve realised that a scuba-fear is way more common than I’d assumed it was.

However, here are a few tips from me for anyone who is mildly to moderately nervous about diving for the first time. These are just based on my personal experience of learning to dive

Book a private lesson

This might not be possible if it’s going to cost you bucket loads of money. However, as my first two lessons ended up being one-on-one I really feel this helped me relax. 

Not having multiple pairs of eyes on me made me feel far less self-conscious. Besides, I felt more at ease asking questions that I thought sounded dumb. I also felt that if I did freak out or start dying (yes, a bit of an exaggeration) there’s no way the instructor wouldn’t notice! 

Sip the air

After my first gander under the water, my instructor told me I was breathing too deeply. Like totally emptying and refilling my lungs with each exhale and inhale. I did this by default because that’s what I’ve been taught in yoga and when doing my anti-anxiety breathing exercises.

But, if you breathe too deeply, you end up using up too much air and it can actually make you tired. It also burns through your oxygen supply. My instructor told me to instead ‘sip’ the air. Understanding this concept really helped and my breathing was much calmer. That being said, I still slip into deep breathing now whenever I feel panic under the water. Once I realise that I’m gulping the air, I slow my breath back down to sipping. 

Don’t be a shark

Another mistake I did was to thrash my legs around much more than I needed to. You don’t need to rush anywhere under da sea.

The trick is to master what they call ‘trim’ where your body is horizontal in the water. Gentle kicks with your legs will move you to where you need to be, and your fins do most of the work. At first, I wasn’t aware I was even moving my legs, but after my instructor jabbed angrily at them with his torch, I clocked on that I was swimming like a furious shark. 

Tell your instructor 

As someone who always feels self-conscious when sharing my vulnerabilities, I was shy to talk to my dive shop about my nerves.

Actually the instructors were total pros and didn’t make me feel guilty about being frightened or suffering from panic attacks. So I’d recommend telling your instructor about any nerves you have. It’s worth asking specifically for an instructor who is used to dealing with more nervous divers or having a discussion in advance with the dive shop about how they can support you.

Have fun!

Because scuba diving is fun! 

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