People of all ages and from all walks of life embark on the scuba diving journey for various reasons. Some might simply be attracted to the underwater world; others do it for the adrenaline rush; some do it hoping to find hidden treasures or explore sunken wrecks, and others more for a biological interest.
On top of all these noble causes, scuba divers experience several additional benefits to their lives. Let’s see together the most significant advantages that scuba diving adds to your life.
Fitness
Scuba diving improves physical fitness, burns calories, and moves muscles. While swimming against currents or carrying heavy equipment, your body is subject to an effort that is minimized by the water surrounding you but still gives you a great workout. Your flexibility and agility improve, and you build your aerobic fitness and muscular strength. Studies show that regular divers have a lower risk of heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure, which is dropped while you relax and take deep breaths while enjoying a nice dive. We all want to control our breathing while diving to master our buoyancy and maximize dive time by minimizing air consumption. The effects of these techniques follow us well after reemerging to the surface.
Mental health
The positive effects of scuba diving on our mental health are countless. While breath control has excellent results on the physical side, it also promotes a general feeling of emotional well-being and peace of mind, allowing divers to connect at a deeper, spiritual level with the ocean, stabilize negative feelings, and calm their nerves. Even in the earliest stages of learning, when anxiety or previous traumas might make us feel overwhelmed, mindful breathing will assist us and build extra resilience. In the meantime, scuba diving enhances our focus, concentration, and awareness, boosts self-confidence and self-esteem, relieves stress, and soothes our minds. In-water meditation is almost automatically achieved while scuba diving, leaving you with great peace of mind.
Environment
When you learn to scuba dive, you immediately realize there is so much you were unaware of on earth. Water is over 70% of our planet: there is so much more to explore underwater than on land! Scuba diving opens the doors to a whole new world, allowing you to have a deeper interaction with the elements of nature. You will expose yourself to more sunlight, colorful seascapes, magnificent marine life, underwater artifacts, and more. The connection with nature that divers experience has no comparison on land, generating more respect for our world. Several events aiming to protect our environment involve divers worldwide, who can simply pay their respects to the underwater world by picking up plastic and trash during their dives. Ocean clean-ups make us feel we are doing something good for the planet, and conservation activities give us a general sense of satisfaction.
Social Aspects
Scuba diving offers several social benefits. As you learn from the first lessons, diving is not a solo activity. You must find a dive buddy or follow a guide to avoid any dangers. You will learn to trust and appreciate the divers you connect with and build lifelong friendships this way. Becoming friends is very quick between divers! Even if no one you know is a keen diver, you can still join a group, a dive trip, or a dive center and find dive companions to share your experiences with and to admire the underwater world in total safety.
Sunlight
You’ll likely choose to dive into sunny, warm, tropical paradises, enhancing your exposure to sunlight. This should not be considered a trivial advantage! Vitamin D is critical for our well-being and health, and exposure to the sun is very limited in our modern, stressful lives. Especially during the Covid pandemic, we have been locked in our homes for extended periods, missing that much-needed sunlight. This might have long-term effects on our bodies, so a good dive trip to a dream destination might be all you need to balance your Vitamin D intake! The advantages? Stronger bones, reduced inflammations, enhanced immune system, lower risks of infections, heart disease, arthritis, and type 2 diabetes, to name a few!
Hormonal Aspects
Scuba diving is a happy activity that transforms our mood and makes us feel accomplished and serene: these results are achieved thanks to releasing our “happy hormones.” Dopamine helps regulate motivation levels, so an achievement such as certification, reaching that particular depth, or visiting a shipwreck for the first time will enhance your dopamine levels. Serotonin plays a crucial role in boosting your general happiness and self-esteem. Scuba diving maintains healthy levels of both hormones and makes you feel good about yourself, allowing you to experience better sleep, rejuvenating and genuinely refreshing.
Travels
Scuba divers will likely not be stuck in a single place but travel the world looking for different environments, new conditions, and exciting adventures. We get to see incredible places that are not accessible to most of the population, even some remote locations with little to offer to non-divers. Traveling becomes the way to explore and witness the wonders of nature, and we just can’t get enough of it!
Career
An exciting outcome of becoming a scuba diver is that most people get so hooked up that they might decide to continue their education and even switch to the professional side. Becoming a divemaster or scuba instructor is the key to a satisfying, exciting, and rewarding career that can take place in the best places in the world and generate a decent income, great memories, and relationships.