From Sampler to Sower

It’s almost time to start getting wet again…

Ever since I took a group of teens to a free I Tried SCUBA class at a local YMCA, I wanted to become a certified SCUBA diver.  Thanks to my brother and his SCUBA teaching cronies, last fall that goal was realized.  My oldest son Brenden and I were certified last November.

Now that the temperatures in Middletown have hit 60 degrees, at least for a day or two, I’m wondering when I can get in the water next.  (It’s warmer outside now that it was on our certification dives, though I’m sure the water has cooled off a bit.)

One of the primary risks in SCUBA is decompression sickness, commonly known as the bends.  As a chemistry teacher (or anyone who has ever opened a bottle of pop) can tell you, more gasses dissolve into a liquid when under pressure.  That’s true of carbon dioxide in your bottle of Coca Cola, and it’s true of nitrogen in your blood stream.  The increased pressure caused by breathing compressed air at depth causes excess nitrogen to dissolve into solution in your blood.

As you return to the surface, that nitrogen comes out of solution in a process called outgassing.  At a controlled pace, it’s a normal and natural process.  Nitrogen is reabsorbed by the alveoli in your lungs and released from the body as you exhale.  Stay down too long and surface too quickly, however, and you can have problems as gas bubbles form in your blood stream.  Even worse, due to decreasing pressure, those bubbles can grow so large they get caught in your vessels and veins.

Fortunately, it’s not hard to prevent decompression sickness.  It’s a fairly simple combination of making sure you don’t stay too deep for too long, and then making a controlled ascent with a safety stop on the way to the surface.  Even if you accidentally go too deep or stay too long, decompression stops on the way back to the surface can give nitrogen the opportunity to outgas before it becomes a problem.

The only complicated part of the whole formula is the problem of residual nitrogen.  Nitrogen doesn’t outgas instantly when you return to the surface. Much like that open can of pop on your desk, your blood takes some time to go flat.  And if you make a second dive before all the nitrogen has time to come out of solution, you start your second dive with increased levels of gas in your bloodstream.  You start the dive as if you’ve already been underwater for a while. And to make sure you don’t stay too deep for too long, you have to figure that residual nitrogen time into your dive plan.

What’s that got to do with anything?

Thinking about diving again got me thinking about stress.  Nitrogen isn’t the only thing that has residual effects on us.  In many ways stress works the same way.  The smart guys and gals who write the big books call it cumulative stress.  (Not residual stress, that’s a wholly different engineering term.)  Stress has a way of building up in our system and can cause all sorts of problems:

• Fatigue
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Memory and Concentration Problems
• Illness
• Relational Breakdowns
• Addictions

The key to preventing these stress related problems is much like preventing decompression sickness.  Don’t stay too deep for too long. In times of distress, it’s important to surface occasionally and give yourself the chance to de-stress.  The complicating factor, however, is the way that cumulative stress can build up in our systems.  Like residual nitrogen, if we don’t de-stress adequately, we enter the next stressful situation with stress already built up in our system.

How to Prevent Cumulative Stress Sickness:

• Recognize the reality of cumulative stress. The first step to dealing with the problem is to recognize that it exists.  Like a diver who hasn’t learned to work the dive charts, you run the risk of diving back in without taking into account the cumulative effects of previous stressors.
• Eat right for a change. It’s easy to allow stress to knock us out of our healthy routines.  There’s too much going on to take the time for a good meal.  We find ourselves eating on the run.  But that can be as detrimental to your mental health as it is to your waistline. Sit down, eat right, and eat regularly.
• Don’t just sit there, do something! Few things help the body work through the physiological effects of stress better than good, old fashioned exercise. The body gets rid of nitrogen as you exhale and it excretes stress as you sweat.
• Unplug. Granted, this may be the pot calling the kettle black, but a staggering amount of our hobbies revolve around our connection to technology, and that alone can lead to stress.  Find a hobby that doesn’t require you to be plugged in to enjoy.
• Rest. Ask a minister when their Sabbath day is, and they’ll tell you they take Mondays off.  Or Tuesdays.  Or some other day.  Given our Sunday responsibilities, we look for a different day of the week for a day off.  And we should.  But a day off is not a sabbath. I tend to spend my day off cutting wood to heat our home in the winter.  Or cleaning x. Or fixing y. Or running z errands for the family.  All of those are important, all of them necessary. And there’s nothing like having a running chainsaw in hand to get people to leave you alone for a while. But none of these are Sabbath appropriate.  God’s rule for the Sabbath wasn’t that it should be a day to work at home rather than at the office.  The Sabbath was designed to be a time when we decompress by stepping away from finding our identity in production and productivity and instead to find our identity in our relationship with him.  When was the last time you took a Sabbath to rest?
• Sleep. Rest is vitally important for our bodies. Sleep is vitally important to our minds. A full sleep cycle allows the brain to process all the sensory and information overload that has built up during the day.  Without uninterrupted sleep cycles the overload will eventually crash your system.
• Dive. Seriously.  Look into SCUBA. It’s not for everyone, but everyone should at least try it.  Imagine a world where there are no phones. No computers. No voices! And all you have to do is float suspended, weightless, through a world of beauty and serenity… If you’re interested, and live in northern Indiana, I know some great guys and gals who could teach you.