How to Overcome Your Skydiving Fears and Take the Plunge
The main reason why many people do not engage in sky diving is because they have a fear of it. They have fears that the parachute is not going to deploy, they won’t be able to breathe while falling, or they will have a heart attack during the free fall. These are all myths.
It is important to understand that skydiving is something that is a lot of fun and it’s actually comfortable. Yes, you will find yourself falling from great heights, but thanks to having a main parachute and a reserve parachute with an automatic activation device that will deploy your parachute for you if you fail to deploy it, sky diving is safer than it ever was before.
So if you’re wondering how you can overcome your skydiving fears and take the plunge, these tips may help you:
• You do need to determine if it is sky diving that you’re afraid of or if it is a fear of heights. You may even have a fear of flying. You should identify the exact fear so that you can face it and totally overcome it. You have to break all boundaries to get rid of your fears.
• Have a friend or family member do the jump with you. It is always more comfortable to take on such activities in pairs or groups rather than alone. You need a support group.
• If there are several sky diving centers in your area, call them all and ask them questions. Ask them what procedures they use, their accident record, and any other questions you want to ask them. Don’t worry about a question being ridiculous because you want to feel as secure as possible when making the dive. Choose the company whose answers make you feel the most comfortable.
• Jump in tandem with your instructor. This is required when you are a first timer, but you can do tandem skydiving as often as you need to so that you can bring yourself to jumping solo. Keep in mind that you will have a lot of freedom when you jump solo. You may even get to do some somersaults, dive, and simply have a good time.
• Remind yourself again and again that your instructor is very experienced. He or she has dived many times, which is how they became an instructor in the first place.
• Make sure you listen closely to everything that your instructor tells you. The few accidents that do occur, occur because directions may not have been followed.
If you are wondering exactly how many fatalities occur on a yearly basis, the answer is 35, but that is out of 2 million jumps that occur around the world. A small percentage of those fatalities are due to airplane accidents, but these are very rare. The fatality percentage is actually less than 1% and those are great odds. You have a better chance of being in an car accident than in a skydiving accident. That is actually a frightening thought, but comforting in the skydiving sense.
Basically, you just need to face your fears. Living life in a state of fear is definitely not the way to live. When you let your fears go, you feel freer. You feel like you can actually live. You may be amazed at how great it feels to conquer your fears. And something that is unique about sky diving is that it can help to relieve other fears you may have as well. When you conquer one, you can conquer them all.
