Someone tells you to dive down 50 feet underwater, grab a breath of air from a diving bell and then come back to the surface, exhaling constantly and never moving faster upwards than the bubbles leaving your body.
Sounds difficult right? It is, but it's not impossible.
In fact, with a few days of training its quite doable.
Diving 50 feet only takes a couple of seconds. Take one deep breath, exhale, take another deeper breath and then leap in. Open your eyes after the initial impact with the water and stay relaxed. Your face mask covers your nose so you haven't accidentally inhaled any water. The dive tank you're in has even lighting so you have no trouble seeing the bottom, or the fresh air pocket under the clear dome of the diving bell. You can see the air filtration system driving clean oxygen into the diving bell.
You've already started kicking, calm but powerful, and you're at the bottom before you know it. You may feel an onset of panic from the excess CO2 in your blood telling your body to breathe, and you might also forget yourself and glance upwards, and suddenly realize how narrow the tank is and how far underwater you are.
But even if you mess up and do this, you will still have enough presence of mind to get yourself under the diving bell; besides there's an instructor drifting beside the bell ready to grab you and guide you to the bell if your panic gets the better of you.
Once you're inside you take several deep breaths. You probably aren't even gasping for air, given how shallow the dive was. You're dry from the shoulders up, and before you can think how claustrophobic the bell is you catch the instructor's signal that it's time to go back up.
The bell is deep underwater, under a significant amount of pressure. In fact, the air in the bell is three times as dense as the air you filled your lungs with earlier. As you leave the bell you have over twice the amount of breathable air in your lungs as a the most fit endurance runner would have in his own while sprinting at sea level.
I didn't mention the mask at first, but I also neglected to mention the slender stainless steel pole running down the tank. You grab onto it now, and start letting out your breath steadily. dragging your body upwards along it you can keep pace with the bubbles you let out. This time when you reach the surface you are still exhaling rather than trying to drag air into your starving lungs.
The point of all this is that we love to make skill sets seem unattainable. This is often true for when we obtain a new skill and want to make our hard work appear even more rigorous, but more often, we make challenges insurmountable in our own mind.
This is basic psychology. All animals try to minimize effort just to survive, and there's nothing wrong with that, unless we want to try something new. Then our brain shoots a dozen reasons at us explaining why we shouldn't bother. This is true for everyone, not just the unmotivated.
When I described the challenge at first I didn't even include that you would get a face mask to cover your nose and let you see underwater, nor did I include that this was in a well staffed and climate controlled professional dive tank.
Between over reporting the difficulty of a task, failing to note the details that make the task feasible, and our tendency to make new endevours more difficult in our own mind, it is so easy to fall into the trap of doing nothing.
None of this means the task isn't challenging. It's just not challenging in the way it appears. Remember how you never moved upwards faster than your bubbles. Think about it. You have about three times as much air in your lungs as you could hold at the surface. If you swam straight up, your lungs would rupture. Of course your instructors would have explained all the risks in detail, demonstrating why you need to follow the procedure outlined above. Additionally, if you ever start moving upwards too fast they are trained to forcibly drag you back down into the bell to keep you from damaging yourself.
The point of trying something new isn't just to show that you can do it. It's so that you can learn, add new skills to your repertoire, and gain confidence.
Before you started you just saw one more challenge; someone out there could do but you would never be able to try. Now you know you can do it, you know how to do it, and you understand the real risks and benefits in a way you never would have otherwise.
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