Finding Calm in the Ocean's Most Misunderstood Predator
Why my favourite animals are great white sharks and what they mean to me
A fun fact about me (and often my go-to icebreaker): Great White Sharks are my favourite animals. Not cats, not dogs, nothing fuzzy or cuddly or cute. And this has been the case since I was 6 or 7 years old.
Weird, isn’t it?
I’ve made it a habit of weaving my personal interests and hobbies into my Inspire the Mind articles, beyond the work I do as a Trial Manager in Perinatal Psychiatric Research. I’ve previously written about baking sourdough bread, the importance of children’s movies, and my favourite music artists. Today, I’m going to write about my love for great white sharks, and why, despite the instinctive fear they instil in so many people, they have a strangely calming effect on me.
Why Sharks Calm Me Down
I remember my dad bringing back from a trip abroad the National Geographic CD of a Great White Shark documentary. I grew up in India, where at the time we didn’t have too much variety in available CDs. So, CDs like this were such a novelty. Each time he went for a trip, he’d bring back a new Nat Geo documentary. Stories of the Serengeti, blue whales, cheetahs. But something about the shark documentary stuck with me.
And now when I reflect, I wonder why.
Perhaps it was something calming about the ocean, seeing a large, animal gracefully, slowly moving, making its way, all the way from Australia to South Africa (12,400 miles), and back again in nine months. And this theory makes sense, if you think about the Blue Mind, which is the state characterised by calmness and peace from being in or near water, coined by marine biologist Wallace Nichols in his book by the same name. And perhaps it’s also why I enjoyed Avatar: The Way of Water so much that I wrote about how the underwater sequences made me feel serene, just as the ocean always has.
I guess, at the bottom of it all, it’s the thought that this is an animal I’ll maybe see only once in my life (if I’m lucky), in an environment in which I don’t belong (if only I had fins). I’d be completely at its mercy. There’s something about the sheer size of it (did you know, Deep Blue, the largest recorded great white shark, is approximately 20 feet long), and the grace with which it moves, that I find strangely calming.
Maybe that’s what I love about the documentaries, too: those long, quiet sequences where the shark simply glides through the water, so effortless. There’s no noise, no urgency, just this enormous, ancient animal moving through a world that feels completely removed from my own. And somehow, watching it makes everything else feel a little quieter.
Perhaps also, is the fact that sharks, as a species, are hundreds of millions of years old, having survived all five major extinction events that the Earth has seen.
Now, when I’m stressed out, I find myself either revisiting a beloved Disney movie, or diving into another shark documentary. Either because it takes me back to my childhood, watching shark documentaries in a simpler time, or because it’s the ocean and has my favourite animal in it.
The Slight Fear That Accompanies My Love and the Reason Why
I have to admit. I don’t only watch shark documentaries. I also watch fictional shark movies. Some of my favourites include Open Water, The Reef, and The Shallows. What this genre has done, however, is reduce these incredible animals to human-hunting villains. Bloodthirsty predators who mindlessly kill, popularised by the Jaws film series. In reality, it’s not great white sharks that are to be feared. Statistics show that there are far more survivors of great white shark bites than fatalities, and fewer than 17% of unprovoked attacks have been fatal, since records began in 1580. They do not actively hunt humans. If I were swimming in the ocean, I’d be more scared of bull sharks or tiger sharks (but that’s just a nerd fact from me). And what’s more important, humans pose a bigger threat to sharks than the other way around.
Despite knowing this information however, I have a slight fear of the ocean, and what’s in it. Although great white shark attacks are often a case of ‘mistaken identity’, I understand that I’m swimming in an ocean, and therefore, there may be sharks. And these fictional shark horror films do not help my case. Take for instance, the time I watched a shark movie the night before I went off on a two-week holiday to Mauritius. I know full well there are no great whites in Mauritius, but you best believe I was still scared.
I know my dream holiday is South Africa, because of one reason. Neptune Island, where you can go cage diving to see great white sharks. But, since the shark horror film 47 Meters Down came out, I’m a bit scared.
Sharks as a Metaphor for Misunderstood Mental Health
While writing this piece, I got to thinking, sharks are so misunderstood, much like mental health. Through these movies (Jaws was the first and most culturally impactful one), sharks have been painted as monsters and bloodthirsty, human-hunting predators, lurking beneath the surface, waiting for the opportunity to attack. But a shark is simply an animal, behaving according to nature, in ways we don’t fully understand. They aren’t out to get us humans.
And mental health can be quite similar. Poor mental health, be it intrusive thoughts, trauma, anxiety, and low mood, can exist beneath the surface, invisible to those around us. An individual with a calm demeanour might be fighting numerous, invisible battles beneath the surface.
When it comes to diagnoses, there is so much stigma surrounding a mental health diagnosis. Just as great white sharks are too often reduced to human-hunting predators, people with mental illness are reduced to their symptoms, their diagnosis, or their most vulnerable moments. They are so much more than just their diagnosis. They’re labelled as ‘dangerous’, and often subject to prejudice, discrimination, and social isolation.
My intention isn’t at all to reduce people’s experience of mental illness to ocean animals, but my love for sharks, coupled with my career in mental health, did get me thinking about the parallels in biased perceptions.
Just as sharks are not inherently terrifying, mental illness does not make someone inherently dangerous or undeserving of compassion. While the ocean has taught us to fear what moves beneath the surface, mental health shows us that just because we may not see outward evidence of struggle, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
