The Impact Of Sea Swimming On The Mental Health Of Adults

Abstract

Background: Past evidence has showed the impact of blue spaces on the psychological health of individuals with or without diagnoses of mental illnesses. Sea swimming is among the blue spaces with potential beneficial psychological outcomes. Hence, there is a need to examine the effect of sea swimming on psychological health as this is an under researched area. Further, there is a lack of systematic reviews in the research area on the impact of sea swimming on mental health. Aim: To identify the potential factors that may moderate the association between open water swimming (pool or non-pool) such as individual characteristics, forms of swimming environment, or frequency of swimming and the psychological outcomes such as depression, anxiety, stress, and general well-being; To evaluate the quality of the current evidence on the relationship between sea swimming and the mental health of adults Methodology: Science Direct, Scopus, Medline, Google Scholar, and JSTOR were searched with selected keywords. An expert librarian helped with formulating the search strategy. PRISMA 2020 Flow Diagram was used for screening and selecting the studies while a manual elimination of the duplicates was conducted. A data extraction matrix generated relevant characteristics of the studies. RoB 2 and ROBINS-I Tools were used for critical appraisal while thematic synthesis by Thomas and Harden (2008) was used for generating codes, descriptive, and analytical themes. Results: The search and screening generated ten relevant studies. The study found that sea swimming improves mental health of adult. Sea swimming enhanced emotional wellbeing of adults by reducing anger, confusion, fears, and stabilising their mood. Swimming improved the psychological state of the adults by reducing anxiety, stress, and depression. On the other hand, the synthesis of the ten studies found that sea swimming enhanced the social wellbeing of the adults with or without existing diagnosis of mental illness or impairment. Conclusion: Sea swimming is essential for adults’ psychological wellbeing. Clinical practice could recommend swimming as part of therapies to treat or manage psychological impairments. Future studies could use RCTs to compare the effects of inland and sea swimming on the mental health of young adults.