In subjecting myself to different pictures and videos related to submechanophobia, I realized there were very specific triggers that made it worse for me, as it will be for each person. It stands to reason that as we get older, childhood fears subside as new ones take over with different life experiences and knowledge we acquire leading us down these untraveled roads into our own psyche.

I was never involved in any kind of real-life water accident, the phobia just developed with time and was largely unknown to my conscious mind until a random trigger happened while playing video games some years ago. It’s one that I developed as an adult, perhaps from a deeper understanding of the world and nature, or something of the sort, since I didn’t have any kind of real traumatic event in my life that caused it. The answer varies from person to person, as the human mind is an extremely complex system that we aren’t even beginning to fully understand yet, similar to how little of our oceans we’ve truly explored and understood in modern-day science.Īs with many phobias, submechanophobia isn’t something I suffered from as a child. Is it a simple fear of the unknown or what you can’t see under the water? Maybe the fear of the destruction and decay of these objects represents the people who made them and the eventual fate of mankind to succumb to nature’s reclamation of Earth? Is it the visible destruction of objects that traditionally represent safety and shelter from nature’s elements that freaks us out so much? Perhaps when the human mind instinctively detects a foreign object in an otherwise natural environment, it triggers a fight-or-flight response. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason why submerged man-made objects trigger such a response, but theories about what causes it are endless. There are dozens of articles online, as well as an entire Reddit community dedicated to this phobia, as more and more people are realizing they suffer from Submechanaphobia. In researching this phenomenon online, it’s clear that I’m not alone in suffering from this fear. My encounters with the sights of multiple real-life shipwrecks triggered a fear of submerged or partially-submerged man-made objects a condition known as Submechanophobia. While vacationing along the coast of the Pacific Ocean recently, I came face-to-face with a phobia I hadn’t realized was so real for me until it hit me.

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