In survival psychology a strong positive attitude is an essential tool.
Your most powerful tool for survival is a positive mindset.
The thread that connects all writings on survival psychology is the importance of one’s frame of mind. The habit of positive, proactive thinking is the most important tool you can have at your disposal.
When things go wrong in our lives the our knee-jerk response is to blame someone else for our situation or problem. If we can’t find an immediate scapegoat maybe we take it out on ourselves through self-destructive patterns behavior which leave us demoralized and drained. The sum of these approaches leaves us at a physical, spiritual, and emotional deficit.
We need to determine our physical needs by realistic assessment of our physical reality.
This is where the concept of truth comes into play. We need to be thoroughly honest to ourselves about our situation.
This is where it’s important to understand the differences between needs and preferences.
Your needs are what it takes for your body to keep functioning. Your preferences are the options that modern convenience makes available to us like flavor of ice cream, air conditioning, etc.
To develop a strong survival psychology we should first determine what our vital needs (things that will keep our body alive) are in the situation.
Secondly, we should determine an efficient course of action and seek ways to systematically implement it. This applies to everyday life as well as in survival situations.
How Do We Determine Our Vital Needs?
We need to understand what the basic conditions for human life are and seek to promote and preserve those conditions.
- Oxygen: It seems too obvious but every year people die from carbon monoxide poising from lack of ventilation in there living structure. Make sure there is adequate air flow into your structure whether it be a survival shelter or your house.
- Water: Often overlooked but the most important. Remember you can survive up to three months without food but only three days without water.
- Regulated Body Core Temperature of 98.6 Degrees Farenheit: This is where the elements of clothing, shelter, and fire come into play. Clothing, shelter, and fire all serve to regulate the body’s core temperature so it doesn’t get too hot or cold.
- Food and Nutrients: Carbs keep our bodies going, nutrients help us retain water and give us energy, proteins give us long-term fuel and help repair damaged tissues and rebuild muscles.
- A Cheerful Attitude: Many have lost their minds from being alone in the wilderness, keep your mind busy by playing mental games, chess, meditation, journal writing, etc..
Assess Your Situation
Proper assessment of your situation can only be made when we ask ourselves two vital questions:
- What am I doing and thinking now?
- How have my past behaviors an actions lead to this predicament? (How did I get into this mess?)
It is well-known by therapists and renown philosophers that by placing your focus on what you have, not on what you don’t have will give you clarity to creatively find a solution to the problem at hand.
A good illustration of this is in playing the game of chess.
You couldn’t play a good game of chess by wishing that you hadn’t made the previous move.
You couldn’t then pray to god and magically expect things to change. The board (as in life) is a result of your actions and the response of your opponent (the people you interact with). You have to observe the reality of the board and then make the best decision you can based on the situation.
The Practice of Gratitude
The fact that we exist at all is a miracle, plain and simple.
Developing the habit of focusing on what is here and now (what you have) is a lifetime practice for many people. Many people renounce the world and devote the their whole life to meditation in Zen monasteries to achieve the ability to live in the present.
Many children are born into this world only knowing a few short moments of starvation and pain from disease before they die. If you have the access and the ability to read and acquire the right information you have a great chance of survival. It just depends on your will to ask the right questions. We all have the advantage to freely research and learn information to fortify ourselves against whatever may come your way.
What You See Is What You Get
Self-help guru Maxwell Maltz wrote years ago“Psycho-cybernetics” that a person’s self-image is the engine that drives their life.
Learning how to manage and effectively deal with fear is a skill that we can develop through visualization and role-playing exercises by simply using the creativity that we all possess to“see” yourself acting and being your “best self” in a survival situation. You simply play it in your mind as if you were watching a movie with you in the starring role.
Negative thoughts and self-image effectively paralyze us and stunt our performance under stress.
If a person spends their whole life thinking of themselves negatively then they will need to systematically and intensely counteract those patterns of thought.
New thought patterns need to be systematically and regularly self-administered to take hold. With regular visualization practice (your ideal way of being and acting) will counteract your counterproductive self-images. Eventually you will become as you see your improved self.
Regularly imagine yourself calmly and adeptly accomplishing the tasks of foraging, shelter building, fire building, in various emergency situations. The more you practice in your mind’s eye the smoother your real-life performance of survival techniques will be. Adopting this practice in your daily life can ultimately prove your most useful survival tool.
Developing a strong positive psychology must be a regular practice in your life so that you can cope with long periods of uncertainty.
How To Manage Fear and The Effects of Predation
Being successful in a survival situation requires us to become skillful in managing fear and the effects of predation.
The dynamic created when predator and prey interact is known as “predation”. The prey’s responses become clumsy or paralyzed from the stress of being stalked by the predator. Predation happens when a predator frightens the prey through tactics like poisoning and threatening displays.
The same the prey is paralyzed through predation happens in people when media sources routinely sensationalize violence and crises.
If people allow their personal power to become eroded by the fear being spread by news media they start to lose their sense of purpose. Lose of purpose makes a person lose confidence in their ability to act to improve their situation.
If we allow our personal power to be eroded by fear we start to respond like the prey. If we allow hesitation and doubt to take hold it will effectively paralyze us. If this goes on long enough we start to see ourselves as prey.
Asking yourself, “are you sure?”can be a pathway to wisdom if systematic attempts are made to discover what the truth of reality is. A good example of this is the scientific method. The tendency for most people is to want to quickly rid themselves of the uncomfortable feeling that doubt creates by turning over their power to make decisions to an other authority. This results in a loss in personal power and a loss in the ability to act proactively.