It’s not what’s in your pack or even what’s in your mind.The first lesson is to remain calm and not panic.
Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They’re the ones who can perceive their situation clearly, plan, and take correct action, the key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.
Adaptation is another word for survival.
Those are some highlights from “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales, a book about wilderness survival stories. It gives insights from survivors of the worst situations and insights from the mistakes made by those who didn’t make it.
In a post a couple of years ago, I said the key to survival is a good attitude and having a down jacket.
Plus, if you work your way through obtaining shelter, water, fire, then food you’ll probably do ok.
Here’re some other highlights I made in “Deep survival:”
Moods are contagious, and the emotional states involved with smiling, humor, and laughter are among the most contagious of all.
Laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable.
Survivors joke about dark situations because if you get too serious, you’ll get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you’re on a runaway horse. Some fear is good. Too much fear is not.
“Cognition” means reason and conscious thought, mediated by language, images, and logical processes. “Emotion” refers to a specific set of bodily changes in reaction to the environment, the body, or to images produced by memory. Cognition is capable of making fine calculations and abstract distinctions while emotion can produce powerful physical actions.
Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation involving numerous bodily changes in preparation for action. The nervous system fires more energetically, the blood changes so it can coagulate more rapidly, muscle tone alters, digestion stops, and various chemicals flood the body to put it in a state of high readiness for whatever needs to be done.
The quality which is perhaps the only one for survival success is self-control.
There’re at least two separate brain systems that can generate behavior. The way they work, the way you capture experiences, and turn them into learning (memories), can influence your ability to survive.
Unconscious operations of the brain is the rule rather than the exception throughout the evolutionary history of the animal kingdom.
From the point of view of an organism in desperate trouble, an organism that evolved by relying on emotions as the first line of defense, cognition is irrelevant and gets set aside. It’s slow and clunky so there’s no time for it.
Because the system is designed to work without the assistance of logic or reason, there’s now an answer to the question: What were they thinking? They weren’t. The whole point of the system is that you don’t have to think.
We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.
When the bad outcome connected with a given response comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Using that system, you can choose very quickly and may be unable to explain your choice afterward. The best and worst decisions are made that way. You don’t have to think about it. It just feels right.
A dog is like the amygdala, when anyone comes to the door, it barks before I even hear anything.
Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.
Mismatching the abilities of people in the outdoors is a sure way to get into trouble. People routinely fail to realize that they have to travel at the speed of the slowest member.
Generally, they’d be wiser and safer to stay put and get as comfortable and warm as possible, but many feel compelled to push on, urged by subconscious feelings.
A working definition of being lost is the inability to make the mental map match the environment.
Admitting that you’re lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self. It’s impossible to conceive, because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place.
The organism’s main task is to map the self, map the environment, and keep the two in harmonious balance. Without the balance, the organism dies.
Those who die can do so surprisingly quickly, and hypothermia is usually the official cause. Hypothermia is frighteningly insidious, but in some cases people just give up.
It’s simple. Fail to update your mental map and then persist in following it even when the landscape (or your compass) tries to tell you it’s wrong.
Whenever you start looking at your map and saying something like, ‘Well, that lake could have dried up,’ or, ‘That boulder could have moved,’ a red light should go off. You’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there.
Everyone who dies out there dies of confusion.
There can be a destructive synergy among numerous factors, including exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia, anxiety, hunger, injury. It’s called “woods shock.”
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life
Dougal Robertson, at sea for thirty-eight days, advised thinking of it this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of…the survival voyage.”
She looked to herself, took responsibility, made a plan.
The survival instructor kept talking about Positive Mental Attitude. It was the number one item on the checklist he’d given us.
A survival situation is a ticking clock: You have only so much stored energy (and water), and every time you exert yourself, you’re using it up. The trick is to become extremely stingy with your scarce resources, balancing risk and reward, investing only in efforts that offer the biggest return.
In survival situations, people greatly underestimate the need for rest.
You should operate at about 60 percent of your normal level of activity and rest and rehydrate frequently. If the weather is cool and you’re sweating, you’re working too hard.
Purpose is a big part of survival, but it must be accompanied by work.
The survivor plans by setting small, manageable goals and then systematically achieving them.
Don’t get comfortable. Get confident.
It’s amazing to see what a fire can do for your outlook. Like making art, making fire is a deeply human act. Through it, we know our world in a way that no animal ever will.
Bruce Chatwin wrote “The Songlines” about Aboriginal methods of mapping.
Each child in Morey’s school selects a “secret spot” in the woods. Every day, the students are directed to spend some time at their secret spot. They do this through all the seasons. They learn to stop and think. They learn to be calm and alone. They will never feel that the woods are alien. So, if they ever get lost or otherwise disoriented they can comfort themselves.
You can learn to turn around and see where you’ve been, which is a means of paying attention.
Starting the moment an accident occurs, it’s necessary for a survivor to take control of his situation. Turn fear into focus – the first act of a survivor.
When the personality is ripped away there has to be a core remaining to carry the person through. If a person can carry all his support within him then it matters little what the external environment comprises. It’s not that cool people are unafraid. They’re very afraid. But they are “Afraid to panic.”
In the heat of a crisis, the only thought you can allow yourself concerns your next correct action.
Callahan dove underwater at night into his damaged, sinking sailboat to retrieve his emergency supply bag. He had just saved his life by risking it, which is the essential task of every organism. No risk, no reward. Then he set up a small, attainable goal. He was giving himself something to do and a chance for success both of which are necessary early in the survival scenario.
A sense of humor is not a luxury, it’s vital for survival.
“I’ve got to do the best I can,” he told himself. “The very best. I cannot shirk or procrastinate. I cannot withdraw.” Begin taking delight in small achievements, celebrating early victories. You must help yourself.
Callahan constantly reminded himself of the basic things, the important things: “The important thing is to keep calm…. I can only afford success. Don’t hurry. Make it right…. Patience is going to be the secret, and strength.”
Admit the situation’s reality and adapt to it. Be here now. Place yourself in relation to it and say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still.
To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe.
Privacy is essential to life. Life itself can be seen as arising from a self-organizing force that gathers certain materials, hoards and tends them, and protects them from becoming part of the rest of the world, even while delicately interacting with, finding a place in, taking from and giving to the world. Privacy is life, but so is community. It’s another balancing act, to have boundaries and not be completely alone. At times when nature is trying to reclaim the materials of life, to turn you into the raw stuff of the world.
Gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination, and cold, logical determination: those are the survivor’s tools of mind.
“Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.”
Leadership, order, and routine are all important elements of survival.
The best survivors spend almost no time getting upset , especially in emergencies, about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly. For this reason they don’t usually take themselves too seriously and are therefore hard to threaten.
To make a pattern, to use rhythms, means quite literally to live.
Epictetus said, “Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself.”
Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from; it is a decision not to be lost where ever you happen to find yourself. It’s simply saying, “I’m not lost, I’m right here.”
Don’t feed that amygdala any scary raw data. A survivor must compartmentalize and set small goals. It would kill him not to.
Some instructors at survival schools use the acronym STOP—stop, think, observe, plan.
We come from cities and learn to expect things to stay the same. But they don’t in the wilderness. And it kills us, quickly or slowly.
Don’t think that just because you’re good at one thing, it makes you good at other things.
NOLS says ‘The summit is not the only place on the mountain.’ So turn around when conditions warrant it.
Set up small, manageable tasks. Survivors quickly organize, set up routines, and institute discipline.
Horace Barlow, a neurobiologist, says that intelligence is a matter of “guessing well.”
