Everyday Survival
Most survival guides fail to
consider some very useful tools: an individual’s character, wits, and
worldview. The tips assembled here will change the way you approach each and
every day—and help you survive a particularly bad one.
Text by Laurence Gonzales
Photograph by Dan Saelinger
Long ago I believed that survival
meant having a pack full of equipment that would allow me to make fire and
build shelter and trap varmints to eat in the wilderness. But then I kept
coming across cases in which someone had survived without any equipment or had
perished while in possession of all the right tools. Obviously something else
was at work here. After more than three decades of analyzing who lives, who
dies, and why, I realized that character, emotion, personality, styles of
thinking, and ways of viewing the world had more to do with how well people
cope with adversity than any type of equipment or training. Although I still
believe that equipment and training are good to have, most survival writing
leaves out the essential human element in the equation. That’s why I’ve
concentrated my efforts on learning about the hearts and minds of survivors.
You can start developing these tools of survival now. It takes time and
deliberate practice to change. But new research shows that if we adjust our
everyday routines even slightly, we do indeed change. The chemical makeup of
the brain even shifts. To make these lessons useful, you have to engage in
learning long before you need it—it’s too late when you’re in the middle of a
crisis. Presented here are 14 concepts that have proved helpful to survivors in
extreme situations, as well as to people trying to meet the challenges of daily
life.
1. Do the Next Right Thing
"Debriefings of survivors
show repeatedly that they possess the capacity to break down the event they are
faced with into small, manageable tasks," writes John Leach, a psychology
professor at Lancaster University who has conducted some of the only research
on the mental, emotional, and psychological elements of survival. "Each
step, each chunk must be as simple as possible.... Simple directed action is
the key to regaining normal psychological functioning." This approach can
sometimes seem counterintuitive. And yet almost any organized action can help
you recover the ability to think clearly and aid in your survival. For example,
Pvt. Giles McCoy was aboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis when it was torpedoed and
sank at the end of World War II, tossing some 900 men into the black of night
and the shark-infested Pacific. McCoy, a young Marine, was sucked under the
boat and nearly drowned. He surfaced into a two-inch-thick slick of fuel oil,
which soaked his life vest and kept him from swimming—although he could see a
life raft, he couldn’t reach it. So he tore off his vest and swam underwater,
surfacing now and then, gasping, swallowing oil, and vomiting. After getting
hoisted onto the raft, he saw a group of miserable young sailors covered in oil
and retching. One was "so badly burned that the skin was stripped from his
arms," Doug Stanton writes in his gripping account of the event, In Harm’s
Way. McCoy’s response to this horrific situation was telling. "He resolved
to take action: He would clean his pistol." Irrelevant as that task may
sound, it was exactly the right thing to do: organized, directed action. He
made each one of the sailors hold a piece of the pistol as he disassembled it.
This began the process of letting him think clearly. Forcing your brain to
think sequentially—in times of crisis and in day-to-day life—can quiet
dangerous emotions.
2. Control Your Destiny
Julian Rotter, a professor of
psychology at the University of Connecticut, developed the concept of what he
calls "locus of control." Some people, he says, view themselves as
essentially in control of the good and bad things they experience—i.e., they
have an internal locus of control. Others believe that things are done to them
by outside forces or happen by chance: an external locus. These worldviews are
not absolutes. Most people combine the two. But research shows that those with
a strong internal locus are better off. In general, they’re less likely to find
everyday activities distressing. They don’t often complain, whine, or blame.
And they take compliments and criticism in stride. The importance of this
mentality is evidenced by tornado statistics. In the past two decades Illinois
has had about 50 percent more twisters than Alabama but far fewer fatalities.
The discrepancy can be explained, in part, by a study in the journal Science,
which found that Alabama residents believed their fate was controlled by God,
not by them. The people of Illinois, meanwhile, were more inclined to have
confidence in their own abilities and to take action. This doesn’t mean we
should be overconfident. Rather, we should balance confidence with reasonable
doubt, self-esteem with self-criticism. And we should do this each day. As Al Siebert
put it in his book The Survivor Personality, "Your habitual way of
reacting to everyday events influences your chances of being a survivor in a
crisis."
3. Deny Denial
It is in our nature to believe
that the weather will improve, that we’ll find our way again, or that night
won’t fall on schedule. Denial, which psychologists call the "incredulity
response," is almost universal, even among individuals with excellent
training. David Klinger, a retired Los Angeles police officer, describes in his
book Into the Kill Zone that while moonlighting as a bank guard he saw
"three masked figures with assault rifles run through the foyer of the
bank." His first thought was that the local SWAT team was practicing. His
second was that they were dressed up for Halloween. Klinger later said,
"[I thought] maybe they were trick-or-treaters. It was just
disbelief." (He did recover from denial to shoot the criminals.) One of
the most common acts of denial is ignoring a fire alarm. When my daughters were
little, I taught them that the sound of a fire alarm means that we must go
outside. Standing in front of a hotel at about two o’clock one cold Manhattan
morning, I explained to them that it was nicer to be on the street wishing we
were inside rather than inside wishing we were on the street. Denial plays a
large role in many wilderness accidents. Take getting lost. A hiker in denial
will continue walking even after losing the trail, assuming he’ll regain it
eventually. He’ll press on—and become increasingly lost—even as doubt slowly
creeps in. Learn to recognize your tendency to see things not as they are but
how you wish them to be and you’ll be better able to avoid such crises.
4. Use a Mantra
In a long and trying survival
situation, most people need a mantra. Ask: What will keep me focused on getting
home alive? Then learn your mantra before you need it. For Steve Callahan,
adrift in a raft for 76 days, his mantra was simply the word
"survival." Over and over during the ordeal, he’d say things like
"Concentrate on now, on survival." Yossi Ghinsberg, a hiker who was
lost in the Bolivian jungle for three weeks, repeatedly used the mantra
"Man of action" to motivate himself. Often, a mantra hints at some
deeper meaning. Ghinsberg, for example, explained it this way: "A man of
action does whatever he must, isn’t afraid, and doesn’t worry." My
personal mantra is "Trust the process." Once I’ve gone through the
steps of creating a strategy, I continue telling myself to trust that the
process will get me where I’m going.
5. Think Positive
Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s
Search for Meaning recounts the story of Jerry Long, who was 17 years old when
he broke his neck in a diving accident. Long was completely paralyzed and had
to use a stick held between his teeth to type. Long wrote, "I view my life
as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that
fateful day has become my personal credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn’t
break me." Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University,
would agree with this sentiment. Dweck studies individual learning habits,
specifically how people grapple with difficult problems. According to her
research, individuals with a "growth mindset"—those who are not
discouraged in the face of a challenge, who think positively, and who are not
afraid to make or admit mistakes—are able to learn and adjust faster and more
easily overcome obstacles.
6. Understand Linked Systems
In complex systems, small changes
can have large, unpredictable effects. I wrote an article for
Adventure(September 2002) about an accident on Mount Hood in which a four-man
team fell from just below the summit while roped together. On the way down,
they caught a two-man team and dragged them down too. Three hundred feet below,
the falling mass of people and rope caught another three-man team. Everyone
wound up in a vast crevasse. Then, during the ensuing rescue attempt by the
military, an Air Force Reserve Pave Hawk helicopter crashed and rolled down the
mountain. Because of the complex and coupled nature of the system in which all
these people and all this equipment were operating, what had begun as a slip of
one man’s foot wound up killing three people, severely injuring others, and
costing taxpayers millions in the rescue effort. Accidents are bound to happen.
But they don’t have to happen to you if you recognize your role in a system.
Driving bumper to bumper at highway speeds, waiting for someone to tap his
brakes and start a chain reaction accident is one example. Having a retirement
account heavily invested in the stock market is another. A small move by a few
investors can send everyone stampeding for the door. Being aware of such
systems and analyzing the forces involved can often reveal that we’re doing
something much riskier than it seems.
7. Don’t Celebrate the Summit
Climbers learn this the hard way:
Don’t congratulate yourself too much after reaching a goal. The worst part of
the expedition may still be ahead. Statistically speaking, most mountaineering
accidents happen on the descent. Celebrating at the halfway point encourages
you to let down your guard when you’re already tired and stressed.
8. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Every new challenge you face
actually causes your brain to rewire itself and to become more adaptable. A study
at University College London showed that the city’s cab drivers possessed
unusually large hippocampi, the part of the brain that makes mental maps of our
surroundings. The fact that London has very strict requirements for cab drivers
forced them to create good mental maps, which caused their hippocampi to grow.
For most of us, a normal routine at work, home, and play will provide plenty of
opportunities for simple mind-expanding exercises. For example, if you’re
right-handed, use your left hand. Learning to write with your nondominant hand
can be extremely challenging and builds a part of your brain that you don’t use
much. Learn a new mental skill, such as chess or counting cards for blackjack.
Learn a musical instrument or a foreign language. A recent study suggests that
Chinese uses entirely different parts of the brain than Western languages. Take
tasks that require no thought and re-invent them so that you have to think.
This bears repeating: Survival is not about equipment and training alone. It’s about
what’s in your mind and your emotional system. Living in a low-risk environment
dulls our abilities. We must make a conscious effort to learn new things, to
force ourselves out of our comfort zones.
9. Risk and Reward
The more you sacrifice to reach a
goal—and the more you invest in it—the harder it becomes to change direction,
even in the face of overwhelming evidence that you should alter your course.
Recently I decided to clean the leaves out of the gutters on my house. I put up
a big aluminum extension ladder that is a real pain to move. I was up there, 20
feet in the air, reaching to clean as far as I could without moving the ladder.
And I looked down and thought, Is this worth a broken neck? Or should I just go
down and move the ladder? I performed a similar mental exercise in the Canadian
Rockies this spring. I had traveled there to give a talk to a group of safety
experts and decided to do some exploring. But I had no gear with me. As I crept
farther and farther up a twisty mountain road in a rental truck, it began to
snow pretty hard. And I thought, I’ve seen some pretty good scenery already.
What if this vehicle of unknown origin breaks down or gets stuck? Do I want to
try walking out in my cotton clothes and city shoes in a blizzard just to see
one more vista? I decided that it would be most embarrassing to become a
statistic in one of my own stories. I call this thought exercise the
"risk-reward loop." When facing a hazard, always ask: What is the
reward I’m seeking? What is the most I’m willing to pay for it?
10. Trust Your Instincts
Be careful who you go into the
backcountry with. Some people just have it stamped on their foreheads: "I
am going to die in a wilderness accident." But to recognize this stamp,
you must pay attention to some very subtle signals. Researchers such as Elaine
Hatfield at the University of Hawaii and Paul Ekman at the National Institutes
of Health have studied nonverbal communication since the 1960s and concluded
that it conveys essential information, which we ignore at our peril. It can be
anything from a gesture to a slight change in facial expression. Most people
will respond to such signals by feeling either comfortable or ill at ease with
someone for no known reason. In a culture like ours, which puts more emphasis on
logic and reason, nonverbal signs are easy to dismiss. Pay attention. They mean
something.
11. Know Plan B
When undertaking anything risky,
always have a clear bailout plan. In November 2004 I wrote about the hazards of
Mount Washington for this magazine, recounting the death of two ice climbers
who had evidently not planned beyond reaching the summit. When a storm blew in
during the middle of their climb, they could have made an easy rappel to the
bottom. Instead, following the only plan they had, they continued toward the
top, where they died of exposure. Similar failures occur in all areas of life.
When the IBM PC was released in 1981, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
continued to follow its outdated plan, building minicomputers that cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result, DEC, the second largest maker of
computers in the world, went out of business. When formulating a bailout plan,
it’s important to establish parameters by which to make the decision. For
example, if you aren’t on the summit by three o’clock, you must turn back. Or
if you have lost $100 million, you must end the project. Whatever the
criterion, make sure it’s specific. Then, when you’re brain’s not working well
because of stress or exhaustion, you’ll still make the right decision.
12. Help Others
In a survival situation, tending
to others transforms you from a victim into a rescuer and improves your
chances. Psychology professor John Leach writes in his book Survival Psychology
that in disasters, natural and otherwise, doctors and nurses have a better
survival rate because they have a job to do and a responsibility to others.
This same phenomenon was documented in the Nazi death camps, where people who
helped those around them stood a far better chance of surviving. Practice being
selfless in daily life and it will become second nature when disaster strikes.
13. Be Cool
Acting cool is not the same as
being cool. As the head of training for the Navy SEALs once said, "The
Rambo types are the first to go." Siebert wrote in his book The Survivor
Personality that "combat survivors . . . have a relaxed awareness."
People who are destined to be good at survival will get upset when something
bad happens, but they will quickly regain emotional balance and immediately
begin figuring out what the new reality looks like, what the new rules are, and
what they can do about it. In the past few decades, technologies like magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) have allowed researchers such as Bruce McEwen at
Rockefeller University to demonstrate that stress changes the shape and
chemistry of the brain, resulting in trouble remembering, difficulty completing
tasks, and altered behavior. In effect, losing your cool makes you stupid.
Examine the way you handle yourself under pressure: Do you blow up when you’re
stuck in traffic or when someone cuts you off? Are you able to accept failure
philosophically and move on with resolve to do better next time? If you’re
rejected—in love, in business, in sports—do you stew over it? Practice being
calm in the face of small emergencies and you’ll be more prepared to deal with
large ones.
14. Surrender, but Don’t Give Up
The concept of surrender is at
the heart of the survival journey. While that may sound paradoxical, it starts
to make sense when you realize your limitations. If you are terrified, for
example, you are more vulnerable in a hazardous situation. Ahmed Abdullah is an
Iraqi journalist. When the war began, he found that he was horrified by the
violence and in constant fear of dying. After years of combat experience, he
explained the concept of survival by surrender: "Don’t be afraid of
anything," he said during a recent radio broadcast. "If you are
afraid, then you have to lock yourself inside your house. But if you want to
keep on living, then you must forget about your fears and deal with death as
something that is a must, something that’s going to happen anyway. Even if you
don’t die this way, you can die normally, naturally.... Whatever [you] do,
[you’re] not going to change this." Once you surrender and let go of the
outcome, it frees you to act much more sensibly. It actually puts you in a
better position to survive, to retain that core inside of you that will never
give up. A good survivor says: "I may die. I’ll probably die. But I’m
going to keep going anyway."
