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Learning the physical skills contained in this book to a fair degree of mastery is not extremely difficult for a dedicated practitioner. Unfortunately, though, it is much harder to train in mental skills.
Armed forces worldwide experience the difficulty of training recruits for real-life combat. The main method they use, drilling, will also partially equip you with the mental skills needed to survive. I say partly because more is needed.
You also need a real understanding of the emotions and stresses involved as well as thorough knowledge of how you respond in certain situations; in other words, you must know your weaknesses and strengths. Immersing yourself in practice scenarios in as big a range of climates as possible under controlled conditions is the key.
Such exercises will also provide you with another important gift in the form of confidence while weeding out arrogance or overconfidence.
Finally, mastering a few simple tricks when entering a real-life situation will allow you to adopt the needed mental attitude for survival.
Let’s cover these four subjects of mental survival skills in more detail.
Drilling
Drilling might seem straightforward, but it is not. It requires you to generate the motivation and discipline not simply to learn a skill set, but to get on the path to absolute mastery. In my opinion, you can consider yourself to have learned a skill if you can perform it with a 95 percent success rate under controlled conditions. Real mastery of a skill means you can perform it with a variety of materials (even if you don’t always know the material) during a range of circumstances so wide that you can almost say you could perform that skill any time, anywhere.
Let’s take the debris hut covered on page 24 for instance:
Learning the skill means that with a large number of resources, you’re able to build the shelter within 4 to 5 hours when the weather is warm and dry and you’re able to do this 9 to 10 times out of 10 attempts. When you sleep in it, you will be relatively comfortable.
Mastering the skill means you’re also able to build that shelter 9 to 10 out of 10 attempts and survive the night in relative comfort; however, you can do this in adverse weather conditions in an environment where you don’t really have enough resources and have to think out of the box in order to construct a workable shelter.
Not every skill you have knowledge of needs to be mastered. It is sufficient for most of your skill set to simply be learned. In fact, after years of learning and teaching these skills, I can emphatically say that a great number of the skills I know are merely on the road to true mastery, each skill on different steps of the ladder, while some skills are only barely learned. For instance, I’m hardly an expert on felting wool, though I have learned to perform the task. I’ve pushed only a few of my skills to near mastery—these constitute the skills I feel are most vital in a survival situation and include such abilities as shelter-building and fire-lighting. As time goes on, other, lower priority skills (closely tied to my level of interest) are slowly advanced toward mastery. I strongly believe that what makes a great wilderness practitioner is the ability to become a jack-of-all-trades, yet still be a master of some. The “some” is decided through the close examination of your own priorities.
Learning a skill and mastering a skill are not completely different entities. They are both markers on the same sliding scale. First, a debris hut is learned under comfortable conditions, then, it is slept in and improved. Perhaps the next time, you will build one during the colder season, sleeping in it, improving it. During another opportunity, you might decide to arrive closer to dusk, or use an area with less resources available. The point is to constantly raise the challenge level. I ca
Understanding Emotions and Stresses
This area covers both the mental ups and downs. While the other three subjects covered here will help combat the extremes, a good understanding of how the brain works in these situations can be immensely helpful.
Finding yourself in an unexpected survival situation can be an extremely stressful and frightening experience that can easily lead to panic and hysteria. Even simply getting lost can cause anxiety. Compound that with the realization that survival is at stake as well as possible adverse conditions, such as injuries or weather, and the chances of getting into a panic increase substantially.
When faced with a life-threatening situation, the brain triggers the release of hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, to set the body up for the fight-or-flight response. Kept under control, these hormones will be useful. Adrenaline-boosted heart function triggers the release of stored energy and sends increased amounts of blood to the larger muscle groups while bringing the environment into clearer focus and giving the sense that time slows down. Cortisol limits the energy normally spent on non-vital organs such as digestion. (Hence the feeling of an unsettled stomach after an “adrenaline rush.”) These effects can help you get to immediate safety or build that crucial shelter as it causes you to perform at peak performance.
The trade-off is that when in this state, you expend huge amounts of energy, which will have to be replenished through sleep, water and food. In some instances, allowing yourself to remain in this state for any length of time can actually decrease your longer-term survival odds due to an inability to replenish the energy consumed. Fine motor skills and situational awareness suffer as well in this state, which can cause accidents. Basically, while in this state, your body and brain think big rather than small.
When left out of control, this state of mind can lead to panic and the expenditure of energy on useless activities such as ru
Feeling down can be caused by a variety of factors. This includes spending too much energy on your fight-or-flight response while not being able to replenish it fast enough. Trying to stay in control of the fight-or-flight response should help with that.
Another factor could be the lack of enough food, water or rest.
Yet another factor is an emotional difficulty to accept the reality of the circumstances. This is actually incredibly common; I have observed it in myself and others even during some of my courses. It is the one factor that can be covered by immersing yourself in practice situations.
As part of my curriculum, I take people out for a week-long experience in the woods without any tools or equipment except the clothes on our backs. During these sessions, the areas where the brain struggles to accept the situation become obvious to participants. It starts with really silly things, such as a reluctance or even inability to defecate or urinate until one can physically no longer stop it. It seems to me that some people find it difficult to break through that barrier of pooing while not having a clean toilet with toilet paper and four privacy-protecting walls. I should admit that at times I have also “deferred the act” to a later time, thinking of the “inconveniences,” knowing full well that there was no practical reason for doing so. More serious are instances where people simply can’t stomach eating that wild squirrel (I sympathize as would many of my past course participants) or those unfamiliar-tasting but edible plants. In these cases, people usually manage to eat some wild foods, but either not enough, or too late, impacting too much on available energy reserves and causing me to have to “cheat” by importing some modern foods into the experience in order to prevent a waste of the learning experience or worse, physical or mental harm.