Stay on the bright side

Mind control can save lives

- Paul Donovan

One of the greatest killers in a survival situation is often not the situation itself, but what’s going on in your mind. Your psychological state can have a great impact on whether you survive or perish.

Often the negative thoughts can be stronger than the rational ones, and these can lead you to do otherwise irrational things.

Do not believe that only the strongest will survive. Simply not true. There is an interesting story of a US pilot in World War II who crashed his plane on a lake. The lake was surrounded by trees which would have offered all the resources to survive. Bear in mind that not only was he trained in survival/bushcraft, escape, and evasion, he would also have had a survival kit with him. Long story short, apparently he had a last smoke, took out his pistol, and killed himself. Why would a trained and experienced person take themselves out in such a situation, surrounded as they were by all the elements needed to survive? The decisive factor seems to be what is going on in the mind at the time.

There are stories of people who have cut off their arm with a pocket knife because they had such a strong will to survive. I suppose until we are in such a situation, reality may be very different from theory.

No matter how much training we do, we know that at the end of the day we are going home. In a true survival situation, that realisation could be a distant dream. The will to survive is all about having a positive attitude and the desire to come through it.

Some people seem to give up even before they begin (as the pilot did), while the will to live is so strong in others that they can surmount incredible odds.

Here are a few pointers, when it comes to trying to cope with the psychological side of survival. They are not in any particular order.

Loneliness