One of my good friends was the head of the SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) program at Offut AFB for several years. This is just one of the important topics covered in the Urban Survival course offered at: Surviveinplace Back in the 80s, there was an incident where an F-16 pilot needed to make an emergency landing and landed at an abandoned airstrip in Alaska. He landed perfectly. The plane was unharmed and he was fine. Unfortunately, he thought that his distress signal did not get out, and gave up, pulled out his Beretta, and shot himself. It is estimated that within 30 minutes of landing he made this decision. Help arrived within 2 hours of the initial distress call, which would have been well before his water/food/ or any other supplies ran out. This is a common story. In wilderness situations, people often die after a single night of â€exposure†at 50-60 degrees, even when they have proper clothing. Even Soldiers, who have watched too many movies have died in Iraq & Afghanistan after receiving otherwise non-lethal injuries. On the flip side, a much more amusing survival story is of a gentleman who crashed his plane in a desert area and survived for almost a week in extreme heat/cold with almost no supplies, skills, food, or water. What was the driving force for his survival?He was in the middle of a divorce and refused to die and let his wife get everything. The point of this is that the mind is a VERY powerful tool, and will either be your worst enemy or your most valuable tool in a survival situation. There are two easy steps you can take to make your mind work for you. 1. Choose to have a positive mental attitude. 2. Have something bigger than yourself to live for. Entire books have been written on this topic, and this was an area that I had to address myself when I started going through the process of fixing my survival plan. I was so focused on the bad political, economic, and global social events that were going on that I had stopped practicing the discipline of thinking positively, regardless of the situation. In short, if you haven’t already, you need to make a discipline of thinking positively. This doesn’t mean that you walk around with rose colored glasses on or ignore reality, but it does mean that you control your mind. You still need to acknowledge when problems exist, but focus on finding solutions and what it will feel like to have successfully navigated the situation. There’s a famous saying, â€Who by worrying can add a single hour to his life?†that is very true. Over the last few years, many people have been worried about a flu pandemic of one sort or another. How does â€worrying†about it help you? How does worrying hurt you? Besides effecting your brain chemistry negatively, hurting your ability to sleep, making you depressing to be around, and increasing blood pressure, it wastes time. A better approach is to only concern your mind with things that you have control over. As an example, you don’t have any control on whether or not there is a global flu pandemic. You do have control over how you are/are not going to respond if it becomes a reality and effect you. Identify the threat, figure out your plan and move on. By following the urban survival course, you’re going to do just thatâ€create logical responses to potential threats so that you don’t have to waste your life worrying about things that may or may not happen. You’ll address them head-on once, write out your plan for dealing with them, and then go on living your life.
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