Stress and Survival: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

survival and stress

We all deal with stress every day. From waking up late to balancing work, family, and friends, stress is inevitable. Most of the time stress comes and goes, and while it’s not healthy to be stressed all the time, a little stress can actually be helpful every now and then.

Once you switch gears from daily life and move into a survival situation however, stress can easily become the norm, which gives way to all sorts of health and psychological issues. In such an environment avoiding stress is just about impossible but understanding stress can help you not only cope with it, but use it to your advantage.

RELATED: How to Cope with Sleep Deprivation

The Good

While most people will disagree with the idea, stress can actually be good for you. Think of stress as a litmus test for importance. If you truly feel stress about something that means it’s something that is important to you and something that you attach a high level of significance to, or else you wouldn’t care as much about it.

prepper zombies

Stress provides us with challenges and helps us to learn about our strengths and weaknesses. Use your daily stressful situations to your advantage by learning how your body deals with stress and what physical, emotional, and psychological effects it has on you.

Stress heightens your senses and gives you a better sense of the world around you, too. This is part of the fight or flight response that stress brings on, but in smaller doses this can help you focus on the task at hand.

The Bad

As you may have guessed, stress isn’t all good though. There’s a ton of bad attached to stress, and rightfully so. First, too much stress equals distress. Being in a state of distress is a bad place to be. Being full-on in a state of distress can mean you will have difficulty making decisions as your body’s senses are working overtime, which can confuse you.

stress-and-survival-stress-reduction

Distress also equals anger. A solid case of distress will bring on the worst aspects of anger with it, including angry outbursts and rage. Neither of these is a good idea when you’re just trying to survive.

A constant state of stress can take you in the opposite direction, too. You can experience a propensity for mistakes, have trouble getting along with others, and even have thoughts of death or suicide. Add to this an unhealthy dose of carelessness when you think you’re senses are heightened and distress can lead you to some serious issues.

SEE ALSO: Tips for Choosing the Best Survival Knife

The Ugly

Conditions or events that cause stress are known as stressors. As you probably already know, multiple stressors tend to happen at once, making you go from 0-60 in the blink of an eye with stress.

stress-and-survival-anxiety

Multiple stressors and constant, unyielding stress such as you can get in a survival situation can not only hurt you mentally but physically as well. When constant stress happens the body goes into protection mode. Like we mentioned above, your senses go into overdrive to try to help you out of the situation you’re in. This happens in the primitive part of our brain where we believe stress happens and goes away quickly, as with an animal attack or a hunt. Since stressors of today can last for quite a while, especially as with a long-term survival situation, this constant stress and body at the ready will wear you down quickly.

Your body will release stored sugars and fats to provide energy for escape, which can be a very bad thing when you’re trying to save food and keep your stored energy supplies for as long as possible. Constant muscle tension can wear you out quickly and cause major headaches and body aches, which lower your ability to function and pay attention to the world around you.

Your body will even prepare your blood to clot in case of a wound opening up, which uses even more internal energy. While these are all great in the short term in case something bad does happen, allowing your body to do this for the long term is a sure-fire path to disaster.

RELATED: Prepper Tips Learned from World War Z

What To Do

The biggest way to avoid stress is to plan now. Being a prepper is all about preparing for disaster. As the saying goes:

Plan for the worst, hope for the best

Along with basic prepping, training and practice are your best friends. There’s no way to avoid all stressors in what is an inherently stressful situation, but you can mitigate stress by learning survival skills and completing training in skills like firearms, camping, hiking, and general fitness. With those basics under control you can save the stress for more important things.

The average unprepared person will stress about everything from finding food and water, to finding shelter, to even wrapping their brains around the situation. With those already handled, you can set your level at which you become stressed at a much higher level.

stress relief yoga

Even with perfect preparation, stress will happen. Like we mentioned above, stress can be good, so there’s no reason to avoid it completely. You can abate the symptoms of stress by learning how to control it effectively via relaxation and breathing techniques as well as exercise and even yoga. All of these will calm you down and focus your mind to the task at hand.

Be realistic and keep as positive of an attitude as you can and make sure you always remember what’s at stake. By surviving effectively you not only save yourself, but possibly many others in one way or another.

Stress can be good, it can be bad, and it can be ugly. Prepare for stress now just as you do for water and food shortages, and you’ll be as ready as possible for tough time ahead.