There’s a reason people say “don’t look down” when climbing. It’s a simple trick to not let fear interfere with your actions and to help you keep a level head. People that are outside of the prepping world often look at survivalists and peppers with the idea that they are a fearful group. What else would drive someone to spend money and time getting ready for something that may never happen but fear itself?
While fear of a major disaster or TEOTWAWKI is what often gets people into the survival and prepping lifestyle, successful preppers and survivalists quickly drop fear from their vocabulary lest their best laid plans be all for not.
Fear is a very bad thing. Fear drives people to make bad decisions, to act without thinking, and to do things they otherwise would never do. Each of these are the exact opposite of what a prepper or survivalist is expected to do. Sure, it’s easy to motivate someone by telling them about the coming financial crash and how it will completely change the world, or to warn of the societal implosion that comes with peak oil, but fear only gets people so far before turning bad.
What is Fear?
Fear is basically your body’s way of handling fight or flight. Fear is the state your body is in when it’s deciding whether a threat should be overcome or run away from. While small bouts of fear can quicken your reaction time and speed, left unchecked it can wear your nerves raw and make you weak. In other words, fear is a response that’s induced by a perceived threat that causes a change in your mind and body.
So what’s so bad about fear if it gets your brain and body ready for action? Well, like drugs fear starts out as your friend and quickly becomes a weight around your neck in the ocean, dragging you down. Fear starts out great, getting you pumped up and acting, but it also wears you out. Living with fear lowers your ability to make proper decisions and more specifically, to effectively judge when a situation is actually dangerous or not.
It’s the lack of ability to properly judge the danger of a situation that gets friends shot and supplies wasted. Let’s say you’re out in the woods and you hear a deer. Your fear-riddled mind immediately thinks it hears a marauder coming to kill and plunder, so it makes you open fire and start running in any direction. Now you’ve wasted ammo and gotten yourself nice and lost all because you let fear drive you.
Take the Fear Out of Prepping
Sure, the world is a scary place and prepping does indeed shine a light on the more scary parts of it. Where some people get lost is that prepping is meant to remove fear, not add to it. If you’re awake to the very real threats to everyday life that are out there, prepping is how you make yourself a calm and collected survivor and not a scared and ranting animal.
Planning your prep is one of the best ways to get away from fear. Having a plan for what you and your family will do in case of a disaster is meant to make you more collected in the face of disaster, not make you scared leading up to one.
Along with planning you should up your survival skills by learning new and useful skills that you might need in a TEOTWAWKI situation. Nothing makes someone less scared like knowing how to take care of themselves.
Listen, fear in some level is always going to happen. It’s not letting it get to you and rule you that matters. At a certain point fear will overtake you if left unchecked and at that point why even get out of bed? If you’re certain the world will end and you’ll probably die, then prepping doesn’t seem too useful. Keep your fear in check by being a prepper, and be a better prepper by keeping your fear in check.