Chapter 1: Psychology/Fitness

There are groups out there that will tell you that you need these supplies and that you need this equipment. Now before you can even begin to start packing a bag, buying equipment and start saying to yourself or others that you are a survivalist and you are ready for anything, you have a lot of work to do. Often times and I should say majority of the times they forget the most important parts of a survival situation, or they will skim over it very briefly. These are YOU, YOUR MIND and your PHYSICAL CONDITION. To get prepared for survival situations that the others talk about you will have to prepare yourself ahead for some basic survival. To begin with we will start on the mental aspect of survival since it can greatly effect the whole body in these types of situations.

MENTAL STAMINA IS ESSENTIAL

While it is true and vital that energy must be conserved in a survival situation, it is equally important that the mind must be kept busy. When you keep your mind busy thinking, things like fear and stress will not be able to get to your mind and effect you or your situation. To do this you will have to start now and build a mental muscle. You will have to reprogram yourself to think differently than ever before. If you preprogram yourself with positive information you have made the odds better for survival because you will be more alert and active for opportunities that could help you. Positive mental attitude is easy to work on. No we are not talking about drastic changes in your life but we are talking about changes. No we are not here to brain wash people, the world does that already by telling you how bad things are and sometimes blowing them out of proportion. We are not here to tell you what to think, but to try to tell you that you can think for yourself. We are talking about opening your mind to what is around you and think for yourself. Above all things that you could purchase for a survival situation the best investment is the 6 inches between your ears.
A friend of mine asked me once “What is the definition of insanity?” I really did not know and then he said something that I felt was really good. He said it is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So often people get up in the morning go to work see the same people and do the same thing then come home and do the same things at home again until it is time to go to work again the next day. When you talk to them they will tell you that they are trying to get ahead in life, make more money or prepare for whatever. You can put whatever you want there, but the are just driving themselves insane. We have become complacent in our day to day lives and have not really looked at what we are doing nor have we put any thought into our day. We operate on remote control and the only time that we think is when something causes our routine to be interrupted. There will be something’s in life that you will do that will require little or no thought, but their needs to be more thinking in our life.
An example is, I have had people tell me that they drive to work some 30-100 miles everyday one way and there are parts of the trip that they don’t remember at all. Think about it, did you remember anything that happened on your way to work today? Yes there are those who are going to say that they remember everything and I am here to say well maybe you did but just think what you saw as you drove to work or to the store and what did you see. You also here of road rage and cars and people being shot on the side of the road and NOBODY saw a thing. They are correct they didn’t see a thing because they were so wrapped up in their routine they couldn’t see.
In order to start the process for your self-help and to be prepared for any situation you will have to make some changes in your life and your thought process as we mentioned earlier. A good friend of mine told me once “If you are not changing a little thing every day in your life. How are you ever going to change the big things in your life? If you want some things to happen in your life then you will have to change and for some things you will have to be changed all together.” At first I did not understand what he was talking about but as I started to work on my thinking I found out that I was very blinded. A big help in any situation is “Your mind does not know the difference between reality and your imagination”. So play a trick on your mind, keep thinking and fear and stress will not effect you or your situation.
The process is very easy to do. Lets start by reading positive information to help you get through the day. (See the List in the Back of the Survival Guide) Most people start the day off by reading the news. Great! Lets read that after we read some good stuff. It will help us with all of the bad and a lot of the negative things that have happened in the world. Don’t get me wrong it is important to keep up with what is going on in the world around you and to abreast of current events. It is that the world continues to bombard us with negativity everywhere. The world continues to give us negative information throughout the day everyday and we start eventually start to get slow and rundown. If you still feel the need to read the papers, start reading good stuff first and then read the papers and you will see that your days will start to get better. Start easy, like 15 minutes every day for a week, then increase so as to build a habit. It takes 21 days to build a habit and only 7 to do away with it. So start gradually and work towards success. Try to make the reading time the same everyday and if it can be in the morning it will help you through the day. We have included some books to help you get started in the back of this guide to help you get started.
Once you have started to read some good information in the morning time you will notice in about 7-10 days that your days should be getting better. It will also be helpful if you had some time during the day by this time to read one page from a book that you are currently reading. I mean one Page. Take a good book like *************************** and go to a copy machine and copy 10 pages and then start to read them. Only one page a day. It will start to make you get very courious if at the end of the page you are in a thought and you have to wait until the next day to read the rest of the thought. What this will do is to allow you to redirect some of your thinking and will allow you to actually start thinking. It will make you have to remember what you read yesterday and how what you are reading applies to today.
Now that we have covered the beginning of the day and the middle of the day lets finish the day with some more reading. I know there are you people out there that don’t want to read and those that haven’t read a book in years. OH WELL, if you want help you are going to have to work for it. A great way to relieve stress at the end of the day and get a few more worth while minutes of sleep every day is to finish the day with some more positive reading. What this will do is to get you in a better mindset and cause you to remove the negative thoughts that have been given to you throughout the day by work, friends, and people around you that you have very little contact with. This reading will allow you to relax and thing on some good thoughts, thus giving you more time to sleep and less time to worry and toss and turn while you sleep. Now we are on our way to building a strong mental muscle.
A friend of mine once said, “If you do something, Something will happen. If you do nothing, Nothing will happen.” With this in mind you need to get started and the fact that you are reading this guide says that you are all ready ahead of the rest of the people because you have at least done something. If you finish the guide and prepare some materials and supplies together and don’t’ use them you are even further than the people who read the guide. If by some wild chance you read the guide and put together some materials and some supplies and start to think different and use some of what you have read whether you agree with part, some, or all of what is said here have you really lost anything? Now understand we are not making any promises or guarantees in this guide. We are not saying that you can go from the average person to a survivalist go getting Green Baret overnight nor would you want to go that far. We are saying that this could help you make it to and from home with out becoming a statistic. Now that we have gotten some of the tough stuff out of the way lets work on some other ideas.
Another saying that I once heard was “Losers live by preference. Winners live by conviction.” The question is are you a looser or are you a winner. I would like to think that you are a winner and you want to help your family, yourself, and your neighbors. If you are a loser stop reading the book now and through t in the trash or give it to someone who you think is a winner. Now with that out of the way if you have continued to read you are a winner. Don’t let your emotions rule your life. Discipline yourself with time, emotions, and feed yourself mentally. Anything anybody wants they are going to figure out how to get it. Write your plan down. Believe in what you are doing. Believe in why you are doing it. Believe that it will work. If people are not willing to look at how they think about situations that have occurred in their life (or could occur in their life) and how they would handle them then why should we need to here them complain. Learn to speak as if it has already happened. Those are great one line statements that can be written down to help motivate you the day and help you in a survival situation. We will get to a log and how to use it later.

PHYSICAL ENDURANCE IS NECESSARY

Now we must look at the physical side of you and your body. It is much harder to work on the mental side because there are so many other outside factors working on your mind whereas the ones that are working on your body is you and your lazy bones that says I will work out tomorrow. If you haven’t noticed tomorrow is not a day and neither is yesterday so why not Start on Monday, Tuesday, Wensday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Whichever day you are reading this guide is a good day to start. Remember the statement above that said, “If you do something, Something will happen. If you do nothing, Nothing will happen.”
We are not going to spend a lot of time here because there are more self help fitness books out there then there are survival books or guide combined. Find on that you like and start. If it has been awhile since you visited a doctor we would recommend that you go and visit them for some help. First like a physical so that you know what kind of shape you are actually in. Don’t rely on yourself because we all thing that we are in better shape than we actually are. Next start you fitness program and go easy. OH you say that you don’t have enough time well look at the next paragraph and follow the little test for one week.
Yes I said that I don’t have enough time for this and enough time for that. When it came to fitness I really said that I don’t have enough time. A dear friend of mine said take a minute and write down the hours in a day on the left side of a piece of paper. You know start with 8:00 am and go down every hour per line until the time that you go to bed. Next across the top write the days of the week so that you are making a chart. Now that you have done this every time that you are watching television put down the time that the set was turned on and then put down the time that the set was turned off. Be realistic and as accurate as possible. This will be of help to you in the future.
At the end of the week total up the hours of TV you watched. Pretty impressive. It was once said that the average American watches between 75-100 hours of television a week. Now that is two jobs for the average American. Wonder why we don’t have enough money. Wonder why we are leading the world in being overweight. Wonder why we are leading the world in suicides. Well now that you have opened your mind to think it want take long to figure out how you can work out your body to help you in a survival situation.
We are not talking about the New York Marathon. We are talking about being able to walk and get help or even run to get help if need be with out killing ourselves. As we stated above go to your doctor and get a check up and then start a simple exercise routine and stick with it. This will help to clear your mind and give you an opportunity to think about what could possible happen to you and your family and how you would get yourself out of it.
The mental and physical parts to any survival situation are the hardest parts. They will require more time and energy than the getting prepared sections in this guide. Just because you have read the chapters in this guide doesn’t mean that you will know everything. We encourage you to continue reading good positive books and literature so to keep your life, mind and body functioning in the world as you help yourself to prepare for what ever life gives you. Also don’t forget to exercise all of your body. The mind is a terrible thing to waste but so is the body because without the body the mind will cease to exist. Now that we have gotten the hard parts out of the way the rest should be easy.