a load of guff about coping mentally post SHTF

[Tnarturnah]

I am often accused, correctly, of going on a bit. I am about to do just that right now so grab a beer or a brew and settle in or stop reading this now. I read the post on depression when the SHTF and the following words fell out of my fingers.

Being an independent thinker (awkward) and full of initiative (cannot take orders) I found myself to be a terrible employee. As a result of a couple of sackings early in my life I have been self employed since being 22. This has worked out well for me. I made a fair bit of cash in the early 2000's so I made the sensible and grown up decision to sell my house, car and business and do whatever I pleased until the money ran out. Two very eventful years followed.

First of all I pottered around the world climbing up big hills, this was a good start as I was a very keen rock climber and mountaineer. Upon my return I took on the task of ticking off some UK long distance walks, the coast to coast, the Ridgeway and Hadrian's wall etc. I wild camped all of them and again, much fun was had and I was insanely fit as a result.

I had always been an outdoors type, as a kid a tent went up in the garden every spring and stayed there until November. I slept in it more often than I was in the house. My dad was a very practical and capable man and taught me all kinds of useful stuff, I was a scout and the whole ethos of a life outdoors just suited me well.

I did find, however, that on my long distance walks I had got a bit too gear orientated. I had way too much equipment, too much bulk and weight, when walking a couple of hundred miles this becomes an issue so I started to kit down and skill up. I got a few books, learned and practiced some new techniques and went on a bushcraft course. At the end of the course I had been taken on as an assistant instructor, which was nice! The instructor training was excellent and rather than walking long distances and camping as a practical sleeping solution I took a different approach.

I would take the basics, set up camp and make it work for a few days. The shift was really eye opening, I was very competent at wild camping with stoves and a bag full of kit but when you set up a bit of woodland as your home for a while pretty much everything you need to live in total comfort is available. I had always travelled upon a physical journey before, a start and end point with a great deal of movement in between. Bushcraft was a stationary journey, a whole different approach, mindset and skill base. I learned this new skill of staying put and living outdoors in absolute comfort and did plenty of it, on my own, with friends and as an instructor. My kit had reduced to much smaller, lighter and more manageable bag, the irony was I no longer had to carry it very far.

My cash pot was running out and a couple of carefree years of pottering was finding its natural conclusion. I'd had a lot of time to think about what next and decided to train as a tree surgeon, naively it turned out. The name suggests you make poorly trees better, which does sometimes happen but usually you just end up putting a lovely healthy tree on the floor for money. A shame. In fairness this was an excellent choice of direction, I learned lots of new stuff and worked outdoors every day. It is a great job. About five years after I set up my business I slipped two disks, this was in October 2012, a work accident, a common tree surgeon injury, no more working for me for a while.

The unrelenting boredom of being indoors and injured, after an extremely fit and active life was unbearable. It made me think a great deal about what life would be like if some form of apocalypse happened. If you survived it but had to batten down the hatches and stay indoors to avoid the violence that would ensue amongst the human population desperate to survive given this totally unknown new situation. No power grid, shops, law enforcement or rules etc.

With the knowledge, skills and tools I had spent a lifetime putting together I had always assumed that if our current system of civilised living was to come to an abrupt end I could happily wander into the woods and live a peaceful and comfortable existence. My injury and house arrest lead me down the thought process of the unskilled masses. It would not just be a case of pack a bag, hit the woods and ride it out for the vast majority of the population.

Our lives are governed by rules and laws which do, virtually all of the time, keep us safe. There is a fair bit of crime but unless you are a criminal it doesn't affect you too often, your car might be broken into, house burgled or you might be mugged but these things do not happen often. When they do the insurance company takes care of your loss, the modern world has insulated the average person from most harm and risk. If you are hungry you go to the shop, viola, food.

Remove the insulation and the unprepared, unskilled, frightened and hungry majority will not suddenly adapt, dig out the Ray Mears book they got five Christmases ago and become a self sufficient survival warrior. There will be chaos, hideous violence and fear. Instinctual fear will prevail and instincts will kick in. The problem with this lies in the fact that although we are still an animal capable of experiencing true animal instincts who among us can translate an instinct into an appropriate action? Not many.

Inevitably only two actions will be translated. I do not claim to be a master of my instincts but I have lived fairly closely with nature and have learned to understand some of them. There are many actions instinct can guide you towards taking but the only two your modern human being will have any kind of understanding of are the most obvious. Fight? Flight? Those who choose flight with no skills, equipment or knowledge will quickly become overwhelmed by either those fighting or their own incompetence. Those who choose to fight but are poorly equipped to do so will not fair much better, most people do not have the fitness or stamina for a start. If you lose a fight and get injured you're in trouble, if you die, well then you are dead.

All this happy thought forced me to conclude that if such an event was to happen the first few months are critical. In a brand new world now governed by fear, violence and incompetence the only real chance you would have at long term survival, even if you were overflowing with all the necessary tools to do so would be to wait out the initial chaos. You could be Bruce Lee with an AK-47 but sooner or later, in the initial panic, all it would take is one group of scared 'fighters' with some makeshift weaponry and that would be that.

My solution to that was simple, stockpile, which I have now become aware is prepping, which I have been doing for years. A house that can sustain for six months, a van that can sustain for one month and an emergency bag that has enough in it to get by if caught out. If or when the day arrives that requires the use of this resource I have built I feel pretty ready for it, the constant practice of these skills is my hobby and I thoroughly enjoy using them. I suppose all that would be left on the day would be a little luck that I wasn't taken out in the first attack, or got the plague, or the tsunami ripped me to bits, or the meteorite landed in my garden or of course, if I could run faster than the zombies!

So now I assume I outran the living dead, made it home, secured all windows and doors and I am sat on six months of food, fuel, water and feeling pretty good. All I have to do now is wait a few months for the dust to settle, let everyone battle it out, the weak will perish, the strong, lucky and most importantly the prepared will ride it out and emerge into a brave new world. Sounds good. Until I reflect on my house arrest as in injured man. I only spent six weeks in convalescence, I had power, entertainment and all the things that we do as modern people to stop ourselves from being bored. I still hated the confinement, I'm an outdoorsman from the core and not being able to go for a long walk, sleep outside, cook on an open fire, essentially to just be a part of nature and be immersed in that environment really got to me. It got to me so deeply that I became depressed, as soon as my back was fixed enough to be out again I went and lived full time, for four months, in a wood, in the coldest winter I can remember but that is a tale for another day.........

There is absolutely no denying that the issue of staying sane would be an equally important part of surviving. It is not for no reason that it is very often said that survival is state of mind, it is. In my opinion this is probably the single most important issue to address. The body can take all kinds of punishment and pull through but only if the mind wills it to do so. If you are truly serious about prepping I believe this is probably the area worth spending a great deal of time and effort on. Stockpiling physical goods is not difficult, with a bit of common sense and a fairly small amount of money this can be achieved. Stockpiling a mindset is a whole different game.

I have no moment of truth answer to this but do have some thoughts to offer. Within the previous post dealing with this a lot of really good advice was given, nutrition, staying fit, sleeping, meditation, things to get obsessed about to keep you occupied, medication and music. All important, all worth doing, all would be very helpful.

We live in a time where constant overstimulation has become regular life. If you sit on a train and look out of the window there is plenty going on in front of your eyes, it is stimulating but it also allows you to daydream, think, work problems out, make plans or just remember enjoyable things you have done. If you sit on a train you will notice the vast majority of people have small computers that happen to also be phones in front of them with facebook, twitter, candy crush or whatever other nonsense keeps them from being present. The sheer influx of stimulation at all times of the day seems to me to be changing the wiring of the human brain.

As a species we have entered a phase where our technical achievements have become so clever, portable and all consuming that the simple act of being present in your current surroundings vary rarely happens. Waiting for something, anything, no matter how short the wait is what generally happens now? Do people plug into their environment and observe it or pull out the iphone for the duration and lose themselves in what is essentially just a meaningless distraction until that very short wait is over?

The ability to cope with situations as they arise is firmly rooted in your ability to be present with your own, personal situation. As the wiring of our magnificent brains gets more and more saturated with insignificant and useless stimuli our ability to see a situation for what it is gets diluted to the point where we have no idea what is going on. If you have not been present to the accumulation of events preceding a current situation, because you were distracted by nonsense, how can your brain then be expected to throw together all the facts to make a suitable solution? Well it can't, welcome to the modern age of mental illness, brains becoming incapable of problem solving because the neural pathways that would probably be formed in order to do this, by being present, are watching a baby monkey ride a pig on youtube instead.

I am in no way discounting the physical and chemical imbalances in the brain that can cause mental health issues and have done for as long as the term has existed, way before facebook I concur. What I am suggesting is the rate of the increase is closely aligned with the growth of cyber life and the dislocation with the physical world around us. If our brains no longer have the time to take in, digest and be a part of where we are and why we are there the job of coping with that is almost impossible.

I am not a Luddite, I have a phone that does all that stuff, a laptop, Netflix and the rest and I use them but I attempt to be a part of my own existence too. How this relates to prepping is this. If all that stuff suddenly disappeared, all the happy distractions that prevent people from being present were to just vanish, the magnitude of the shift in circumstances would be enormous. The enforced reality of an immediate need to be totally present would be overwhelming in the true sense of the word.

It would be impossible to be fully mentally prepared for an apocalyptic event as how it affected you directly is a totally unknown factor but if you seriously believe that such an event is possible and you are preparing for it I believe this is a big issue to focus on. It isn't bad practice for your everyday life either, being present in what you do is a good thing. Giving yourself time and space without distractions to work out where you are at is a fantastic pass time and does help combat the trials of life. If any of the above sounds familiar and your cyber life has got confused with your physical life maybe it is time to evaluate that and go without social media etc for a few days? Throw your phone in a river and go and live in a wood, I did, it was excellent.

Thoughts.............

[Deeps]

Wow ! what a post, you've put a lot of thought into it, that's for sure and you probably won't get much dispute on here. My small input into it is that we don't know how we'll react to the life and death stuff until you're in that kind of situation, training (or practice) can overcome it to an extent but it seems to be something that comes from within. I've seen people who have been well trained and practised 'freezing' when things go seriously Pete Tong so there's no hard and fast rule, they maybe just needed a few extra seconds to process things, maybe someone to take charge, who knows.

I get what you're saying about modern technology and there seem to be a lot of people who are 'addicted' to Facebook etc and if and when the zombies come it will be an extra hurdle for a lot of people to deal with (the loss of their 'must have' I mean) and I understand your point that people 'waste' their lives doing stuff like it when they could be doing something better but that could be said for about 99% of us but that's what makes us the flawed people we are. If you 'KNOW' the zombies are coming then anything that's not anti zombie based is a waste of time but if life is going to carry on as it is then there's no harm in 'LOLing and OMGing on Facebook or whatever. I suppose the counter argument to prepping is why waste your time and money on something that probably won't (and hopefully won't to be fair) happen.

For what it's worth, I agree with you view on how things will pan out if the zombies turn up, its going to be our friends and neighbours that we'll be fighting off first, especially if there's even a suspicion that you're sitting on a mountain of supplies, mob rule doesn't need much to go on and there will need to be scapegoats to take frustrations out on.

It sounds like you've had an interesting time and have pretty much done things your way which I salute you for mate, most of us play the hand we're dealt but you seem to have stacked the deck in your favour, well done. A friend of mine has flitted between contracting for big bucks and then 'dropping out' and doing his own thing for years and I was really envious of him, then the silly beggar went and got married and had a kid at the age of 44. I'm looking forward to more of your posts, keep them coming.

[Arzosah]

Wonderful post! A thoughtful outdoorsman - I salute you! I totally agree with what you've written - as Deeps says, you won't get much argument on here. A few small points:

- I think there are a few more people than you might imagine who aren't sucked in by faffing about digitally - but by their very nature, they're not visible, digitally or otherwise. And I don't think there's enough of them/us to make a difference to the events that you're envisaging.

- there's always the *chance* of a truly apocalyptic worldwide event - ask the dinosaurs - but I think its very, very small. Other than localised events at that scale, I think a slow decline for whatever reason - climate or economic - is more likely. There'd be time to adapt, but the fallout would consequently also be more drawn out, and more difficult to manage because of that.

- there's also something about mindfulness (which is increasingly popular now in counselling-type circles as an antidote to the surface nature of CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy) and about what a friend of mine calls "conscious living", which is exactly what it says, making decisions consciously and not just living life on automatic, with your own thought processes drowned out by endless social media etc.

A couple of questions too ... before you could get outside again (in that cold winter!) how did you cope, while you had to stay *inside*, healing? Were you aware that you were depressed at the time? And what about community after the potential future apocalypse that you see, how do you see yourself connecting to people face to face? How did you manage while you were healing?

Its two areas that I'm really interested in - I'm a counsellor/therapist in real life, and I like post-apocalyptic fiction, I have a novel growing thats just begging to be written down

Hope you don't mind the questions!

[Lintymantis]

Wow great post! Made very good reading on my lunch break today.

[OCDprepgirl]

A couple of questions too ... before you could get outside again (in that cold winter!) how did you cope, while you had to stay *inside*, healing? Were you aware that you were depressed at the time? And what about community after the potential future apocalypse that you see, how do you see yourself connecting to people face to face? How did you manage while you were healing?

Thank you for your interesting post, it was a really thought provoking read. I'm interested in the above question from Arzosah too. While I generally don't mind being within the confines of my house and garden and generally would suit a life of hermitage, my fiancé gets severe cabin fever (and often projects it on to me saying I need to go out rather than him). I'm happy so long as I have my dogs and books, how did you cope with confinement?

[Tizzie]

I have just read this to my husband who is an Author/Writer. He has asked me to tell you that it has all the makings of a good E Book on the Psychology of Survival.

I would definitely buy a copy if you did, your article was SUPERB, BRAVO.

Regards,

Tizzie

Area 4

[Tnarturnah]

My hatred of social media sometimes consumes me and if I am not careful with quite how much I dislike it and how I believe it is changing human interaction it grows into an already present apocalyptic event of its own in my eyes. Hence the above little rant!

I will give an example of why then get to your questions. Last year an old school friend got married, I wasn't the best man but ended up organising the stag do because everyone else was too busy with life to have time. I am always busy doing something but have no formal commitments or deadlines to meet so fair enough. We are all now 40 or there about so rather than your typical rowdy affair I decided that I would take us off grid for the weekend and purposely booked a big cottage near Patterdale in the Lake District. A place I knew would have no mobile signal or wifi, for which I also knew I would get in all kinds of bother for at first.

I was correct, as soon as we arrived and piled out of the minibus phones came out and seeing no magic bars the moaning started. The complete lack of internet access in the cottage doubled the moaning, I was very pleased with myself indeed. After half an hour of this it was begrudgingly accepted and phones were put away. As everyone busied themselves inside I got a long fire going outside and set up a surprise hog roast. The group was very surprised to see a full pig on a spit in the garden and the evening that followed was of movie like brilliance, ten old friends around a fire eating a slow roasting hog and drinking beer. Perfect. A few of the lads said it was one of the best nights of their lives.

The following day we went for a walk and then into Glenridding for a meal, the hotel restaurant, of course, had wifi. I can't describe a more contrasting scene. As soon as we sat down devices sprang from every pocket and bag and all conversation stopped, entirely. I initially thought this was fair enough, checking in at home is what people do. My family are used to me disappearing for a few days with no contact so I hadn't brought a device of any kind. As the meal wore on so did the complete preoccupation with small screens. I suggested that maybe an hour of this had been enough but it appeared it was not.

When polite suggestion didn't work I formally asked everyone to stop telling the world what they are doing and use this rare and brief moment in time, when we are all together, to actually do what we are doing instead. I might of gone into a small but succinct diatribe on the issue of social media destroying actual social interaction. A short respite was filled in with some discussion on my views but this topic was mostly regarded with the same sort of uneasy non acceptance that would of ensued had I announced I have pledged my allegiance to Satan and tried to resurrect the dead.

The easy flowing friendships of the previous night were again forgotten and the broadcasting resumed. I excused myself for a toilet stop and walked back to the cottage. There is no part of me that understands why anyone would, given our situation, ten long standing friends meeting up after years of not seeing each other, chose to concentrate on what was not happening around them rather than be fully integrated in the present. It is a real shame but that is how it was.

Arzosah, I too worked as a counsellor some years ago, I got qualified and did a couple of years but it wasn't for me. The above post obviously deals with total collapse, quickly in a worst case scenario but I enjoy the drama of that thought process!

I didn't really cope that well is the answer, not at first. The first couple of weeks were a bit of a morphine haze as the pain was more than I cared to have to deal with. The medication caused so many problems of its own that I ended up stopping it and embarked upon a journey of drunkenness for a couple of weeks instead. This also holds its own issues so that had to stop too. I hadn't realised I was depressed at all because I was on drugs and then drunk, in constant pain and was sleeping badly. After maybe four or five weeks of this I cut out all pain relief and started properly on my physiotherapy, I couldn't do that straight away as one disk popped out left and one right creating an S bend in my spine, this had to be aligned before I could do anything to strengthen my back again.

Once clear headed again I recognised the mental symptoms and dealt with them in the way I deal with most things, I used my stubbornness to refuse to let depression sink in and get hold of me. I set small goals, started reading rather than binge watching TV series, did a fair bit of writing and did the maximum amount of physiotherapy I could handle. I was amazed at how quickly I had been affected, I am a pretty strong minded individual used to making life work for me how I want it to. My massive physical energy output for the past 37 years had always kept me mentally balanced and as this had been a constant coping mechanism the enforced period of stasis, the complete removal of my established way of maintaining that balance hit me very hard.

I knew that tree surgery was out for a while, maybe permanently but money is very low down on my priority list so not working wasn't the issue, I can happily live with virtually no money. My priority was getting fit again and fixing my back so the move into the woods happened, my reasoning being I would have to be physically active but could spend long periods of time resting too. All with nature surrounding me. I hadn't bargained on the constant stream of epiphanies that would come with this experience or how far removed from modern life four months in a wood can take you.

I did see my recovery in a house as a form of imprisonment and my time in the woods the exact opposite. I have a friend who spent a lot of time in the woods with me and brought regular supplies, without which I could not of stayed but approximately three quarters of the four months was spent alone. I left the woods for two reasons, my back was better and I had gone mad!

It is almost two years since this event and I still haven't left the woods entirely. The simple and beautiful life I had, totally off grid, removed entirely from all modern gadgets, worries and problems, surrounded by and immersed in nature changed me. I watched spring happen, hourly, the subtleties that stop motion camera work has shown on TV unfolded before my eyes and I was a living part of it. When you experience life as this slow natural process the way that modern life is so hectic and rushed seems incongruous in the extreme. To say I lost touch with reality would be both fair but equally incorrect.

I did lose one reality, the one outside of the woods became alien, even repulsive. I say I went mad but after a couple of years reflecting on this I didn't, I became fully present to my existence. A simple and wonderful existence that had no foothold in nonsense or distraction, I felt calm and well, happy for the most part and that serenity was only disturbed when I thought about leaving my world to rejoin the one I left.

Here comes my best answer to your question about reconnecting with people. I emerged from the woods after four months to a world that was pretty much the same as I left it, no plagues, zombies or natural disasters but if I had come back to that I don't think it would of been any harder. The internal changes I had made, the way life had slowed down and become a natural process again did not fit in with the noise and motion I had to deal with. Although familiar it was horrendous, completely overwhelming, I hated it.

Readjusting was a slow process, how everyone was living seemed ridiculous, I couldn't really relate to anyone, everything was way too fast, all the sounds were abrasive, amplified and disconnected. I had a strong aversion to all of it and wanted to sneak back into the woods. I had to force myself not to do that but life seemed so flawed, when trying to talk to people their topics, problems, interests and general way of being seemed so abstract and at the time inconsequential that no common ground could be found. I genuinely think had there been some cataclysmic event I would of been met by a world that made more sense to me, one I would have been more comfortable in.

As time passed it got easier but on a daily basis I was having to make choices about what this world has in it that I could assimilate with, or even wanted to be a part of. Two years after this is an ongoing thing but I have made some peace with the world, stayed out of the woods(ish) and once again made life work for me how I want it to.

Assuming that four months after day zero the initial violence and chaos had simmered down and any survivors were also four months into accepting and living with new rules I expect it would be a similar experience but a shared one. Everyone left would have their personal journey that had changed them beyond recognition and once the dust settled and a sustainable rhythm of life had returned I feel sure that most decent people would stay decent. There would no doubt be a string of tales behind every survivor that would include regret, sorrow, shame, grief and guilt but that would be a common theme and human nature makes people congregate for the greater good, we need contact.

I have always lived on the fringe of modern life, being an outdoorsman technology doesn't really interest me too much but I was amazed just how quickly I lost touch with the world outside my wood. This was all by choice which only backs up the fact that the animal we are is not that far beneath the surface. I didn't really miss anything other than people and within a week or two I had started to harmonise well with nature, as a way of living, not just a bushcraft trip. It is true I had lots of experience of this before and was probably more suited than most but our big brains can be very practical and if an event forced people to live this way I don't underestimate the ability of the human race to quickly adapt and learn, or re-learn.

Good luck with the novel, make a start, mine is not far off complete, we will have to swap when they are done.

[Tnarturnah]

Hi Tizzie,

It appears that as a new member my posts have to be given the all clear before being available. A good idea. I had posted the last reply before reading yours but as yet it has not been approved. As it happens I am a writer and have a novel in the works that is loosely based on my experiences and largely in this genre so hopefully someday soon you can buy a copy! Thank you, sincerely, for the bravo.

I haven't joined this forum as a marketing tool and the posts I have made are genuine, that is all stuff I have done and is personal, not a character extension or fantasy. I have hit a creative wall in my book, i.e. the ending and was just looking around for inspiration and found this forum, upon reading through it I put together some thoughts that became posts. I have enjoyed writing some stuff that is based in reality and personal, there has been catharsis in that after weeks of making things up to keep a fictional story going.

What I have found really interesting is that without realising it I have been following a preppers handbook, for years, without the handbook. I read a lot and watch a lot of films, in some of these prepping has cropped up and I have just sort of bypassed it as part of normal life, because it is something I do, not something I have felt the need to research. I honestly did not know it was a thing that people were talking about or doing on any scale.

Your post made me realise that the novel I am writing is, in effect, a handbook on the psychology of survival. That wasn't my intention but it is how things are turning out it seems, a lot of my material is based on what I do with my life and have experienced, along with a fictional story to entertain and some imaginative leaps into what might actually happen. I would say I have read most of the classics in the genre but went for a new angle, as yet I have read or seen nothing quite like what I am writing. I have no ambition or need to make money from this venture, I just enjoy writing and a few months ago a book started tumbling out so I let it happen. It is now almost complete and even if nothing comes of it I have enjoyed the process so who cares? Not I.

[jansman]

Ok then. As a 'Newbie' there are certain protocols. These apply to everyone. It has become obvious that you are promoting a book. Here at UKP we like some input and some questions too. When you are 'established' as it were, then you can promote yourself and your projects. Sorry to sound so hard about it , but that is the way it is. Moderator's decision.
Thread locked.