Table of contents:
How to survive in any unforeseen situations close to extreme.
Let's imagine the following situation. You are in your apartment or in your house, but you absolutely do not remember how to turn on the water tap, what a refrigerator and a toilet are. What danger can a TV or computer cable be connected to electricity and how to open the door to the street?
If you continue the reasoning, then in such a situation you can easily die of thirst and hunger, although there is a refrigerator full of food nearby, and there is so much water that you just have to turn on the water tap, so you can flood all the neighbors.
The situation is not so absurd despite the seeming simplicity of the household items and household appliances surrounding a modern person, we must remember that each of us learned to use these devices and items for many years. And how many burns, bruises, cuts and other injuries were once received, and training should continue throughout your life. For an illustrative example, remember what kind of bedlam can be done in your apartment by "untrained" relatives who have arrived from a nearby hinterland, and what will happen if you yourself do something not according to the rules.
Being somewhere in new "slightly" unusual conditions, for example, on an uninhabited island, lost in the taiga or jungle, an unprepared person finds himself in a similar situation. New, previously completely unknown problems are emerging, and these are not only dangerous animals and uncomfortable climatic conditions. Certain knowledge is required on the rules of life in new conditions. How to provide yourself in the shortest possible time with the most necessary things, how to eat right and how to starve correctly, how to overcome loneliness and incompatibility, what are visual and auditory hallucinations, and so on? A bunch of new problems that have arisen do not pass without leaving a trace and are hazardous to health in their possible consequences.
Today, our contemporaries still have a chance, for some reason, to find themselves in a deserted and wild area, without food, appropriate equipment and without the slightest hope of someone's help in salvation. Starting from victims of accidents such as shipwrecks, emergency landings of planes and spacecraft and to those who, due to duty, occupation or for some other reason, are obliged to live, endure hardships, comply with the conventions of laws and work as a "Robinson volunteer" in hundreds kilometers from the nearest settlements.
In the snows of the Arctic, on distant islands, in the taiga, in the mountains, in the desert, these volunteers in most cases create the conditions for trouble-free flights, safe navigation, uninterrupted work of factories and plants, looking for minerals, warning of impending natural disasters. They make their labor contribution to the common cause of their country, and sometimes the whole planet. In Russia alone, there are many thousands of such people, these are observers of hydro, meteo, seismic, magnetic and other posts and stations, keepers of lighthouses, power lines and pipelines, builders, foresters, etc. You can also recall a whole army of seasoners and amateurs: they are members of all kinds of expeditions, winterers, hunters, fishermen, extreme tourists.
You cannot predict everything in advance and cannot foresee, therefore, these people have adventures and emergency situations much more often than they themselves would like.
The distant ancestors of modern people, even in prehistoric times, adapted to living conditions in all climatic zones practically throughout the planet and were not afraid to end up in wild and uninhabited places without appropriate equipment, food and water supplies.
You can recall many very real stories when the pioneer travelers dying of hunger, thirst, heat, cold or other unbearable living conditions were saved by the aborigines - local, indigenous people. They had no idea how it is possible to experience something like that in their native places. The natives knew where everything they needed for their life could be found or how to make the most necessary things with their own hands.
In order for ordinary adventures not to sometimes develop into tragedy, modern Robinsons need to have the appropriate skills and knowledge, but with useful additions at the modern level, and then you can not survive, but live fully in almost any conditions.
Below will be given recommendations for solving some of the most important problems for life in the forest (taiga) zone of our planet in conditions close to extreme.
Loneliness
A person who is caught in a completely unfamiliar situation, as a rule, experiences psychological shock … His behavior at this time can be from complete prostration (not mobile, does not respond to external stimuli) to panic rampage. Illustrative examples can be well-known cases when people who cannot swim, for some reason, ended up in a deep body of water. Some went like a stone to the bottom, others are trying to swim out, heading in the opposite direction from the nearest shore. There are many possible variants of such tragedies, the main thing is to pay attention to the fact when completely normal people in a state of shock completely lose control over their actions.
In social animals, such as bees, wasps, and ants, a single individual cannot live long apart from his family. Having lost contact with their relatives, such individuals, despite the most favorable living conditions, soon die. A person is also a social being, spends his whole life in a team of his own kind and always on a subconscious level counts on support or help from other people.
Symptoms of shock from loneliness in mentally healthy people may appear with some delay, up to a month or more. For people "not ready" for such tests, the first signs begin within a few hours and even minutes. Symptoms of some kind of illness such as indigestion, nervous breakdowns and lethargy, fever, etc. often appear. In the end, these diseases can become real and lead to chronic, including mental illness, and even bring to death.
Treatment for the shock of loneliness for completely healthy people at the first signs is quite simple. Firstly, you now already know that in such a situation some problems will surely appear, and secondly, in order to avoid these impending problems, you must remember that you are a reasonable person and try to forget about ailments and loneliness. In advance, start distracting yourself from bad thoughts with some kind of work, sports. As a last resort, if there is no opportunity to do physical labor, then try to solve some "unsolvable and global" theoretical problem such as determining the squaring of the circle, the true meaning of life, or try to invent a perpetual motion machine, etc. After a week or two, everything will go away by itself, normal sleep will be restored, an appetite and a taste for life will appear. The main thing is not to hang your nose and not lose heart in any situations.
Hallucinations
A person living for a long time alone or in a small, 2-3 person, collective far from settlements may also encounter such a phenomenon as hallucinations. Many days of silence, the monotony of the surrounding landscape and an unusual way of life also cause a nervous shock (shock). Future cosmonauts must be checked in so-called isolation chambers, where the subject spends several days (and just something?). And nevertheless, this test is considered one of the most serious, many do not survive even a few hours. Prolonged silence, the absence of bright or prominent visual reference points in the environment, as well as the monotonous sounds of "blinking" lighting, and especially in combination with thirst and hunger, heat, cold and loneliness, has a depressing effect on the nervous system. In the tiny space of the isolation chamber and the chronic lack of external stimuli, the so-called speculation effect … A person begins to fill in the gaps in the perception of external information on a subconscious level. Mentally hums melodies, begins to talk aloud, not noticeably for himself, in any sound he can hear something familiar or desired, and in the play of light and shadow he can see some images.
The human brain from tiny hints of information, visual, auditory and others, can make up a whole picture and not notice or discard at the same time very real information as insignificant, and this is normal. If there is more information than the brain can remember and analyze, the excess is discarded as unnecessary. If there is less information than needed, then the brain will complete the missing information. Everything is understandable. Our distant ancestors, even at the level of monkeys, learned this. It was enough for them to see any part of the body (fragment) of a dangerous predator hiding in the bushes in the immediate vicinity in order to raise the alarm and climb trees to save themselves.
Each person, one way or another, controls their perception of information about the outside world. Simply put, it separates the real from the fiction. In stressful situations, a chronic lack of external stimuli can present original surprises, when the fictional can seem very real. This feeling or sensation of the fictional as something real is called hallucinations. These hallucinations have nothing to do with the visions of the mentally ill, although they cannot do without nerves. In a person who is not ready for such tests, these hallucinations or glitches can cause a nervous breakdown.
Hallucinations can be visual, auditory, smell and other senses. All or almost all of the apparent hallucinations are explained by some real reason, albeit unknown at the moment. For example, all sorts of barely audible, monotonous sounds such as hum, ringing, rustling may be the result of a congenital or forgotten violation of the integrity of the eardrum. Folds of the terrain and optical phenomena of the atmosphere (mirages) can "help" to hear or see what is from the observer for several tens or even hundreds of kilometers. There are times when, for some reason, it is impossible to determine even the approximate distance to an object, then a passing speck of dust may seem like an alien spacecraft, or the rustling of an insect under your ear is perceived as a mountain collapse.
A person does not hear sounds higher or lower, at a certain level, does not see images lasting less than a tenth of a second, and nevertheless, all the information is somehow fixed by the brain. There is still much unknown and mysterious. Sounds and images can be perceived or felt in some other way. Silent running of a large animal, for example, a person can feel like a shaking of the soil from the tread of a heavy animal and even determine the approximate direction and distance to the source of the "sound". Out of the corner of your eye you can accidentally notice an animal, but if the time of "viewing" was less than a tenth of a second, and the animal is dangerous, then an "unreasonable" feeling of fear may arise.
A person who is in unfamiliar and unfamiliar conditions usually exacerbates all the senses, often the senses replace each other, and all ambiguous feelings or doubts that suddenly appear should be taken as quite real information and in any case worthy of mandatory verification. At the same time, don't let your fantasy play out indefinitely.
I recall a comic incident that happened to one hunter-fisherman.
He came with his dog already after dark into one of his hunting huts, for the first time this year and saw that someone had lived in this hut for a long time. The "tenants" were literate and respected the laws of the taiga. They did not touch the supplies, before leaving, as expected, tidied up, put things in order, chopped wood for the next tenant.
The hunter cooked a stew, ate and fell asleep. After some time, I woke up from extraneous sounds, it seemed like music was playing somewhere and someone was singing. The dog sleeps quietly on the floor and does not lead with his ear, which means that the hunter thought he heard glitches. During the day I ran through the forest, froze, tired, it happens. I tried to fall asleep again, but I like the songs and hears them for the first time. When I heard the voice of the announcer with the news, I got very scared and decided how it would be dawn so it was necessary to urgently run to the nearest settlement and surrender to the madhouse. But after hearing the announcer's promise of the premiere of "A Million Scarlet Roses" by Pugacheva, thinking, he decided that even his sick imagination would not be enough for such glitches, and he crawled under the bunks to look for the source of sounds. As he himself later said: “I had nothing to lose”. And indeed, under the bunk lies a transistor receiver, warmed up and sings quietly. "Thanks to the tenants, they made a gift."
Incompatibility
Finding yourself in the same conditions of complete isolation from the outside world in a small company (or group), you can experience for yourself what psychological incompatibility is with each other. This phenomenon usually occurs in small groups of two to five, six people. It is not a disease, but fatalities are not uncommon. Best friends suddenly become enemies. In the group, quarrels begin over trifles, a showdown, a struggle for leadership, etc., and all these strife ends, at best, in fights every other day.
To study this phenomenon, it is not necessary to go to the ends of the world or survive a plane crash; it is often quite enough to look at your neighbors or at yourself personally and draw your own conclusions. Why can't two housewives get along in the same kitchen?
Why does every second registered marriage end in divorce?
It is not known whether these conclusions of yours will be correct, but you will gain some experience.
The reasons for incompatibility is a topic that is quite relevant and still poorly understood. Spacecraft crews, for example, are selected for their compatibility by special research institutes. And usually no one specifically selects personnel to work in a tiny team at some facility far from settlements. They hire random people, not particularly interested in their past and possible consequences in the future.
You personally can only be advised to select a company for yourself with an eye to the future. If the company was selected for you without you, then live like the rest. The team is friendly and you are friends, if you scattered and hid in the corners, and you find your corner. In any case, sooner or later, but quarrels and enmity will surely begin, try to push this moment further. Remember, a bad world is better than a good fight.
The fears of loneliness and incompatibility are very well described in many of Jack London's stories.
Food and fasting rules
Anyone should know the capabilities of their body and, in particular, how to eat and starve properly. For example, sometimes, in order to quickly get to the nearest settlement, it is more profitable to starve a little than to waste time and health in search of food.
The body of any living creature, including humans, is so arranged that the cells of the body assimilate only a full set of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, microelements, etc. our body is completing the construction of new cells and the excess is processed into fat.
It is no secret that our nutrition is not always ideal, there are a lot of fats, then carbohydrates and vitamins, but if, in general, say in a week, the body has received the necessary set, then everything is fine for a full life of the body. When a set of food products is not ideal for a longer time and some substances are lacking, then a person will try to make up for the missing by eating more other foods. If overeating does not help, most of the body's cells still receive the required set and the missing one will be taken from some of the destroyed cells of the body. Fat reserves in this case are consumed, and although fat contains a complete and balanced set of everything necessary for the body, there are no extra ingredients.
