One of the core factors when it comes to being a “Collapse Prepper” is that you are embracing the inevitability of that collapse. You face the world as if that collapse could come at any moment, and be very rapid and dramatic. Because of that, you must incorporate prepping into every aspect of your daily life. The world can come apart at any minute, and you will have to be ready. To that end, one of the best ways you can maximize your prepping productivity is living a healthy lifestyle. Your health and fitness will be your primary survival assets and critical parts of being prepared for societal collapse. In this article, I am detailing my top daily habits for collapse preppers.
1. Hydration: The Wellspring of Survival
Imagine a day when turning a tap yields nothing. Your body, a machine running on water, will demand its due. The rule of threes grimly notes you can survive three weeks without food, but only three days without water. Aim for a gallon per day, more if you’re exerting yourself or if the heat is oppressive.
Remember, your food, especially if it’s lush and ripe, will lend its moisture to your cause. We tend to get about 20% of our water from the foods we eat, so don’t pass up those veggies. And when it comes to drinking, don’t guzzle; sip steadily. It is far more effective for hydration if you drink small amounts of water over a long period rather than downing your fill at one time.
Proper hydration helps maintain your ability to take in and circulate nutrients and oxygen, flush out toxins, regulate your body temperature, and reduce the chances of injury by maintaining cell suppleness. All that sounds pretty important, right?
2. Embrace the Shock of Cold Showers
It sounds like a trial, but it’s a tonic. Cold showers are not just a wake-up call but a health strategy, boosting leukocytes, circulation, and endorphins. Taking cold showers isn’t just to torture yourself, it’s about conditioning your body and mind to respond robustly to stress. The benefits of such cold water therapies are well known to professional athletes who will use ice baths after intense training or for treating injuries. Collapse preppers should do no less.
And for those moments of peace? A sauna or hot tub can help unknot muscles, aiding recovery and resilience. It supports blood circulation and relieves stress as well. Your body, as it grows accustomed to these extremes, will serve you well in a post-collapse world where comfort is just a memory of better days.
3. Nourishment: Fueling the Fight
Survival isn’t just about the calories you can scavenge; it’s about the nutrients those calories carry. Your diet needs to be as adaptable as you are, tailored to your body’s demands and the resources at your disposal. Everyone is different, and it is essential to listen to your body when learning what diet is best for you and the activity level you operate with. Proper diet is a big factor in supporting your body’s healthy functioning.
Some fundamental principles for healthy eating are applicable across the board. Eating a balanced diet with large amounts of fruits and vegetables is one of them. Also, eating foods that are high in dietary fiber. Increasing the diversity of foods you consume helps keep any deficiencies at bay, and fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kimchi can benefit your digestive health. Modify your diet to balance your calorie intake and output, practicing moderation, not restriction. And finally, always choose the most nutrient-dense foods that are available to you.
4. Mindfulness as Part of Mental Fitness
In the clamor of collapse, your mind must be calm, a sanctuary where good judgment can form. Leaving your thoughts to only react to what is going on around you doesn’t serve you very well. You must be able to keep a calm mind in a wide variety of new and difficult situations, including survival scenarios. This will greatly increase your ability to survive. Stress is a saboteur that undermines your health and clouds your judgment. Cultivate calm through meditation, through mindfulness, and find in that practice the discipline to face whatever comes with a clear eye and a steady hand.
Some of you out there might laugh at that, but meditation is no joke. It is a key practice in building the overall discipline and mental fitness that will be vital to your survival in an SHTF scenario like societal collapse. Mindfulness has been shown to have a great many benefits for our physical health, as well as working to increase awareness and focus and reduce or manage stress.
Meditation might feel weird for you at first, if it is something entirely new, so you must be disciplined about getting in your practice. At first, just try sitting still for ten minutes or so in a quiet place, just focusing on your breathing. Your mind will try and stay busy, so that will make it hard to concentrate, but that’s normal in the beginning. After some basic practice, maybe even try a guided meditation to help you learn more about the process.
5. The Lore of Survival
Knowledge is your arsenal, and every day is a chance to arm yourself further. Delve into the skills that will define your survival—first aid, fire-starting, self-defense, and things of that nature. In the quiet of today, prepare for the clamor of tomorrow. Prioritize learning everything you can about the area you will be operating in post-collapse, that kind of knowledge will be critical later when there is no convenient satellite imaging or internet databases to reveal things about the area.
But don’t stop with just the basics. Absorb everything you can; current events, history, homesteading, carpentry, and anything else you can learn.. Information is a resource that needs to be accumulated now while it is still easily accessible. Try and learn something new every day, whether it’s a small thing like how to tie a new knot, or a bigger step like taking an archery class. Everything you can learn now will be another weapon in your arsenal after the collapse.
Your library, digital or otherwise, should be a vault of survival wisdom. I recommend building up a survival library that can help you access valuable information down the road. Physical books are good for stashing in your final destination location but are too heavy to move in a bug-out situation. That is why I recommend setting up a digital “Bookbank” that can hold thousands, if not millions, of books. You can even download an entire offline copy of Wikipedia to be run locally on a laptop…
6. Pushing the Boundaries: Physical Fitness
Your body is your primary tool for survival. And to learn about that tool and its limits and capabilities, you need to test its mettle. Run, lift, and challenge your endurance. Find out by trying, exactly how fast and far you can run, how much you can safely lift, and how well you are able to climb rope and walls. In understanding your limits, you learn how you can redefine them.
This is about more than fitness; it’s about discovering the primal strength that pulses in your veins, about getting in touch with the physical aspects of that inner animal nature once intended you to be… An animal you may have to become one day. Having the unconscious knowledge of what you can and cannot do physically helps with making those split-second decisions that survival depends on. No time to wonder if you can make that jump…
Once you know what you are capable of, you can design a fitness routine that can help you increase your limits. Fitness will be the foundation of your survival capability, and it actually has a lot to do with fortifying your mind as well.
The ancients knew it: a sound body houses a sound mind. Your survival hinges on your health and fitness, so integrate strength and stamina into your daily discipline. Whether it’s a sprint, a stretch, or a stride, make movement your mantra.
Conditioning your body to operate in a strenuous manner is going to be key for your survival. You need to put together a workout regimen that gets you ready to operate in a post-collapse environment. At the start, go for at least 30 minutes a day to engage in some sort of physical activity beyond the norm. That can be walking, lifting weights, swimming, or even joining a local softball team.
Adding workouts and exercise to your routine is an integral part of securing your long-term health and wellness and your ability to survive. It may seem daunting at first, but start small, make a plan, and stick to it.
8. The Sanctuary of Sleep
In the quiet of night, your body and mind forge their peace with the day’s demands. Quality sleep is your recovery room, where the trials of today are processed and the strength for tomorrow is built. Getting proper rest is an essential component of a healthy body and mind, and one that is often overlooked. You must design your rest as meticulously as your physical defenses.
A clear mind is just as important as a strong body, especially when it comes to crucial decision-making during your bug out from hostile territory, or when you need to do complicated and highly skilled tasks like preparing for or evading a threat.
Proper sleep is when your mind goes into an active state of processing information and decompressing. At the same time, your body acts to begin healing your muscles and body tissues from the strain of an active day. Start going to sleep at a time that allows you to wake naturally after a complete and fulfilling sleep cycle. This will be critical to your performance the next day.
9. The Power of Community
Lone wolves starve in isolation; packs thrive through cooperation. Find your tribe, whether they’re gardeners, gamers, or gunsmiths. Share your journey toward preparedness and let their successes spur your own. You want to try and build the kind of relationship with people that will help you down the road when the time comes to form a collapse-prepping group of your own.
When the kinetic portion of our ongoing collapse actually gets real, it’s gonna get real fast. You will want to have relationships in place with a group of like-minded survivalists so that you can help each other through to the other side of collapse and on to a recovery. No one can handle the post-collapse world alone. it might be necessary to do so for a little while until a new norm can be established, but in the end, this will be a new world, a ruined and dangerous world, and you will need people at your side to get you through it. Best to find them now, while doing so is relatively easy and safe…
10. Changing Your Unhealthy Behaviors
Whether you are trying to get in better shape, eat healthier, or learn new hard skills, breaking your old bad habits can greatly increase your chances of success. The best way to stop eating garbage is to stop having it around you. This is a methodology that will apply to all of your habit-building and habit-breaking. You have to surround yourself with positive things and get rid of those things that can tempt you to fall back into negative patterns.
If you want to get more fit, find ways to encourage fitness in your environment. Take the stairs next time, rather than the elevator, or maybe start walking or biking to work. Need to get a better night’s sleep? Move the TV and iPad out of your bedroom. Get rid of triggers that encourage bad habits.
Building good habits is all about shifting your environment to suit those habits. Cultivate an environment where good practices flourish naturally, where the path of least resistance is the path that leads you toward your goals.
Conclusion
It is essential to your overall survival to discipline yourself. You have to engage in regular activities that increase your health and fitness instead of decreasing them. Discipline is an essential feature of a true collapse prepper and It will increase your overall quality of life. More than that, it will increase your chances of surviving in a post-collapse world.
But in the end, this isn’t just about surviving; it’s about thriving in the face of the unthinkable. Discipline, in its many forms, is the thread that weaves through all of these practices. It’s the difference between the prepared and the perished. In the quiet of today, we forge the strength for tomorrow. The prepared don’t just endure; they emerge dominant in the new world that awaits us.
Lots of great stuff in there. I did a deep dive on ancestral diets and have determined that a fasting ketovore approach is much like a hunter/gatherer diet. My big tip is turn off the tv and read a book or do a (free) course on something practical (snaring rabbits or tying knots). Or go look for edible plants on a hike. Don’t wait til you are ready. Start now.