8 Reasons Why Prepping Is Good For Your Mental State

Mental health is something that usually falls by the wayside until things start to go sideways. Once a crisis comes into your life, that is when suddenly your emotional state becomes of major importance. It’s pretty obvious that stressful situations can leave people feeling anxious, fearful, and even depressed. The pressures of everyday life, combined with the more harmful aspects of modern society, such as social media, complex jobs and personal debt are enough to create anxiety in even the strongest people.

Toss in the idea of facing the collapse of civilization, and we are talking real stress on one’s mind, and body as well.

Whether it is climate change that concerns you the most, the potential for nuclear war seemingly at any minute, or even just garden variety economic or political upheaval, collapse comes for us all, and it starts early, working to negatively affect your mental state and emotional health. A big part of being prepared to face the coming challenges of collapse is to have a clear head, unburdened by excessive stress and worry. 

How in the hell are you supposed to manage that, with all the craziness going on now, in these early stages of collapse? I know it seems like an insurmountable challenge, but the answer might just be simpler than you expect.

There are all sorts of ways you can help strengthen your mental state, and I’m not quite qualified to speak on all of them. But there is one thing I know, both from experience and from study, and it is that being prepared to face whatever the world can throw at you goes a long way towards making you feel better about things. And so, in this article I will be assessing how ‘prepping for collapse’ can be good for your mental health.

But before I talk about how prepping can help with this, I want to say a little about the why behind it. Why should you put forth the effort to de-stress your life and improve your emotional state if society is going to fall apart around you?

The simplest reason to give is because survival is paramount. I am quite sure you have all sorts of scenarios running through your head about just how bad things can be during the collapse of civilization, and especially later in a post-collapse world, but I bet you haven’t spent much time thinking about what might happen if you make it through all that…

Here is a video that describes something I think about…

But few do think about the after. And that is because the natural reaction is to fear change, especially violent and destructive change. Your mind naturally wants to focus on the threats, and that is a holdover from an earlier period on our evolutionary timeline, when focusing on the danger was the best way to avoid it. Now, however, such intense focus can be a danger in itself, blinding you to the other factors.

Additionally, that focus doesn’t really go away. Sure, it might briefly fade from our conscious mind while we are engaging in some activity that takes our minds off it, but it is still there, still clawing at the back of our minds and digging into our subconscious even while we are asleep. If we don’t deal with it, it doesn’t just go away.

You have to deal with it and put it to rest. Why? Because that is the only way to reduce your risk of being overwhelmingly triggered by stressful events. When the boom comes down for real, you do not want there to be a whole bunch of pent up stress and simmering fear that will burst out and make you panic right when you need to be thinking clearly the most. 

Okay, so we know why we should work on easing our mental state, but how does prepping help with that? Let’s examine a few general aspects of it. 

You’ll Learn To Prioritize The Important Things

When you’re prepping for a societal collapse, you learn that essential needs come first. It’s easy to get caught up in the latest Netflix shows, fast fashion trends, career moves, social media fads, or other things that promise to distract you from all your problems. However, when you step back a little and take on a collapse prepping mindset, you start to shift your perspective and see things far more clearly. Is social media really important when there won’t be a social anything soon? Does working extra hard for that promotion really matter when a violent climate event or nuclear strike could wipe out your office any day now? Was binge watching Squid Game really a priority that will help you survive the apocalypse?

Part of prepping is evaluating your core needs, and ensuring that you have the right skills and resources to thrive regardless of what is about to happen. This helps you prioritize and create order in your life; not taking anything for granted, not being frivolous with your money, planning your expenditures carefully, and focusing on long term thinking.

You’ll Set And Achieve Real Goals

Prepping is all about goals and objectives, steps towards a bigger picture plan to survive and thrive after collapse. Setting goals and achieving them is a very effective way to boost your mental health and emotional well-being. That’s because setting goals gives you direction in daily life, provides new challenges that expand your comfort zone, and helps you set priorities and pull off things you wouldn’t have succeeded at otherwise. Completing objectives as part of a larger overall plan gives you a sense of self-confidence and satisfaction that stays with you for a long time afterwards. You learn a lot about yourself and what you are capable of doing, and that can go a long way towards dispelling some of the uncertainty of surviving in a post-collapse world.

Establishing goals also provides you with something important to focus on and look forward to. This improves your sense of control and can help to combat feelings of depression. Collapse is a bad thing, and post-collapse will be a dangerous time, but knowing that you are ready and in control helps a lot with feeling less fear of the dangers to come.

You’ll Gain Confidence In Your Own Abilities

One of the greatest advantages of becoming a true collapse-aware prepper is that you fully commit to developing your knowledge and skills.For those of us who are aware, collapse isn’t a maybe or a possibility. It is a certainty. In today’s society very few people are raised with an ability to survive without all of the support infrastructure to which we have become conditioned. In many ways, civilized life has done us a major disservice.  Becoming a prepper will bring a focus on survival skills and expert knowledge that will enable you cope in tough circumstances, and over time you will start to see yourself in a new light, with an appreciation for how rare and how crucial your skillset will be for you, your family and friends when real collapse becomes our reality. 

A collapse prepper’s mindset is one of continuous learning and development. Sure, there is a lot about stockpiling and collecting gear, but that isn’t the primary focus. Maybe for those “Tuesday” preppers out there, such is sufficient. They just need to make it through to the return of normal. Us collapse preppers know different. We know that once it is gone, there is no return for “normal.” No, for those of us who are collapse-aware preppers, the real focus is on working to improve our strengths and reduce our weaknesses. We don’t let our mistakes hold us back from growing and improving. Long-term collapse preppers are often skilled at many different things, and this brings confidence and self-esteem, and those are both a major boost to mental health.

Exercise Is Good For Your Mood

Whether you’re hiking, hunting or growing your own food, exercise is good for your mental health. Physical fitness is right up there with skills and knowledge in the collapse prepper hierarchy of priorities, and so in the course of prepping, you are going to be engaging in quite a bit of demanding physical activity. That activity helps reduce anxiety, improve mood, and increase your overall sense of well-being. Exercise releases endorphins in your brain that make you feel better about yourself. It also helps reduce the amount of stress hormones in your body. This helps keep you from feeling overly anxious and irritable. Exercise is a great way to clear your head after a stressful day and is an effective way to work out any pent-up frustration.

Touching Grass Improves Your Mental Wellbeing

There is a lot of research showing that spending time outside can help lower your risk of depression, improve your mood, and increase your creativity. It can also help you to reduce stress and improve your sleep quality. Exposure to natural sunlight has been shown to help release the hormone serotonin, which can reduce feelings of paranoia. Spending time outside can also help reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation, whilst fresh air also has lasting effects on your physical health as well such as positively affecting your blood pressure and reducing your risk of heart disease. It can also help improve your immune system and reduce your risk of certain types of cancers.

Getting away from the demands of work or school, and getting as far outside the city as you can is not only an integral part of coming to learn your own area of operations for a future bug out. It is also key to adapting more to a life away from those comforts of the urban sprawl. Those conveniences are nice, but at the same time they have contributed quite a bit to our current state of mental disrepair. People are actually afraid of the wilderness these days. The thought of being out there all alone makes them want to shut themselves inside. But the truth is that the real dangers aren’t lions and tigers and bears. Oh, no. The real dangerous place to be is the city. This is where you will be at risk of being robbed or run over by a drunk driver. This is where you have to work to pay for a spot to park the car you only own because you need it to get to work…

Being out in the natural world for as much time as you can helps to get you accustomed to that environment, and that means you will be less afraid of having to exist in it post-collapse, and more comfortable with your skills in navigating it. And that will make you feel better and more confident overall.

Being Prepped Reduces Stress and Fear

Prepping helps reduce your overall stress levels by giving you a sense of control. You can’t do much to control the events that happen in the world, and you certainly can’t affect the coming collapse, but you can control how you react to all of it. Knowing that you are ready for anything will help you stay calm in an emergency. Prepping allows you to focus on the positive things you can do to help yourself and how you can avoid dangers.  Many people find it helpful to do something with their hands, like gardening, cooking, or building, when they’re feeling stressed out, and prepping provides ample opportunity for such practical, physical activities.

Also, once you know that you have prepared as much as you can, this takes a huge weight off of your shoulders. You have done what needed to be done, and now you can relax in the knowledge that you are ready. That is why people who call prepping a kind of “fear mongering” really don’t know what they are talking about. Prepping is the opposite of that.

A Unified Community Group Can Have a Big Impact

Prepping offers you the opportunity to form new friendships among other like-minded and collapse aware people, and it can also help strengthen the bonds you already have with your family and close friends as you help take them along on your prepping journey. In working together with like-minded people and sharing the experience, you will have even greater benefits from your achievements and goal fulfillment. So take the opportunity to join a prepping community, mutual assistance group, or other team-oriented collapse-aware people, and build those relationships. It’s also a good idea to look for ways to help others in your community. If and when disasters strike, people can become closer when they’ve been through something difficult together.

Prepping is Power

Finally, there is the idea that being prepared is a kind of power that you can possess over both the system of society, and the world as well. This is the power to be able to walk away. I saved this factor for last because it is extremely important, and I want it to be the last thing on your mind after you read this.

Now more than ever, people are losing their power. They have less and less control over their lives, and a very great deal of the stress and mental anguish people have comes from that. People worry about losing their jobs, about living paycheck-to-paycheck, stressed about what will happen if they get sick or if their home is hit by disaster. So many people are literally stuck in the rat race because they can’t slow down long enough to get off the hamster wheel safely. Two weeks out of work could put many people out on the streets, and that is a huge burden to bear day in and day out. It makes you feel powerless.

The same goes for political worries, in the face of the changes we are seeing, not just here in the United States but across the world. It’s getting downright ridiculous. And being unable to get away from whatever threats might come from it all next is a huge problem.

Prepping alleviates a lot of that, by giving you back your power. The power to walk away. The power to go without and buckle down to endure hardships. And, most importantly, the power to simply bug out and remove yourself from it all entirely. As a collapse prepper, you will get yourself ready for the complete and total collapse of global civilization. Forever. And with that readiness, you will have a very powerful weapon at your disposal: The power to walk away.

At the end of the day (and of the world), that is the most powerful weapon of all.