Putting it another way, she had a plan. That is the third level the Rule of 3’s provides for a basic survival strategy. There are literally hundreds of stories written of amazing survival, from climbers trapped atop blizzard-swept mountain peaks to families trapped in their homes after a storm. These have been studied, and what has been learned from them is that the ones who make it typically do so because early on they came up with some kind of a plan to survive. It could be one that was based on years of professional training and rehearsal, as in the case of a seasoned alpinist or a veteran soldier, or it could simply be something half-baked and impromptu, that was hatched in the moment of crisis. But a plan to survive gave those who were affected a goal to work towards, a reason to keep trying and to keep living. Placing yourself in the proper frame of mind, and then assessing and providing for your essential needs, is a plan to keep living. With it, the nature of the crisis could be anything. The focus is instead on the solution. The crisis itself, whatever it might be, is the unfamiliar environment to which you must adapt.
II: Is it Shelter or is it Warmth? It’s definitely warmth. The basic biology behind it is not that hard to understand. You are a warm-blooded creature, so you need to maintain your body’s core temperature within a narrow range in order to thrive. For homo sapiens, it’s in the high nineties. If your body gets cold and your core temperature goes down just a little, you feel uncomfortably cold, and you put on a sweater. If it gets too cold, you feel very uncomfortable. You begin to shiver, and your body starts doing things like shutting down the blood flow to your extremities, in order to concentrate it more towards your vital organs. Eventually, as you continue to lose body heat and your core temperature drops further, the shivering becomes sustained and uncontrollable. The blood flow to your brain begins to shut down, and you lose the ability to think coherently. You are now well into experiencing hypothermia, and if you don’t act, it will kill you very quickly. The human body is essentially a furnace. In doing its work, it produces the energy needed to maintain its core temperature in one way only: it burns what we eat. So we feed it. As it does its work, it produces and sheds spent energy in the form of heat. There is a reason why the ideal room temperature for humans is about seventy degrees, or almost thirty degrees cooler than the optimal core body temperature. That difference is just about right for shedding the excess warmth at just the right rate. At eighty degrees that process is slowed, and we begin to heat up; at sixty degrees the process becomes too fast, and we begin to get cold. Copyright © 2013 AliveAfterCrisis.com
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