I went to a bushcraft survival skills day and it gave me so much more than I expected.

It appealed because it is just so different to anything that I normally do, out of my comfort zone and involved things I’d never done before like knife and axe work. I was looking forward to a day outside in nature, learning new things, and having a complete break from the norm. There is also a part of me that finds it very reassuring to learn skills that might be useful in case the world as we know it disappears in a climate change apocalypse… so choosing a day of bushcraft was also sort-of part of a strategy to manage eco-anxiety…

What I hadn’t thought about was how, beyond the practical benefits, bushcraft offers so much more. It shows us ways to cope with the stresses of modern life, trains us to be ready to face unexpected challenges with calm resilience, offers a re-set when life is too much, brings us back to earth when we spiral, and reminds us of what is real, and what matters. As I often work with people on the brink of, in the middle of or recovering from burnout in this stressful world, I was really struck with how valuable this kind of space can be when we need to ground ourselves and re-build.

Our guide was full of wisdom about the importance to our wellbeing of simple things that we have lost sight of: communal eating, getting out of our heads and back to the basics, meeting our needs, spending time outdoors and in nature. I am definitely inspired by the idea of offering reflective coaching-bushcraft blend days in the future (Please tell me you love that idea too!) but in the meantime, much of what the day showed me can be applied to the urban jungle or the chronic survival situation of getting by in life…. Here are some of the things I picked up:

*We learnt how to prepare this water for drinking…*

Give your mind something to do before it finds something itself…

In bushcraft training there are lot of principles and rules like the rule of 3, the 5 priorities, the 3 ‘c’s etc. Our guide said that part of this is simply giving your mind something that it is trained to automatically go to, to occupy it when you find yourself in trouble, so that it stays calm instead of catastrophising, over-thinking, panicking, spiralling, freezing.

The other reason for these rules is that it helps you to prioritise. When we are in ‘fight or flight mode’, we are biologically predisposed to become more threat-aware and on alert, so everything seems urgent and top priority. If you’re like most people with a constant buzz of stress, you might have noticed that your to-do list very quickly gets unwieldly as everything seems to be number one priority. The ‘rule of 3’ and ‘5 priorities’ give you a ready-made guide for prioritising at a time when you are unlikely to be very hot at prioritising. Then you can adapt the list according to the circumstances – for example depending on the weather, finding or making a shelter might be pushed higher or lower in the list.

What go-to thing you can train yourself to work through, to slow down and occupy your brain, and stop yourself from panicking when things go awry?

What should your top priorities be when you are feeling stressed?

You are the first priority: are you in one piece?

If you’re not freezing, panicking or spiralling as above, maybe you’re jumping into action mode and problem solving. This is natural: in survival mode our brain tends to focus on the problem at hand. But in Bushcraft Survival skills you are trained to override that impulse: the first step is to check, Am I OK? Am I in one piece? What do I need? Given that so many of us are in a chronically stressed state, do we ever remember to check in on ourselves, to see if we are intact or if our needs are met? And given that many of us never learned to listen to or respond to our needs, or were trained to ignore them or mask, do we even know how to check in with ourselves?

Bushcraft training recognises that if we are going to keep ourselves out of trouble or solve our predicament, we need to prioritise maintaining our full working capacity. Instead of jumping to problem-solving, you are trained to take a step back from the problem and make sure that you are in a good state to face it.

So many people seem to be living in a chronic survival situation – or at least your nervous system thinks you are. What is going to put you in the best mental and physical position to be able to take on the challenges that you face? And if you never learned, forgot, or replaced it with masking: how can you learn the skill of checking in with yourself, identifying and meeting any needs?

Bring it back to the basics

Our big brains are so blimmin’ clever and they really over-complicate things sometimes. Leaping to interpret and predict and then starting to problem-solve and analyse based on those interpretations and predictions and throwing in some judgements and some explanations and before you know it you’re miles from anything that actually makes sense. So much of what we occupy ourselves with isn’t even real. There is something very grounding about Bushcraft that brings it back to solid, undeniable, concrete reality. Water, food, shelter, things like that. Stuff that when you translate it into normal life (paying the mortgage / rent, cooking dinner for the family, meal-planning) seems to get in the way of life or add to the stress, but in Bushcraft it IS life. I think we need that reframe sometimes.

Pause, disconnect and re-set

Modern society expects us to be on the go all the time and technology seems to have taken this to the extreme. There is something very powerful about the pause, disconnect and re-set. Our guide, unsurprisingly, is a huge fan of spending prolonged periods out in nature, sleeping out under the stars. When do you get to completely disconnect from obligation, having your attention pulled and a constant feeling of not enoughness? If the answer is ‘never’, what small step can you take to change that?

Mindful knifework

One of the great things about knifework, as our trainer explained, is it’s dangerous so you have to focus, you can’t think about other things: it’s mindful. I know I’m not the only one prone to popcorn brain and don’t get me started on rumination. What opportunities can you find to occupy yourself with something challenging enough that it absorbs your attention and gives your mind a chance to cool down?

Seek simple, effortful reward

A lot of things in modern life are either complicated and out of our control, or they offer too big a hit of easy reward that’s not very compatible with the design of our brain’s reward system (like scrolling and soft processed food). Our trainer showed us how lighting a fire is a perfect way to employ a bit of skill, a bit of effort, a bit of patience to get a bit of reward, in a way that our brain can cope with. Do you have many opportunities for activities that offer this satisfying mix to your brain, such as making, learning, building, growing?

Do your own version

This one is not particularly bushcraft-specific but whatever our trainer was demonstrating, he always reminded us to do our own version. He understood that so many people are riddled with performance expectations, self-judgement, comparison and would be berating themselves for not being able to perfectly imitate someone who has been honing his craft for years. So I thought I’d include this reminder: do your own version.

Community

Survival sounds like a lonely thing and at the same time there is also something appealing about the peace and solitude of bushcraft, and something satisfying about having the skills to independently meet your survival needs. On the other hand, our guide also repeatedly emphasised the importance of community. Of course community supports our survival and resilience. And, there is something very fundamentally important and expected from within the core of our primitive guts as human beings to work together and sit around a fire and eat together. Surviving together. How can you nurture your survival community? If you don’t have one, what are the first steps to find or create one?

How are your survival skills? Get in touch for a chat about how 1:1 coaching can support you to sharpen your survival skills (not the bushcraft ones, I am very amateur level…) so that you can face the challenges of life, while making the changes needed to bring you out of chronic survival mode and into living mode. And PLEASE tell me if you want me to develop a collaborative offering with a bushcraft expert! What would you want from it?

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