1 – Walk to Improve Physical Fitness

There are no words that can explain just how important physical fitness is for virtually every aspect of human life. Although physical fitness primarily impacts cardiovascular health and the musculoskeletal system, it also greatly improves the functioning of your organs, brain health, and your psyche.

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Fitness Does Not Have To Be Complicated

And the thing is, physical fitness doesn’t have to be complex, drawn out, expensive, or intense. Sure, you can hire a personal trainer if you so wish, but you can improve your overall fitness through small habits.

Walking Is One of the Simplest Preparedness Habits

The most useful one is walking. Start walking everywhere. This doesn’t, of course, mean that you should walk instead of driving to your workplace if it’s five miles away, but if it’s just a mile or so away from your home, why not walk there? You’re saving on gas, you’re conditioning your legs, you’re burning calories, and you’re improving your heart health.

Emergencies May Require Long-Distance Movement

Most importantly, you’re getting used to walking, which is something the majority of the human race has seemingly forgotten how to do. The human body is quite literally designed to walk across vast open spaces; it’s one of the reasons why we developed bipedality (walking on two legs instead of on all fours) and lost all our hair (which helps with sweating, which cools us down and allows us to walk almost indefinitely). In an emergency scenario, you need to be ready to walk across seemingly endless paths, and this is a good way to prepare for that.

Jogging and Running Can Build on That Foundation

Jogging and running are, obviously, the next steps (pun intended), and they also fall into the affordable and simple categories. You don’t have to run a marathon or a half-marathon to improve your overall fitness – just a mile is enough for beginners, and it’s almost certain that a single mile will become too easy for you with time.

2 – Planning and Taking Inventory

A lot of people like to do things impromptu, without planning or thinking ahead. Life is fun that way and that’s fine, but if you ever find yourself in an emergency, knowing every single detail of the situation you’re in is what will provide you with foresight, which, in turn, leads to good decision-making.

Everyday Plans Build Situational Awareness

Similar to how walking improves your overall health, making simple everyday plans improves your overall capacity to control your situation at any given moment and allows you to make split-second changes without having to think about them. 

You Do Not Need a Perfect Plan

So, instead of winging it all the time, why not plan everything? It doesn’t have to be accurate to a T, but know the rough time you’ll be leaving for work, the route you’ll be taking, the exact time you’ll schedule that big meeting, when will you be taking your lunch break, where are you going to have lunch (or, if you’re bringing food from home, what will you make for lunch tomorrow), and everything else.

Thinking Ahead Becomes a Useful Mental Framework

Thinking this much ahead really doesn’t take much effort, but it creates a habit of needing to know everything ahead, and that kind of mental framework can be a huge tool in an emergency.

Inventory Helps You Understand What You Have

Adjacent to this is the principle of taking inventory. Knowing what and how much of something you have, and what its shelf life is, is immensely important in an emergency.

Small Household Checks Can Build the Habit

In everyday, normal life, you don’t have to run an Excel sheet of your food and home supplies, but it’d be good to always keep track of how much fabric softener you have, how much food is there in your fridge, and what the status of gas is in your car.

Inventory Can Also Help Your Budget

Keeping inventory will reflect positively on your budget as you’ll lose less food and cleaning supplies to shelf life, and similarly to planning ahead, it will create the habit of always needing to know the status of your stuff (put extremely simply).

Knowing Your Supply Levels Matters in an Emergency

Knowing when your supplies are dwindling in an emergency will allow you to prioritize them or come up with an alternative.

3 – Explore New Things

We all love our little comfort bubbles, and as we age, we rarely want to explore new stuff. But one of the biggest benefits of exploring new hobbies is that we get to learn new things, and you never know when that knowledge might prove useful.

Sewing Is More Practical Than People Realize

Sewing, for example, is one of the most underappreciated skills among hobbyists. Everyone thinks that, unless you’re a professional tailor, sewing has no real purpose in everyday life, but that couldn’t be further removed from the truth.

Practical Skills Can Transfer to Unexpected Situations

Knowing how to sew means knowing how to engineer clothing, and that can be an extremely valuable skill in an unexpected situation. Furthermore, it translates to more than clothes.

Basic Skills Can Become Survival Skills

There’s a famous scene in First Blood in which John Rambo, after being shot in the shoulder, sews up his wound by himself. Where do you think he learned that? The special military course for wound sewing? No – he knew how to sew before, and he just applied that knowledge to himself instead of his clothes.

Sewing Challenges Outdated Stereotypes

This, if you think about it, is particularly ironic, since John Rambo is a quintessential traditional masculine figure, and sewing is usually considered a feminine hobby.

Learning New Skills Does Not Have To Be Expensive

Does sewing require a particularly high IQ or a lot of money to learn? Absolutely not – all it takes is patience and a little bit of time.

Preparedness Can Come From Many Everyday Hobbies

This is just a single example, but if you think about it, getting into new hobbies opens the door to new skills, and you never know when you’re going to need them. Hiking doesn’t require too much brainpower or money either (you can get military-surplus backpacks for cheap nowadays), nor does gardening, baking, or reading, but they all equip you with a tool you might need tomorrow.

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