The Walking Dead, Survival Rule of The Week: It Just Got REAL

If there’s one thing The Walking Dead teaches us, it’s that if you’re not psychologically ready for it, it’ll destroy you.

I’ve got two more weeks of October to give you some tips to survive the zombie apocalypse and I don’t intend to waste them!

I would be remiss if I didn’t do as much as I could to help you prepare for the zombie apocalypse physically, mentally, and…psychologically.

Did you notice, last night, how shook up The Group was in the aftermath of Negan killing Abraham and Glenn? I certainly did, and that will be the focus of this week’s survival rule.

Rule #104: Brace yourself. Things just got REAL.

The zombie apocalypse will be nothing if not horrific. You will be inundated with death and destruction on a near constant basis. Death will come at the hands of zombies and, very often, the living, too.

And, in either case, chances are it won’t be pretty. It’s unlikely you will see many heroic Hollywood deaths once the zombies show up; They will be brutal, gruesome, and ugly.

Now, I’m obviously not telling you something you don’t already know, chances are, if you’re here, you are pretty well acquainted with the notion of a zombie apocalypse being a brutal event, but, what I want you to do is prepare yourself, psychologically, for that brutality.

Of course, this is easier said than done. I get that. To be honest, I would expect a lot of people to simply say “There’ll be zombies. They’re scary. They’re ugly. People will die. Got it.” and move on. However, I believe that oversimplifying the nature of a zombie apocalypse does you a disservice, and doesn’t truly get your psyche ready (Assuming it even can be) for what’s to come.

Hopefully, I can help with that.

I find it difficult, personally, to try to think of how to give the idea of what a zombie apocalypse could do to you psychologically the gravity it needs…but I will try.

Visualize if you will, for a moment, the worst thing you can think of happening to you personally. Now, I don’t mean someone posting an embarrassing video of you on Youtube kind of “worst thing”, I mean the worst thing you can think of. If you’re thinking of you or a close friend or family member dying in an awful, gruesome way, than you’re on the right track.

Have you imagined it? Okay, now, imagine everyone else and everything else you care about being destroyed. Not gone temporarily, DESTROYED. Completely.

Once you’ve visualized that, gauge your emotions, if you can really put yourself there, you’re probably pretty shook by now.

Good. Now you have some idea of what the zombie apocalypse will be like, and that’s the point. Once you realize that it won’t be all people being super-badass and just getting lucky at every place they scavenge, and that it will really be a horror show, you will be a step ahead of those who don’t. With some prep and a little luck, you may survive when so many get swept in the initial outbreak.

Of course, the zombie apocalypse won’t just be Z-Day, but the weeks and months and years that follow. While that will require a great deal of things, the most important of them is optimism.

Beyond idiocy, nothing kills faster in a zombie apocalypse than hopelessness, and, that’ll spread as much as the zombie virus.

The fact is, even the most prepared person won’t survive if they’ve thrown in the towel. All they’ll be doing is just waiting out the clock. That’s not thriving, that’s not surviving, that just…dying real slowly.

Don’t get confused, I don’t want you to be blind to the world around you, we just went over that, but, I want you to have hope. Remember, so long as you’re walking, and not infected, there’s hope.

I don’t think I can stress enough just how important it is to your survival that you believe you’ll survive.

If you believe, within reason, that you can and will keep going, you’re in infinitely better shape, mentally, than someone who doesn’t. If you believe you’ll survive, you’ll be that much more willing to make the effort to survive, that much more willing to go the extra mile to help your group hold together.

If you believe you will survive, you will fight that much harder to ensure that you do. And if you know how bad things will get, you won’t be naive about how hard that fight can be.

And that’s our survival rule of the week!! Hopefully, it will help you should you ever need it and give you that mental edge that will prove so crucial once the dead start eating everyone.

If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!