The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: It’s What You Make Of It

5) Avoid Things That Will Mess With Your Head.

According to Princess, she suffers from ADHD, anxiety, PTSD, and depression, as well as claustrophobia, and explained that these helped contribute to her extremely vivid imagination.

While a couple of these would, sadly, be things she would just have to deal with in a zombie apocalypse, there are a few that can be (And, in her case, were) exacerbated by outside forces.

In Princess’s case, being locked in a boxcar and backhanded by the Commonwealth interrogator only succeeded in fueling her anxiety, PTSD, and claustrophobia. Still, for others, the catalysts might be different, though no less destructive.

Things like extended periods in isolation or sleep deprivation do wonders for setting one’s nerves on edge. The former is great for sewing things like paranoia and delusions, and the latter a great way to generate hallucinations.

Earlier, I asked what would have happened had Princess not been able to stop “Ezekiel” from killing the guard who entered her boxcar. Well, that is an example of just how bad delusions can get and the sort of terrible consequences they could have for you in the apocalypse.

As for hallucinations? It’s bad enough when sleep deprivation has you seeing shadows out of the corners of your eyes, but what if you start seeing things like genuine monsters roaming around? At that point, the zombies will likely seem pleasant by comparison, and you’ll run away from the monsters as hard and as fast as possible, and probably running right into zombies; of course, the former won’t be able to actually hurt you, and the latter most certainly will.

My point? These are things that can be avoided in a zombie apocalypse, maybe not all the time, but they can certainly be avoided some of the time. As I’ve just laid out, this is vital because of the long-term effects these things will have on your mind. At the same time, they may not physically harm you (Though sleep deprivation certainly will, eventually), they can cause you to become so confused and your perception so distorted that they guarantee your premature death.

Bottom line: If you can avoid the things that you know will adversely impact your mind, you should always take the opportunity to do so.

A zombie apocalypse will be a dangerous place, but how each of us perceives it will vary from one person to the next. We have the ability to make it better or worse for ourselves depending on what we do and how we think. The apocalypse will be what we make of it. The question becomes: What will you make of it?

And that’s your Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week! Hopefully, you’ve learned that how well we fare in a zombie apocalypse will depend on how we see it, how we think about it, how those things affect our behavior, and how to make sure they don’t affect it for the worse. If you like this and want something else to help you survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!