BETTER TOGETHER

SURVIVAL CONSULTANT, EXPEDITION LEADER AND PRODUCER MEGAN HINE ON WHETHER TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE IN AN EXTREME SITUATION…

It totally depends on who you’re stranded with, for a start.

There’s a whole different mix of things. It totally depends on who that person is, and what their skills are like, and what their psychological state is like. Because in theory, we’re social animals. We function better with other people. It’s how we’re programmed.

If you’re stranded with somebody who isn’t going to pull their weight

or gives up – emotions can be quite contagious. If you’re with somebody who’s super-negative, it’s really hard. We know that from everyday life, so you wouldn’t particularly want to be in a survival situation with somebody like that.

In theory, it boosts your chance of survival actually having someone else there,

because you help to keep each other going. It’s a morale booster. It helps bolster your decision-making: it’s always easier when there’s somebody else to bounce your ideas off. With Romancing

The Stone and Indiana Jones, I guess there was that romantic side as well where they maybe distracted each other from the situation. So that’s a positive.

I also find that helping someone else gives you purpose,

and it distracts me from my own suffering as well. I know I’m going to be hungry. I know I’m going to be tired. I know I’m going to be aching. But having somebody else there to focus on, and to be able to look after, actually distracts me from my own feelings. It allows me to focus much more.

It’s very easy in those situations to become quite co-dependent.

Once you start becoming co-dependent, there’s often an imbalance, and kind of a push/pull between two people. And in a survival situation, that can put a huge amount more stress and pressure [on], as it does in everyday life as well. In any survival situation, what you’re trying to do is stay out of the lizard brain – that fight-flight-freeze response – and stay in the much more rational and human part of the brain where logic and decision-making can happen. So anything to be able to do that is really important.

We always glamorise survival

in the TV shows that I make and often in these Hollywood movies. We make it look romantic. But the reality is, when you’re in a survival scenario, you’re going to do whatever it takes to survive. If you’re put in a pair – male, female – if you’re thinking about it in that way, if there’s an imbalance, if you’re the weaker member, or it’s potentially forming or creating some sort of sexual dynamic between you, or it keeps the other person looking after you, or it keeps you together… that does happen.

Each environment has its own challenges.

In a really cold environment, having somebody else there where you can share body heat, is a real bonus. In environments like jungles, there may be predators. It’s good to have a second person there. You can keep watch and stop at nights.

The most annoying film cliché is the obvious one:

how the woman is often portrayed as the weaker member of the team. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to put people into these quite real survival situations, and it’s actually women that often do much better than men. If you look at how our ancestors would have lived, and if you look at a lot of native people, the men really hunt for game. They’re typically – not all tribes, but typically – they were then the warriors as well. So they were conserving energy for those kind of high-energy output activities. Whereas the women were going around, foraging, and hunting for smaller game, and patching up the shelters, and raising the children. And that’s where this whole multitasking thing comes from.

It’s all down to the mental side of things.

A lot of it is psychological. Having survival or bushcraft knowledge obviously gives you an edge, but if your mindset isn’t there, it doesn’t matter, because potentially you’re just going to give up. It’s a fascinating topic because it’s so complex, and it all comes down to the psychology of it all, which is rarely touched upon in these films.

FOR MORE FROM MEGAN HINE, CHECK OUT HER BOOK MIND OF A SURVIVOR, VISIT MEGANHINE.COM OR FIND HER ON INSTAGRAM @MEGAN_HINE