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Throughout history, some people have chosen to take huge risks. What can we learn from their experiences?

Extreme activities, such as polar exploration, deep-sea diving, mountaineering, space faring, and long-distance sailing, create extraordinary physical and psychological demands. The physical risks, such as freezing, drowning, suffocating or starving, are usually obvious. But the psychological pressures are what make extreme environments truly daunting.

The ability to deal with fear and anxiety is, of course, essential. But people in extremes may endure days or weeks of monotony between the moments of terror. Solo adventurers face loneliness and the risk of psychological breakdown, while those whose mission involves long-term confinement with a small group may experience stressful interpersonal conflict. All of that is on top of the physical hardships like sleep deprivation, pain, hunger, and squalor.

What can the rest of us learn from those hardy individuals who survive and thrive in extreme places? We believe there are many psychological lessons from hard places that can help us all in everyday life. They include the following.

1. Cultivate focus.

Focus – the ability to pay attention to the right things and ignore all distractions, for as long as it takes – is a fundamental skill. Laser-like concentration is obviously essential during hazardous moves on a rock face or a spacewalk. Focus also helps when enduring prolonged hardship, such as on punishing polar treks. A good strategy for dealing with hardship is to focus tightly on the next bite-sized action rather than dwelling on the entire daunting mission.

The ability to focus attention is a much-underestimated skill in everyday life. It helps you get things done and tolerate discomfort. And it is rewarding: when someone is utterly absorbed in a demanding and stretching activity, they experience a satisfying psychological state called ‘flow’ (or being ‘in the zone’). A person in flow feels in control, forgets everyday anxieties, and tends to perform well at the task in hand. The good news is that we can all become better at focusing our attention. One scientifically-proven method is through the regular practice of meditation.

2. Value ‘knowhow’

Focus helps when tackling difficult tasks, but you also need expertise – high levels of skills and knowledge – to perform those tasks well. Expertise underpins effective planning and preparation and enables informed and measured judgements about risks. In high-risk situations experts make more accurate decisions than novices, who may become paralysed with indecision or take rapid, panicky actions that make things worse.

Expertise also helps people in extreme environments to manage stress. Stress occurs when the demands on you exceed your actual or perceived capacity to cope. An effective way of reducing stress, in everyday life as well as extremes, is by increasing your ability to cope by developing high levels of skills and experience.

Developing expertise requires hard work and persistence. But it’s worth the investment – the dividends include better assessment of risk, better decision-making, and less vulnerability to stress.

3. Value sleep.

Getting enough sleep is often difficult in extreme environments, where the physical demands can deprive people of sleep, disrupt their circadian rhythms, or both.

Bad sleep has a range of adverse effects on mental and physical wellbeing, including impairing alertness, judgment, memory, decision-making, and mood. Unsurprisingly, it makes people much more likely to have accidents.

Many of us are chronically sleep deprived in everyday life: we go to bed late, get up early, and experience low-quality sleep in between. Most of us would feel better if we slept more and slept better. So don’t feel guilty about spending more time in bed.

Experts in extreme environments often make use of tactical napping. Research has shown that napping is an effective way of alleviating the adverse consequences of bad sleep. It’s also enjoyable.

4. Be tolerant and tolerable.

Adventures in extreme environments often require small groups of people to be trapped together for months at a time. Even the best of friends can get on each other’s nerves under such circumstances. Social conflict can build rapidly over petty issues. Groups split apart, individuals are ostracised, and simmering tensions may even explode into violence.

When forming a team for an extreme mission, as much emphasis should be placed on team members’ interpersonal skills as on their specialist skills or physical capability. Research shows that team-building exercises – though often mocked – can be an effective way of enhancing teamwork.

Effective teams are alert to mounting tensions. Individuals keep the little annoyances in perspective and respect others’ need for privacy. To survive and thrive in demanding situations, people must learn to be tolerant and tolerable. The same is true in everyday life.

5. Cultivate resilience

Extreme environments are dangerous places where people endure great hardship. They may suffer terrifying accidents or watch others die. Such experiences can be traumatic and, in some cases, cause long-term damage to mental health.

But this is by no means inevitable. Research has shown that many individuals emerge from extreme experiences with greater resilience and a better understanding of their own strengths. By coping with life-threatening situations, they become more self-confident and more appreciative of life.

Resilience is a common quality in everyday life. We tend to underestimate our own ability to cope with stress, and overestimate its adverse consequences. Some stress is good for us and we should not try to avoid it completely.

Featured image credit: Mount Everest, by tpsdave. Public Domain via Pixabay.

The post Five lessons from extreme places appeared first on OUPblog.

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This is the final strip of storyboard graphics for "The Summit."  After taking the time to mull over the previous blog, with its story board and highlighting of interim complications/problems, the current revision of the short story seemed to invite a tightening up.  The beginning of story implied a backstory of having just survived an avalanche, which was dropped.  The characters have enough problems on their hands as is, and it seemed enough to show they're hard-pressed to achieve their goal of reaching the summit.  Similarly, the complications of insufficient supplies of supplementary oxygen tanks, and strains of a failing relationship, furnished enough tension without adding the woman's secret knowledge of a pregnancy discovered just before their expedition.  The story board seemed a good focusing tool for identifying perhaps too many complications, just as it might have been useful to alert the writer of no obvious, central or main complication that could provide ample tension for a reader.

The scene of arriving at the cobblestone altar to Kali on the summit showed a major turning point, with a debilitating decline in the physical condition of the scientist.  The woman, almost physically spent herself, faces the daunting task of getting her incapacitated partner down the stormy mountain--the descent panel.  She takes shelter for the night beneath a canopy of fallen rocks in the "notch,"--see the night shelter panel.  Her partner is now unresponsive and she can only guess at the severity of his condition.  After a fitful night the woman awakens to the early gray light of dawn.  She checks for vital signs of her partner, but other than a still warm body temperature, she doesn't detect any.  Depressed and exhausted she goes in and out of sleep and wakefulness.  In one of her awakenings, she sees a figure at the entrance to her shelter.  At first she perceives it to be their guide, Ranpur, but she gradually becomes aware of all the physical characteristics of the goddess, Kali, blue-skinned, holding a sword and human head.  The Kali figure tells her to leave her partner and descend the mountain.  The woman is frightened and confused--she can't just leave him without knowing if he's dead.  Kali can't be consulted about anything further--she's gone.

The idea for the story arose in part from reading of the disastrous events in 1996 when 15 people died trying to reach the summit of Mt. Everest.  Eight of these people, men and women, died in a confused scenario when three or four parties climbing simultaneously made a series of errors.  In desperate attempts by the survivors to get off the storm swept mountain, partners unable to continue were left behind, whether dead or alive.

And so, the dilemma of our woman character: was it Ranpur, or the product of a stressed out imagination?  Does it matter--should she leave while she still has the strength?  Would the reader?

Well, the story, and the storyboard, were enjoyable to create, and will probably be repeated for some future stories.

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Some writers have only the barest of concepts in mind as they commence a first draft of a story; others prefer to work with a written outline, listing perhaps main characters, the principal and secondary problems, interim resolutions of secondary problems along the way, and a final resolution.  Another idea is to engage the left brain in the conceptual process, and develop a story board before proceeding into the first written draft.  The graphics needn't be elaborate, perhaps using only stick figures for characters and very rough sketches for the rest, but it may stir the imagination and help visualize the sequence of key scenes that are most dramatic in telling the story.  The story board might also alert the writer to how well the arc of tension rises through the story toward some inexorable release in a final resolution of the main problem.

Story boards are most often considered for developing the very short stories of children's picture books, but they can, and have been, used for considering the skeletal structure of longer fiction, including novels.  Whereas the story board might contain a graphic treatment for every page in a child's picture book, it might only show a panel for each major change of setting, or each complication, in the longer forms of fiction.

The partial story board shown above relates to my short story tentatively called, The Summit, which is currently being revised.  The story opens (1) with the three characters, an older scientist, his much younger lover, an engineer, and a local guide.  They are climbing a mid-difficulty peak in northern India.  Their position is precarious, having just survived an avalanche, the westerners are resorting to supplemental oxygen, and the story needs to get moving.  In (2) they face the next challenge on this lesser known route--a steep escarpment requiring some technical climbing.  It seems important not to get bogged down in details here, but to just show the harrowing conditions.  In (3) the climbers take refuge in a small cave on the face to escape worsening weather conditions.  To pass time, the scientist draws his companions into a topic much on his mind, the existence of god.  He's prone to dismiss it as myth, but seems apprehensive of newer complexities uncovered by science that may touch on it.  The engineer offers one of the elementary theological arguments for god, but has little interest in the subject.  She has more immediate concerns--what to do about a recently discovered pregnancy, and an intuition that the relationship is almost over.  The guide simply makes them aware he is a devotee of Kali.  Of course, there's not time to delve very deeply into the god or personal issues, but the idea is  to show a state of mind that sets a course for what follows.  As soon as the weather breaks a bit, the climb resumes.  In (4) the route taken encounters a deep slipped-out region of rock, called 'the notch,' which they must cross on their path to the summit.  The guide disappears during the crossing, and is assumed to have fallen into a crevice somewhere in the notch.

The complete story board for this short story is 8 panels total, and was done to aid the revision process.  The blog for next mont

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