Environment
Situational Awareness and Survival
Making good decisions and taking the right course of action when it matters most
Posted October 10, 2020 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Situational awareness is one of the most important strategies you can use to improve your chances of making good decisions and taking the right course of action when it matters most.
Situational awareness is one of the ways we can train our bodies to react optimally in the face of disaster and other threatening dangers. It’s one of the ways we can interact flexibly with a threatening environment. When our body kicks into fight or flight, our attention narrows, allowing us to “lock-in” on a threat. This is called hyperfocus. But if we aren’t able to eventually zoom back out, we may actually be putting ourselves further in harm’s way. Too much hyperfocus zaps our energy, leaving us fatigued. Another problem with hyperfocus is that you might be zoned in on the wrong object in your environment. It may also blind us from seeing larger threats. That’s why everyone from first responders to military tactical leaders to survivalists swear by what’s called situational awareness.
Situational Awareness Defined
The U.S. Coast Guard Training Manual defines situational awareness as the ability to "identify, process, and comprehend critical elements of information about what is happening...knowing what is going on around you...” The goal of situational awareness is not to try and focus on everything in your environment at once. Rather, the goal is to be attuned to what doesn’t belong.
Situational awareness teaches us to shift our attention to what doesn’t make sense or is out of place in our environment. In many ways, it’s the opposite of our body’s biological fight or flight response. But it is something we can develop through training.
Levels of Situational Awareness
In a research study by the Royal Air Force, crew members were divided into two groups: one received military survival exercises that practiced situational awareness, while the other group did standard drills. Both groups were then tested on their attention skills. As you can imagine, the group who went through the training scored significantly better. According to researchers, we can further unpack situational awareness into three interlinked levels:
- Perception. Scanning and gathering data. The key is to zone in on just the most relevant and important information our surroundings are providing us. Let the rest of the information fall into the background.
- Representation. Understanding and creating our mental model. We do this by matching our observations with our previous experiences. Our models should constantly be evolving. That means they need to be flexible enough to loop in new information as it’s coming in.
- Projection. Thinking ahead and updating our model. You might think of projection as “building the plane while flying it.” In this level, you are trying to anticipate what wrench or resource life might send your way next.
When I first received my driver's license, I remember one of my parents saying, “Watch out for deer.” I grew up in a small rural farming community, and the road near our home were lined with fields and wood areas. It’s common for automobiles to be involved in deer accidents where I grew up because deer survive by blending in with their environment. That’s why in most cases you don’t spot a deer; you spot movement. Suddenly your mind realizes that’s not a mailbox on the side of the road—it’s Bambi. This is an example of situational awareness: We mix the perception of zoning in on the most relevant information (the movement of the deer) with the representation of matching our observations with previous experiences (That doesn’t look like a normal mailbox) with the projection of thinking ahead (I'd better slow down).
Situational awareness can help you interpret and react to a dangerous situation that’s out of the ordinary.
