HOW KEEPING AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE

BY RYAN LEE PRICE

Most people spend their entire day with their head in the clouds, not having the faintest idea of the world around them. They meander down the sidewalk with their eyes on their phones and their ears plugged into music, blind and deaf to everything. Pick-pockets, confidence men, and criminals in general depend on it.

It isn’t that people aren’t concerned with their own safety, they are, but it is a matter of thinking that nothing bad will ever happen to you. It is being complacent in your environment, comfortable in your surroundings and confident that crime only happens in “bad neighborhoods.” Criminals, like lions on the hunt, pick out the weak animal in the herd, the one not likely to fight back. In the human world, it is usually the weak one that lacks situational awareness.

Situational awareness isn’t a practice most people can easily subscribe to, but it affects so much of what you do, from backing out of a parking space to walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood. And best of all, the most important piece of advice in learning to use situational awareness is, simple: Use it all the time.

In general, we are fighting thousands of years of evolutionary adaptation to overcome something our brains have been conditioned to oppose. It is deep in our genetic makeup to quickly identify an immediate threat to our lives, but it is also in our nature to weed out most stimuli our senses receive. Our brain filters most everything and only looks for sudden changes in our surroundings — quick movements, flashes of color or light — and we are conditioned to react to it. The natural human response to a threat is called “fight or flight.”