The one truism it seems with most survival-oriented television is that “reality” often takes a back seat to what seems to be a desperate need for ratings.

That reality has led to a lot of bad decisions that were you to do them in a real-life survival situation, you would be much worse off than if you did nothing at all.

Not Conserving Their Energy

In most survival and doomsday shows, people do a lot of walking. There’s nothing wrong with a good walk, but it burns up energy. If you can avoid burning that energy, then your body can use it to produce heat and keep you alive. Since hypothermia is the biggest killer in the wild, saving energy that your body can use to create heat is an important part of your survival strategy.

Drinking Unpurified Water

Many of the most dangerous critters in nature require a microscope to see. They are swimming around in our water supplies, just waiting for a chance to get into our bodies. These microscopic pathogens can be found anywhere, even in the cleanest and clearest mountain streams.

Yet you see people drinking water from those mountain streams, and other untested sources, all the time. This drives me crazy because all they have to do is boil the water to make it safe to drink. But way too many of them drink unpurified water anyway, playing Russian Roulette with their health.

Eating Untested Foods

Not everything you can catch or find is edible. Some types of plants, animals, fish, and shellfish are poisonous. Yet I’ve seen people eat all sorts of things on survival shows, sometimes raw. While a good survival instructor should know what’s edible and what’s not, the people on shows like “Survivor” aren’t survival instructors.

They have no idea what is safe to eat and what isn’t.

There is a process to go through when trying new foods. It’s called the universal edibility test. This allows a stepped exposure to the food source, giving your body a chance to let you know if something is poisonous, before it gets to the point where it will kill you. Yet I have never seen anyone talk about that test on one of those shows. Even people who love these shows usually haven’t heard of it.

By the way, the average person can go quite a while without eating. Yet the average survival show makes it look like you have to find food the first day or you’re not going to make it. If you dumped me off in the woods for a week and told me to survive, I wouldn’t even bother worrying about food. A week is much less than the reserves my body has stored up. Instead, I’d first focus on fire and shelter (see #7).

Forgetting Their Priorities

Survival has a very specific set of priorities. You have to take care of the most important things first or you’re not going to make it. Yet many people focus on things that really aren’t that important, rather than those that are. The most glaring example of this is when people put food before fire and shelter.

Fire and shelter together are what help us maintain our body heat. That’s the number one survival priority. But our stomachs tend to complain pretty loudly when they aren’t filled. So people listen to that complaining and look for food before they build shelter and start a fire. That’s setting themselves up for a lot of trouble, even putting themselves in a dangerous situation.

If you’re going to survive in any wilderness situation, you have to keep your priorities straight. You have to develop a plan and you have to complete that plan. Anything less, puts you in danger.

These mistakes when made under the care (and legal liability) of a television show inevitably have little consequence.

In a real life survival situation, however, they can make you sick, injure you and in the most extreme cases, even kill you.

To see more on survival show mistakes you must avoid if you are dealing with a survival situation, check out the Urban Survival Site.