In a survival situation, and indeed in everyday life, it's important to maintain a balance in your body and to keep your mind strong. Without a sharp mind, finding food and resources is exponentially more difficult and you'll quickly find yourself in danger if you don't maintain this balance.

Ready to learn how to decide between sleeping and eating? Read on below.

Laziness, apathy, complaining, small mindedness and negativity are recipes for certain and more immediate death in a survival scenario. Suddenly, with certain death looming just hours or days away, survivors summon an immediate sense of urgency to do whatever they can to live.
In extreme conditions, humans can survive for 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.
I’ve taught many survival courses and it’s common that students will be most concerned about food and eating before shelter and water. I see it all the time. I’ve concluded it’s because we are so conditioned to eat whenever we are hungry. We are conditioned for immediate gratification. For some, a hunger pang alludes to almost certain death by starvation. The human body, however, is incredibly resilient to not eating. In fact, our bodies have an entire physiological survival process in place to deal head-on with starvation and actually prepares for it in advance (our ancestors were not used to eating as much nor as frequently as we do today – hence this built in survival process). We have an internal, instinctual survival back-up plan for starvation. Among other things, it involves using up our fat stores. Consequently, we can go for surprisingly long periods of time without eating and still have no ill effects to our body.
When making everyday life decisions, sleeping well always trumps eating well. AKA – Having peace always trumps any other outcome (financial gain, pride, getting ahead, promotion). Trust me, I’ve made decisions in life and business where I’ve put other interests in front of sleeping well at night and I ALWAYS REGRET THEM. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment or distracted by a ‘hunger pang’ and choose to prioritize eating well over sleeping well. But, just like a real life survival scenario, there are consequences to getting your priorities screwed up. There is nothing that takes the place of internal peace.

We've all gone without sleep, and we've all gone, for a time, without eating. Both are miserable experiences, but once your body adjusts to the lack of food, the hunger pangs evaporate, and it is much easier to focus on things other than what you'll be having for lunch.

Your body cannot adjust to a lack of sleep, however. The longer you go without it, the weaker your resilience will get and the slower your mental processes will become.

As the article says, establish a comfortable shelter, first and foremost. If you find food in the process, great! You'll sleep even better. But finding food will be a much less stressful endeavor knowing you have somewhere to sleep off your meal afterward.

We'd like to thank Creek Stewart for the excellent advice. To read the full article, please click here.