How do you survive against the world? Naked & Afraid: Global Showdown cast members, professional survivalist KY FURNEAUX and FHM fitness guru, ALEXA TOWERSEY, give us a sneak peek into the latest instalment of the nude reality TV endurance show, and shares a few handy survival tips along the way…
SURVIVING IN THE REAL WORLD
The biggest assumption people make is that there’s always a fixed order to survival, but in reality, it’s less like a checklist and more like a constant assessment.
1 Prioritising food over shelter
Everyone thinks survival is about food. It’s not. Hunger’s loud so it feels urgent. But while exposure may be quiet, it’ll kill you a lot faster. Cold, wind, rain or brutal sun don’t care how tough you are. Once your body loses control of temperature, you’re on borrowed time. Hypothermia doesn’t look dramatic – it looks like bad calls, confusion and then lights out. Heat is just as ruthless. It drains you, scrambles your thinking and shuts you down. You can go 3 weeks without food. You can die in around 3 hours in extreme temperatures.
2 Panic will kill you faster than the environment
In an emergency your mind is your biggest asset, yet the second things go sideways, most people hit the gas. They move faster, think less and start making impulsive decisions. That’s when it falls apart. You burn energy, lose direction, miss the obvious and can turn a small problem into a fatal one. Cue the story about a couple who were so panicked when they got lost that they ran straight over a main road without even noticing.
3 The little things become the big things
We all know the quote, “It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” And it’s true. In the outdoors, survival isn’t just about animal attacks, epic rescues or grand bushcraft shelters. It’s often the smallest things left unchecked that cause the biggest problems. Cuts. Cracks. Blisters. Infection. Constant exposure to moisture. Neglecting these minor details can escalate frighteningly quickly. In survival, your feet are most often your only mode of transportation. A 2cm blister can quickly make it impossible to hike out of a remote area.
4 Leave your ego at the door
To be a great survivalist, you must be able to problem solve. It’s the age-old principle behind “survival of the fittest” – it’s not necessarily the strongest or toughest that survive, but the ones most capable of adapting when conditions change. People get too attached to “the plan,” their role, their idea of toughness or how they think survival should look that they refuse help, ignore warning signs and make emotional decisions instead of practical ones.
5 Drinking your own pee
Blame survival TV for this one. It sounds hardcore, but it’s one of the fastest ways to make a bad situation worse. Urine is waste such as salts and toxins, everything your body is trying to dump. Drink it and you’re just cycling it back through, speeding up dehydration and hammering your kidneys. The only time you should drink your pee is when you are well hydrated and if you are hydrated then you probably won’t be thinking of drinking your pee.
One low-cost thing you can do now that your future self will thank you for
You don’t need a backyard bunker or something you’ve seen online packed with gadgets you don’t know how to use. Just a practical kit that covers your core needs. This is where the simple go-bag comes in.
● Water: a bottle, plus a way to make sourced water safer i.e. tablets or a small filter.
● Shelter: a compact tarp or emergency bivvy.
● Fire: a lighter, plus a backup like matches or a ferro rod.
● Light: headlamp or torch – hands-free matters.
● Basic first aid: nothing fancy – just enough to manage bleeding, burns, and blisters.
● Something for warmth: extra layer, beanie, gloves depending on where you are.
● Food: a couple of spare protein bars or easy prepared camp meals.
And make sure you keep it accessible. In your car. Near your door. Somewhere you can grab it without thinking. If it’s buried in a cupboard at home, it’s useless when you’re stuck on the side of the road.
At the end of the day, most survival situations don’t start in the wilderness. They start in your car. Your home. A road trip that goes wrong. A storm that hits harder than expected. You don’t need to be ready for the apocalypse; you need to be ready for disruption. Because survival doesn’t usually give you a heads-up. It happens fast, it’s messy and it doesn’t care about the skills you almost learned, the knowledge you thought you had or the go-bag you almost put together. Because when things go bad (zombies or otherwise) you don’t rise to the occasion. You
fall back on what you’ve prepared.
Watch Ky and Alexa battle it out on NAKED AND AFRAID: GLOBAL SHOWDOWN Sunday nights at 8pm on HBO Max from June 7
