After a recent playdate, a dad friend of mine told me that he and his family would be able to survive off-grid during a national crisis. He’s well prepared for it, in fact. He stockpiles food in barns and frozen meat in freezers. Along with canned goods, long-life milk, rice and grains. He works in cybersecurity and told me that at his second home in Wales, where he has a few acres, he’s got enough supplies – along with solar and diesel power generators – to keep them all safe for a month. He’s also trained his children, ages eight and 11, to shoot, fish and fend for themselves.
“Why not just be ready for all situations?” he said. “The UK hasn’t got contingency measures in place to the extent that we would need for a large-scale alternative plan for clean water, energy and food. [The country] is a lot more fragile than people realise. If a cyberattack does manage to shut down our power supply, most banks and utilities have back-up, but if we run out of power, we lose our phone signal because there’s not enough energy.”
It got me thinking. I stockpile antibiotics just in case. And I do worry about asteroids. But should I be more worried about the state of the world? Just last month, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set their symbolic Doomsday Clock forward one second, making it 89 to midnight – the closest to oblivion it’s ever been. They had much to pull from, they said: the Russia-Ukraine war, conflicts in the Middle East, the threat of nuclear conflict, climate change, the AI arms race, and a looming bird flu pandemic. But is going all out with an underground bunker or a supply of dry food mere common sense, or a sign that you’ve allowed your paranoia to run rampant?
Some prepping sounds sensible. Doing a lot of it surely means living in constant panic mode. Prepping, I learn, can become all-consuming and stems from anxiety and fear. It can be a symptom of underlying mental health conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It could even reflect an addiction to drama.
“Doomsday prepping, at its core, can absolutely be a logical response to uncertainty and fear,” says Dr Scott Lyons, a psychologist and the author of Addicted to Drama: Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others. “After all, preparing for potential crises is a survival instinct.” But he cautions against going too far. “It’s not just about stockpiling supplies, it’s about the emotional charge. The focus on potential disaster can serve as a way for people to avoid deeper, unresolved feelings, or internal chaos. It’s like living in a perpetual state of ‘what if’, which can feel oddly comforting for someone who thrives on intensity or who feels disconnected from themselves.”
For some, this behaviour stems from early experiences of instability or trauma. “If someone grew up in an environment where chaos was the norm, their nervous system might become wired to seek it or even create that same level of activation,” Dr Lyons continues. “It’s not just about being prepared; it’s about staying in a heightened state of readiness, which can feel safer than slowing down and facing the stillness.”
But like any addiction, he points out, it’s about the payoff: “The rush of adrenalin, the sense of purpose, the distraction from discomfort.” There will be an inevitable crash, and that starts the whole process over again.
Dr Adam Fetterman is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, Texas, and in 2019 researched the prepper mindset for the European Association of Personality Psychology. He found that motives for prepping differed from person to person. “One motive is a fear regarding the availability of supplies [or] that humans will not be cooperative in that environment,” he says. “The other motive is the idea or excitement of competing in a survival scenario.” The difference, he adds, between everyday prepping and self-described “preppers” is extremity. Many of us, after all, like to prepare for a rainy day. Some just take it further than that.
“It’s responsible to prep a bit, especially in areas like Huston, where we have to prep for hurricanes,” he says. “We’ve had supply chain issues, as well as prolonged times without power.” However, this doesn’t mean resorting to extreme thinking. “You don’t have to stockpile weapons and not trust our fellow humans.”
Dr Fetterman’s research found that increased belief in the need to prep is associated with a host of factors: religion, conservatism, cynicism, a conspiracy mentality, negative daily experiences, and global political events. For Dr Sarita Robinson, though, it’s just about precaution. The associate dean in the School of Psychology and Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire, and known as “Dr Survival”, she’s spent more than 18 years researching people’s reactions to disasters. She also happens to be a prepper herself. In case she receives the government’s emergency warning alarm that an attack is imminent, she has a three-month supply of food under the stairs, portable power, tons of loo roll, and enough water and purification tablets to last five days. “All the things you might need for 48 hours if you could not return home,” she says.
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She points out that psychological prepping is also important; building your confidence in being able to survive – and being able to adapt. “If one plan doesn’t work, it’s about being able to quickly move to another,” she says. But she adds that people tend to get preppers and survivalists confused. “Some survivalists – like Mad Max types – can take things to extremes, while preppers are actually doing what we should all do and preparing for emergencies. It’s one thing to have a three-month supply of food under the stairs, like me, but quite another to have a nuclear bunker built in your garden.”
Further pandemics are Dr Robinson’s top concern, which tracks with a boom in prepping seen since Covid – “people saw how quickly the world can change”, she says. Unsurprisingly, many companies have started to cash in. The Lincolnshire-based UK Nuke Shelters can build custom-designed bunkers for between £50,000 and £100,000, and they’ve reportedly seen a 300 to 400 per cent increase in inquiries in the past couple of years. Preppers Shop UK in North Cornwall, meanwhile, allows punters to buy portable power generators, freeze-dried meals, gas masks and former military full-body NBC suits, for nuclear, biological and chemical welfare. A best-selling item is the “one-month survival military ration pack supply box”, which includes 60 British military food pouches. A vegan option costs £199.
As for me, I’ve just discovered that a friend’s father has begun prepping for the end of the world at his home in Oxford. It’s slightly reassuring. At least I know where to head now in case of an emergency.
