There are many things you must anticipate as a prepper. and these include emergency scenarios like societal collapse, famine or even nuclear war.
These events may seem daunting, but preparing before SHTF should help you get your supplies ready in case you are one day forced to deal with a long-term survival scenario.
Below are 12 tips to help you get ready for societal collapse, famine and nuclear war. (h/t to SHTFPlan.com)
Get some of your assets out of the fiat currency system
The fiat system, which is a rigged, debt-based monetary slave system, will crumble when disaster strikes. Learn how to efficiently use valuable currencies like gold, silver and crypto as means of exchange. These assets are more “honest” because no government can artificially inflate their supply, meaning no government can print gold, silver or Bitcoin.
Boost your physical fitness with cardio and strength training
Improve your eating habits and exercise regularly to stay fit. When disaster strikes, being physically fit will give you a significant advantage over non-preppers who are used to a sedentary lifestyle.
Keep in mind that bone density is essential for resilience and survival. You will also need stamina for the heavy physical demands of post-SHTF life.
Do whatever you can right now to increase your strength, endurance and bone density to improve your resiliency. Boost your fitness levels with cardio and strength training. Here are some tips to ensure a safe workout when starting a new routine:
Stay hydrated
Drink plenty of fluids throughout the day to maintain healthy hydration levels. Replenishing fluids during exercise is important for maintaining optimal performance, especially if you are working out in hot temperatures.
When you’re done, hydrating after your workout can help you recover and get you ready for the next training session.
Follow a nutritious diet
Following a balanced diet will help support your fitness program. All food groups are necessary to sustain healthy energy levels and get the most out of your workout. You need carbs because they can fuel your muscles before exercise.
Protein helps improve muscle recovery after exercise, repairs tissue damage and builds muscle mass. Regularly consuming healthy fats has been shown to help burn body fat and preserve muscle fuel during workouts, which helps your energy last longer.
Warm up before exercising
Warming up before your workout will help prevent injuries and improve your athletic performance. Warming up also helps improve your flexibility and reduce soreness after exercising. Start with some aerobic exercises like arm swings, leg kicks and walking lunges.
You can also warm up by doing easy movements of the exercise you’re planning to do, like going on a walk before running.
Cool down after a workout
Cooling down is important because it helps your body return to its normal state. After you exercise, cool down to help restore normal breathing patterns and reduce the chance of muscle soreness. Do some light walking to cool down after aerobic exercise or stretch after resistance training.
Listen to your body
It’s ideal to exercise every day, but if you’re starting a new workout routine, learn your limits. If you feel pain or discomfort while exercising, stop and rest before continuing. Pushing through the pain isn’t recommended because this can cause injuries.
Working out “harder and faster” isn’t always better. While the goal is to become stronger before SHTF, you should start slow to avoid serious injuries. Exercise regularly to make the most of it and improve your strength and stamina.
Learn how to use secure, private messaging technology
Secure your data and communicate using secure apps like Session. The Session app is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that minimizes sensitive metadata.
According to the Session website, the app was “designed and built for people who want absolute privacy and freedom from any form of surveillance.”
If you invest in Bitcoin, learn how to use privacy crypto. You can also boost your data security with Apricorn thumb drives with keypad encryption.
Before SHTF, get sat phones and radio comms as alternative means of communication that don’t rely on cell towers and can’t be used to triangulate your physical location.
Learn to grow and store/preserve food
If your property is secure, grow fruits and vegetables in a home garden, such as:
- Lettuce
- Green beans
- Radishes
- Tomatoes (by transplant, i.e. small nursery plant)
- Zucchini
- Peppers (by transplant)
- Beets
- Carrots
- Chard, kale, or spinach
- Peas
If you don’t have space for a garden or you want to grow more food but in a less obvious way, read up on guerilla gardening.
Acquire non-GMO seeds to use in your garden. Learn food preservation techniques like home canning or drying so you can preserve food for future use. You can also use preserved food for bartering. Ensure your overall wellness by also stocking up on various supplements like vitamin D and zinc.
Secure a reliable water supply at your house and bug-out location
Those in power may use water scarcity to control the population. Stay self-sufficient by securing a water supply in your primary location or your house, and in your secondary location or your bug-out location.
You will also need water treatment solutions such as a gravity filter or a high-quality pump filter/camping filter. If power outages are common in your area, find a reliable way to acquire and filter water without using electricity. Consider sources like surface water, well water and rainwater.
Stock up on off-grid emergency medical supplies and first aid items
If you or someone else in the family has a medical condition, like diabetes or hypertension, find a way to stock up on the necessary prescription medication.
Many medical supplies and first aid items will be very difficult to acquire after SHTF, so stock up on first aid essentials like ivermectin and antiseptic supplies such as povidone-iodine.
Learn how to live without electricity
While there is a very low chance of a total power grid failure, you should prepare for regional, intermittent outages that could plunge many areas of the country into total darkness.
Without electricity, water pumps will stop working. Gas stations will shut down and retail establishments cannot function. You won’t be able to use your refrigerator, freezer and air conditioning.
As the pioneers have proven, you can live without electricity, but it isn’t convenient or easy. Invest in hand tools like hammers and saws so you can build and repair things on your property as needed after SHTF. Get solar charging devices to charge small electronic devices such as cell phones and flashlights.
Practice dressing down
As a prepper you must learn how to be discreet. Be confident, but remain humble. Do not wear or carry signs of visible wealth like branded clothing or expensive bags and jewelry. Don’t drive a luxury vehicle and don’t flash wads of cash when buying groceries. Learn the “gray man” philosophy and blend in. When SHTF, knowing how to disappear or blend in may save your life.
Learn how to defend yourself
Guns are ideal for self-defense and for protecting your family when SHTF. Some say the easiest firearm to learn is a rifle. Meanwhile, others consider pistols as more difficult to deploy and require far more training than using a rifle because a pistol involves mastering sight picture, eye dominance and recoil control.
If you don’t know what kind of firearm to buy, get an AR-15 and a Glock 19. Consider getting ballistic armor if you are worried about violence targeting your household or community. (Related: Survival 101: How to protect your family during civil war.)
Have a bug-out plan
Prepare for the Marxist/communist “Activation Day” scenario and have a detailed bug-out plan. Store enough supplies at your bug-out location so you have a chance at retaking your home or farm if they are overrun after SHTF.
You don’t need to be paranoid, but as a prepper you must be ready to evacuate if needed. If money is an issue, consider getting a crypto “brain wallet” so no one can detect or steal it from you.
Move away from “death zone” cities
If your city is considered a “dead zone,” move as far away as possible. Look for a new location that reflects the culture and rule of law you agree with. Choose a local living area that reflects philosophies of resiliency, self-reliance, honesty, compassion and the right to self-defense.
Keep your passport up to date if you need to travel
Prepare a crypto wallet and memorize the seed phrase so you have a “brain wallet” that you can access from anywhere. Use untraceable privacy coins to protect your privacy and avoid crypto confiscation attempts. Use crypto swap aggregation sites to trade Bitcoin into privacy coins.
Exercise, start a home garden and finalize your bug-out plan so you can survive when SHTF. Watch this video for tips on how to harden your bug-out location.
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More related stories:
- Basic outdoor survival skills that will help you when SHTF.
- 8 Forgotten skills that helped the Native Americans survive harsh times.
- Survival 101: How to prepare for and survive a tornado.
Sources include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.