Sean wearing a gas mask while laying on the living room couch.

10 Survival Skills You Can Learn From Your Couch

February 20, 2024

Even if you aren’t a couch potato, you still have to kick up your feet and take it easy every once in a while. Why not learn a few survival skills while you’re at it? The best skills are learned with some blood, sweat, and tears- but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything while just sitting around.

There are plenty of ways to make your downtime on the couch a little more productive. Just spending time with your family and ‘vegging out’ together can be productive, strengthening your family bonds. I’m an avid multitasker, though, so here are my favorite survival skills to learn and practice on the couch:

1. Tie Knots

Knots are about the easiest survival skill you can teach yourself on the couch. You could pull up our Top 10 Survival Knots Guide and go through the visuals and videos.

Once you have those mastered down to muscle memory, try a few of the more advanced knots by picking up a copy of the ultimate knot resource: The ABOK. There are unlimited knots to learn out there, and some have very specific applications. Learning a variety of knots will help you understand the principles of the bight, loop, and turn, letting you start to improvise down the road.

2. Speak Another Language

Speaking multiple languages is very useful every day, but it can also be for survival reasons. Being able to communicate with more people in an emergency is a great skill to have in your pocket.

It is tough learning another language and takes a long time to master, but even simple words and phrases can be useful in a disaster. You may also find it helps during everyday activities, and it can even give you a leg up at your workplace.

If you don’t have the time for a language, you could maybe pick up a code instead. Morse code is very useful in emergencies and can be relayed beyond radio communication by using lights, mirrors, whistles, and more.

The military phonetic alphabet isn’t a code or a language, and is easy to learn with just a little practice. It could help you communicate critical information clearly in an emergency.

3. Lockpicking

Picking locks can get you into safe places, help you find useful resources, and maybe most importantly, help you understand how to prevent your own locks from being picked. If you have never picked a lock before, grab a clear lock and start fiddling with it in your free time.

They are pretty easy to figure out, and then you can go for speed. Once you’ve mastered the clear lock, try a keyed padlock that isn’t clear. Once you master a padlock, you can move on to experimenting with deadbolts.

A starter lockpicking kit will work great for survival purposes once you’ve learned how to use it.

4. Whittling or Bushcraft

Grab a stick and a knife and start making something. Whether you are making something practical, a piece of art, or practicing feathering wood, you can get some good hands-on time while you are on the couch. Both whittling and bushcraft are skills best learned by actually doing them and practicing often.

One of the best ways to start trying your hand at it is to grab a small stick and make a bushcraft ‘try stick’. Put a cloth on your lap so you can clean up the wood shavings easily and not make a mess all over your couch.

18 Essential Knife and Bushcraft Skills: The Try Stick

Watch this video on YouTube

5. Weave a Net

Knowing how to make a net in the wilderness with just rope or string can be a huge help. Sure, you’ll look like an old lady knitting some socks, but the hands-on experience could be invaluable when SHTF. You can then use nets to set traps, as gill nets or drag nets for fishing, to carry stuff, or as a hammock.

You can use paracord to make the net, or fishing line if you are going for more of a gill net setup. The inner strands of paracord are usually easier to work with if you are making a smaller net. Typically, you can string up a line and weave it with the top line taught, but on the couch, it’s a little tougher since everything is slack. If you drape your starting line across your knees and work your way in, it’s a little easier.

6. Identify Plants

Learning how to identify plants is best done in the woods, but books and online sites have a large number of pictures these days. The Edible Wild Plants guide is a low-priced way to learn which plants around you are edible.

Before you go around and start snacking on the stuff growing around your house, you still may want to check with somebody a little more experienced. If you really have to, you can rely on the Universal Edibility Test… but getting familiar with an edible plant guide is a MUCH better option.

7. Identify Fungi

Just like learning about plants, there are several resources on how to identify the different types of fungi in the wild. The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms may be just the book to crack open on the couch and start learning.

I am more of a hands-on learner and haven’t had much success learning wildlife, plants, or fungi from the couch, but some can learn this type of stuff like a sponge. Either way, learning some skills from a book is better than most programs on TV these days.

8. Watch Survival TV

Right after I get done talking about how TV programs are worse than a fungus book, I’m going to suggest you turn it on. Fire up the television set and check out some of the survival shows that are running these days.

Alone, Dual Survival, and anything with Ray Mears are a few that I linger on while flipping through the channels. My family usually finds the situations they find themselves in interesting, and I almost always learn something new or what not to do:

9. Read Prepper Fiction

There are plenty of great books out there, and there is no shortage of fiction focused on surviving catastrophes. There are even a few good free collections that you can find on Amazon.

Be sure to grab them while they are still free because they often don’t stay that way for long. Also, check out our take on One Second After, a novel that sets the bar as far as we’re concerned.

10. Binge YouTube

Let’s face it- you already use YouTube to look up how-tos all the time, so why not use it for survival skills too? There are plenty of creators out there putting their skills on display. It’s entertaining and educational!

We run a top 10 annually, so you can cut through the noise and get straight to the good stuff. Here are our latest:

YouTube isn’t the only game in town- you can also check out other social media platforms. If you curate who you are following, you can get some pretty informative content that isn’t just brain rot:

The 10 Best Preppers on Instagram

The Final Word

Survival skills don’t have to be learned standing up. Try learning a few while you are winding down at night, or while your significant other is watching that TV show you don’t care for.

Prepping and learning don’t have to be hard, and using your downtime is a great way to learn skills you might not otherwise have taken the time to learn. Knowledge is power, and you are never too old to learn. Let us know in the comments the ways you improve your survival skills on the couch.

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