(Warning, long windbag reply ahead, sorry)
One problem for a lot of folks when they are put in a wilderness survival situation is that they have never experienced anything remotely close to it in their lives before. We live such "comfortable" lives, that most people have never spent a night out, let alone an extended stay, with just what's in their pockets, and their brain. When they are put in a Man vs Wild scenario, they are facing not just survival, but, all of the shock, confusion, fear, anger, etc that comes with being in a new and uncomfortable situation.

I think one of the best things we can do is to occasionally put ourselves into scenarios that take us out of our "comfort zone", and see what we can do to make things a little better. Sometimes you try to put yourself in a situation, other times it throws itself on you.

The first time I had to spend the night out with just what was on me I was about 17 I think (many moons ago) on a "walk" in the mountains. We had all just gotten our drivers licenses recently, and went to NH for the weekend. One guy in our small group of 4 had managed to twist an ankle,(later discovered to be broken) and dislocate a shoulder. Yeah, it was a fall on rocks, probably after trying to leap from rock to rock like Superman, rather than climb... Anyway, it was late enough in the day, getting dark, etc, and he couldn't move very well at all. We decided it was better to try to make a fire, get comfortable, and spend the night. We'd improvise a way to splint up his foot, tie his shoulder/arm to his chest, and walk out in the morning when we could see better and take our time. It was a very long night, no sleeping bags, no tent, minimal food, just a couple Snickers bars or something like that. We did have a stream nearby, and at that time, we didn't worry about water quality, so water was no problem. Fortunately one of the guys had a lighter, and we did all had pocket knives I think.

I wish we had a picture of the lean-to that we made in front of the fire, I bet you'd get a good laugh out of it. Still, I did sleep, a little, more like passing out. Eventually, the exhaustion overcomes the mosquitoes buzzing your ears. Our campsite must have looked like a forest fire, we just kept building a bigger fire with deadfall branches, it didn't really keep us that much warmer, but, it felt better, and the smoke helped with the bugs. We're lucky we didn't set the White Mountain National Forest on fire that night.

When I see those guys now, we still laugh about that night, and it was, as I said, many moons ago. This was before cell phones, sat phones, GPS, EPIRB, PLB etc. Of course, nobody knew we were missing, we left no notes, we were away for the weekend. Our parents would have eventually figured out that we didn't come home Sunday night... it would have been interesting if the situation had been more severe, rather than just uncomfortable.

At the time, we were all near the end of our years in Boy Scouts, but, this was not a Scout trip. If it were, none of this would have happened probably, because we wouldn't have still been on the trail that late, would have had a larger group, better equipped, and one of the adults would have told us to stop jumping between the boulders, probably, before my buddy got hurt. We were smart enough to know what we should do and bring, but, young enough to still ignore what we knew to be appropriate. Still, it was because of all those prior trips with my Troop, when we learned how to improvise shelter, get a fire going, make splints, etc, that we were able to make ourselves somewhat comfortable.

When I was a kid, and took long walks in the Maine woods with my grandfather in the summers, he would invariably drop something into the conversation like, "what would you do if you had to sleep here tonight?", "if I broke my leg right now, on our walk, what would you do?", "if I hit my head on a rock...", "if we lost our compass...", "if you were separated from me...", etc. He was always making me think about how quickly things can change from comfortable and familiar to somthing different. I think it's a mentality that helps the survivor.

Since those days as a young lad with a skull full of mush, I've had the "opportunity" to spend the night out with just what's in my pockets or daypack a few more times, sometimes by design, sometimes because of problems. I was the leader on one of them by design. The rest of the time, I just found myself in the position of leader, or maybe a better word is coach. People want to have something to do, to take their mind off a difficult reality. You can coach them through it, by having a role for everyone. They always have to have something they can do that moves them closer to where they want to be; they can focus on that, rather than the bugs, cold, rain, etc.

I better stop now, before I fill up the disk on the ETS server, sorry. (This is a topic near and dear to me, I am constantly trying to coach my crop of 20 or so young Scouts on this all the time.) Thanks for listening.