The most consistent finding across survival psychology literature is that maintaining a purpose — a reason to continue, an activity that gives structure to time — is associated with better outcomes in extended survival situations than passivity or purely physical action. Okene’s sustained prayer was, in this framework, exactly the kind of structured, purposeful activity that survival psychology would predict to be adaptive. He was not merely waiting; he was doing something. The prayer gave him a framework for time, a sense of agency, and a cognitive occupation that prevented the mental collapse into despair that is often the precursor to physical collapse in prolonged survival situations.
The practical problem-solving — the makeshift platform, the positioning with his head above water, the use of the flashlight — also fits this pattern. People who survive are frequently described as having a bias toward action: even small, imperfect actions are preferable to waiting passively for external conditions to change. Okene found the lifejackets. He built the platform. He positioned himself. These choices may have extended his physical survival by reducing heat loss and the energy expenditure of treading water, but they likely also mattered psychologically — they were things he could do.
The decision to move toward the diver’s light, twice, in conditions that made moving through flooded, dark, inverted compartments physically challenging — and the adjustment from the first failed attempt to the second successful one — represents the kind of adaptive persistence that survival situations require and that many people are unable to sustain across sixty-plus hours of cold, dark, and hunger.