The purpose of the research is to study the features of the subject’s predicted choice of security practices in connection with extreme life situations that are significant for him. The main hypothesis was the assumption that the choice of security practices can be associated with the type of extreme situation that initiates it, in such a way that each group of these practices corresponds with a certain type of extreme situations. The research was exploratory in nature. The authors used the methods of incomplete sentence and subjective scaling. A total of 200 university students participated in the study on a voluntary basis. The sample included 118 (59 %) girls and 82 (41 %) boys aged 18–21 years. The respondents identified subjectively significant extreme situations, such as illness, pressure on the psyche, domestic extreme, financial fraud, transport accident, trauma at work, criminal aggression, natural disaster, terrorist attack, destructive social conflict. Factorization has established their semantic grouping into general social, public and private extreme situations. The authors based the study on the selection of the following security practices: normative (compliance with safety instructions, safety memos, following the developed safety rules), socio-­cultural (taking into account the signs of danger, the use of talismans, protective amulets, conducting a ritual of protection against threats) and individual (compliance with the recommendations of significant persons on safety, the use of their own safety rules, their own safety traditions). The authors established on an empirical basis, that the choice of security practices differs depending on the extreme situation that initiates it. The most preferable for students are individual security practices, the least preferable are socio-­cultural ones. The choice of official security practices is more often associated with public extreme situations; the choice of socio-­cultural and individual security practices is more often associated with private extreme situations. The problem has prospects for further research.