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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Carney
Read between
January 20 - January 21, 2019
Instead of softening their feet with shoe or sandal, his rule was to make them hardy through going barefoot. This habit, if practiced, would, as he believed, enable them to scale heights more easily and clamber down precipices with less danger. In fact, with his feet so trained the young Spartan would leap and spring and run faster unshod than another shod in the ordinary way. Instead of making them effeminate with a variety of clothes, his rule was to habituate them to a single garment the whole year through, thinking that so they would be better prepared to withstand the variations of heat
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Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and environmental conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune
Sure we can build skyscrapers, fly airplanes and simply turn up the thermostat to combat the cold, but it turns out that the technologies that we believe are our greatest strengths are also our most tenacious crutches. The things we have made to keep us comfortable are making us weak.
Conscious breathing and mental focus can jump-start a chemical change to alkalize the body, while immersion in cold water creates a mental and physical mirror for seeing ourselves in a state of fight-or-flight. Feeling that change is powerful.
In other words, there’s nothing else to say other than “Breathe, motherfucker.”
The underlying hypothesis of this expedition is that when humans outsource comfort and endurance they inadvertently make their bodies weaker, and that simply reintroducing some common environmental stresses to their daily routines can bring back some of that evolutionary vigor.
With no challenge to overcome, frontier to press, or threat to flee from, the humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated, and understimulated.
Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health.
There is a growing consensus among many scientists and athletes that humans were not built for eternal and effortless homeostasis.
a plunge into ice-cold water not only triggers a number of processes to warm the body, but also tweaks insulin production, tightens the circulatory system, and heightens mental awareness.
This vast and complex network of vessels would extend more than 60,000 miles if laid end to end. In a single day, the 5.6 liters of blood in a human body travels a total of almost 12,000 miles through the system, or almost four times the distance across the United States.
Weak circulatory muscles are a side effect of living in a very narrow band of temperature variation.
In addition to mitochondria, scientists estimate you have more than 10 trillion other microbes in your body, comprising more than 10,000 different species, and accounting for 1 to 3 percent of your body weight.
This book is largely about what happens when we reexamine our relationship with the environment and see ourselves as a part of something bigger than the comfortable spaces we mostly choose to live in. It explores how changing the environment around the body also fundamentally changes the body itself.
What we know about how the human body reacts to cold comes mostly from gruesomely accurate studies that emerged from the Dachau death camp.
Every human alive today lives in a cocoon of consistency: an eternal summer. “We’re overlit, overfed, and overstimulated, and in terms of how long we’ve been on Earth, that’s all new,” he says to me while summer is settling in Alabama. We’re missing out on what he calls “metabolic winter,” a time when the body adjusts to discomfort and scarcity between times of plenty.
Part of the reason humans have gotten weaker as we’ve insulated ourselves with technology is because we don’t experience variety in our daily lives. Make yourself a little uncomfortable, and all of a sudden you might discover that it isn’t nearly as bad as you imagined it might be.
“In the last couple hundred years we’ve put all these barriers on ourselves.” A native of Serbia who nevertheless speaks immaculate English, he starts to impersonate the vast majority of the city of Boston by throwing on a Southie accent. “They’re like, ‘Oh fuck! It’s cold outside. I’m just going to sit at home and be comfortable.’ They don’t realize that the entire human race has been conditioned to think that the outdoors is dangerous. Or that working out in the cold is lunacy. But guess what? This is something that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. We were made for
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