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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Carney
Read between
September 10 - December 30, 2018
Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and environmental conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy.
The Western-lifestyle makes it all-too-easy to take nature for granted. All mammals share the same underlying physiology, but somehow humans are so caught up thinking big thoughts with their big minds that they’ve come to believe that they’re different from everything else around them.
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.
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.
Doing things, doing anything, requires a certain amount of energy, and our bodies would rather save up that energy just in case they need it later.
But what is comfort? It’s not really a feeling as much as it is an absence of things that aren’t comfortable.
Every creature, whether it is an amoeba or a great ape, needs motivation to overcome the challenges of the world around it.
Comfort and pleasure are the two most powerful and immediate rewards that exist.
If your pasty-skinned officemate had the ability to travel back in time and meet one of his prehistoric ancestors it would be a very bad idea for him to challenge that caveman to a footrace or a wrestling match.
It doesn’t matter what the weather is like outside—scorching heat, blizzards, thunderstorms, or just fine summer days—a person can wake up long past when the sun rises, eat a breakfast chock-full of fruits flown in from a climate halfway across the globe, head to work in a temperature-controlled car, spend the day in an office, and come home without ever feeling the outside air for more than a few minutes. Modern humans are the very first species since the jellyfish that can almost completely ignore their natural obstacles to survival.
With no challenge to overcome, frontier to press, or threat to flee from, the humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated, and understimulated.
Despite this apparent victory, success over the natural world hasn’t made our bodies stronger. Quite the opposite, in fact: Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health.
The developed world—and, for that matter, much of the developing world—no longer suffers from diseases of deficiency. Instead we get the diseases of excess.
Human biology needs stress—not the sort of stress that damages muscle, gets us eaten by a bear, or degrades our physiques—but the sort of environmental and physical oscillations that invigorates our nervous systems.
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.
The fortitude they find comes from within the body itself. When they forego a few creature comforts and delve more deeply into their own biology they’re becoming more human.
By incorporating environmental training into your daily routine, you will achieve big results in very little time.
Yet no environmental extreme induces as many changes in human physiology as the cold does.
Weak circulatory muscles are a side effect of living in a very narrow band of temperature variation.
In a way, our conscious minds are now so in control of the world we live in that they’ve left our lizard brains out of the loop.
We are still animals. Just very smart ones.
The body that you have isn’t too different from an ant colony.
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.
Despite all of our technology, our bodies are just not ready for a world so completely tamed by our desire for comfort.
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.
After years of exposing himself to the cold, Hof says that he can now operate his arteries much like he could his fingers.
Ultimately, he says, it boils down to how Hof uses his brain. “The brain uses a lot of energy on higher functions that are not essential to survival. By focusing his mind, he can channel that energy to generate body heat,” he speculates.
The scientists learned that Hof, then 51, had built up so much brown fat over the course of his training that he could produce five times more heat energy than the typical 20-year-old—most likely because he repeatedly exposed himself to cold.
It’s strange to think about how quickly a human sense can disappear when it falls into disuse. Even when it is the most defining characteristic of a person, simply not exercising the neural muscle over a short time can make someone entirely dependent on external resources.
The second that the cool water covered their faces, Scholander noticed an immediate and corresponding decrease in their heart rates.
This water-triggered master switch also has uses for landlubbers suffering from anxiety attacks or heart arrhythmia. If you happen to be prone to panic attacks, then submerge your face in ice water at the peak of the attack, which will signal your body to prepare for going underwater and disrupt the heart palpitations.
While Geronimo’s successes are a rare example of indigenous triumph over the juggernaut of Western progress, there are many tales of native healers and shamans who displayed similar abilities.
The invention of technology, as a rule, seems to correlate with a generally weakening of the raw physicality and resilience of our species.
To put it another way, the body you have now would not have been possible had we not invented fire.
In fact, most adults have so little BAT that anatomists didn’t even know it existed in us until the 1970s. However, Steegman argued that Neanderthals were able to deploy the same heating strategies as human infants, and he scanned obscure literature on human physiology to prove it.
It’s not that the levels of BAT naturally decline as humans get older, it’s just that the body learns that it doesn’t need to invest energy into building BAT when it lives in perpetual summerlike conditions indoors.
Studies of the Inuit, Lapps, Kalahara, and Aboriginals reveal that the human body isn’t limited to a single strategy to deal with the environment but can pull from an array of solutions to extreme weather.
Cypess deduced that the very examination rooms where the PET/CT scans happened were ideal for activating BAT. They were abnormally cold, and patients wore only thin hospital gowns when they were in the confines of the machine. Under these conditions BAT was simply doing its job to keep people warm: sucking up fats and sugars from the bloodstream and producing enough heat to light up the PET/CT readouts.
Ray Cronise, a former NASA scientist
Every human alive today lives in a cocoon of consistency: an eternal summer.
We’re missing out on what he calls “metabolic winter,” a time when the body adjusts to discomfort and scarcity between times of plenty.
“The only two animals in the world that suffer chronic obesity are humans and the pets we keep at home,” he says. “There’s a connection.”
Call it what you want: willpower, focus, or concentration. The mental state you go into while trying to delay a sneeze is a sort of wedge between the autonomic and somatic nervous systems at the point where an environmental stimulus meets an innate response.
Freedivers who descend hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean on a single breath sometimes call it the “master switch”: It’s the point where the body meets the mind.
Try to relax instead of tightly clenching up every muscle. Enduring the snow is the same exact mental trick as trying to delay a sneeze or resist being ticklish. Once you feel reasonably calm, the second thing you need to master is suppressing your impulse to shiver.
But your goal here is to command your nervous system to submit to your will. If your body can’t shiver itself warm again or rely on the insulating properties of your white fat, its only remaining option is to start ramping up your metabolism.
The solution is to start breathing hard long before you actually feel the need to. The most obvious application for this technique is with running.
By anticipating what the body is going to do, Hamilton says anyone can tweak their physiology for better performance.
Cold can trigger brown fat production, but it can also initiate a number of other responses throughout the body depending on which biological strategy seems appropriate in the moment.
When there’s too much energy in a system, then that system starts to malfunction.
