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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Carney
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.
Modern humans are the very first species since the jellyfish that can almost completely ignore their natural obstacles to survival.
diseases of excess.
Most of these are a reflection of livin longer
Evolution made us seek comfort because comfort was never the norm.
the quick breathing adds oxygen to our blood supply so that, at least until we use it up, we won’t have to rely on the air in our lungs to survive. The autonomic urge to gasp for air is based on the mind’s ordinary programming: oxygen-depleted lungs means it’s time to breathe. My nervous system has not yet realized there is still oxygen in my bloodstream.
During vasoconstriction the limbs get much colder than the core. When the body starts to warm up, it lets blood through the vascular system again. Blood chills as it passes through the cold arms, hands, and feet, and when it eventually circulates back to the heart it lowers the body’s overall core temperature.
They are the gift of millions of generations of incremental biological changes from ancestors whose daily challenges we only have a dim understanding of.
The mouths we have now are in much worse repair than those of early humans.
How long did they live? How many of these problems are functions of age?
But where white fat can serve as an insulator, brown fat has an active role to burn white fat to generate body heat.
Fresh from the womb, infants lack significant musculature and can’t shiver themselves warm. Instead they are usually born with a layer of chubby rolls of insulating white fat.
We’re missing out on what he calls “metabolic winter,” a time when the body adjusts to discomfort and scarcity between times of plenty.
he prescribed himself daily hour-long walks in sub-60 degree temperatures
He’s trying to correct what biological anthropologists call evolutionary mismatch diseases, or, in layman’s terms, what happens to the body when the pace of technology overshadows our fundamental biology.
Every morning before breakfast I’m going to do breathing exercises, followed by breath-hold pushups and a headstand.
When I do work out, it will be outside. For now that means shirtless runs in the sweltering summer heat, but as the seasons gradually progress to fall and winter there will be snow, wind, and hopefully a liberal buffeting of frost. Finally, I’ll take cold showers every morning and, when possible, lie down in the snow
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.
When we talk about this sensation we usually say that we need to take a breath. However, on a physiological level your body wants to expel CO2
The most basic, and, some might argue, most important, goal of meditation is simply to calm the mind and stem the ceaseless stream of thoughts that we have all day.
Almost everyone claims that while some people are able to stand in the snow, they themselves are especially vulnerable to the cold.
Whatever the cold source, the goal is to give your system a little shock. Don’t ease yourself into the frigid waters and wait for your body to acclimatize.
While you’re in this moment of shock and pain, you have two basic goals. First, you need to control your breathing and keep calm.
Once you feel reasonably calm, the second thing you need to master is suppressing your impulse to shiver.
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.
Nonetheless, if you last just 5 minutes your entire body will probably be screaming for relief. Go inside and warm up.
By simply keeping the ambient air temperature that low (and not wearing lots of layers to insulate yourself from it), you will force your body to adopt a different strategy to stay warm.
Whatever you end up doing, you need to get to a place where your ordinary response would be to start shivering, then do everything you can to resist the temptation.
Shirtless runs end up being one of the most comfortable ways to practice the Wim Hof Method.
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. One more thing: Remember to wear sunscreen.
It seems to take about a week of training before your body recruits enough brown fat (BAT) for it to have a meaningful impact on your metabolism.
focus on a specific point on a small ridge on the backside of your skull where the temporal bone and occipital bone meet just behind your ears. Once you’ve pushed all of your muscles up to that point, you then squinch any muscles you have in your scalp and head and pressure downward to the same spot. Essentially you’re trying to pinch this area with muscle contractions.
In other words, I didn’t come to win. I, like millions of other contenders, came to finish.
The body has an internal program that automatically evaluates and responds to the conditions it is working in, but it doesn’t have any way to know on its own what sort of oxygen load it is going to need in the future. It responds to the workload of the moment. When a sudden spike in heavy exertion happens, the body has to play catch-up. When you don’t plan for breathing in a workout, it’s easy to end up with an oxygen deficit.
“We do this now because it’s fun, but we used to do it because we had to survive,” Mandaric says.
I know that every person—even people who have jellyfish spirit animals—hide vast wells of inner strength.
