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December 29, 2024 - January 9, 2025
We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives. And it’s limiting the degree to which we experience our “one wild and precious life,” as poet Mary Oliver put it.
So, yes, we don’t have to deal with discomforts like working for our food, moving hard and heavy each day, feeling deep hunger, and being exposed to the elements. But we do have to deal with the side effects of our comfort: long-term physical and mental health problems.
We lack physical struggles, like having to work hard for our livelihoods. We have too many ways to numb out, like comfort food, cigarettes, alcohol, pills, smartphones, and TV. We’re detached from the things that make us feel happy and alive, like connection, being in the natural world, effort, and perseverance.
He called this “prevalence-induced concept change.” Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.
“If you want to have amazing experiences,” he said as we wove up the trail, the silhouette of towering pines black against the moonlit navy sky, “you have to put yourself in amazing places.” The guy is a far-out mix of Davy Crockett, David Attenborough, and the Dalai Lama.
Most of us still partake in some level of predator-prey relationship. Hunting and gathering. Because most of us still eat meat, and all of us still eat vegetables,” he said. “But we now have the luxury of having all of our hunting and gathering done for us at an industrial scale. If we didn’t have that, I guarantee we’d all still be doing our own hunting and gathering. I think I’m just closer to our original form compared to most people.”
“Look, I know hunting is controversial,” he said. “But if you eat meat, your barrier to entry is likely going into the grocery and swiping a credit card. You don’t know anything about the animal. How it lived, where it came from, or what kind of life it had. Well, I know.”
The Kojiki is a Japanese document commissioned by Empress Genmei in the year AD 711. It’s the oldest living document in Japan. It includes myths, legends, and historical accounts of the Japanese archipelago, the formation of heaven and earth, and the origins of Shinto gods and heroes. The Kojiki’s most epic tale spawned misogi.
Izanagi then dove into a nearby freezing river to purify himself from the degradations of hell. The experience rocketed him into a state of sumikiri, pure clarity of mind and body, and removed all his impurities, weaknesses, and past limits. It made him tougher in mind, body, and spirit.
These modern misogis offer a hard brain, body, and spirit reboot. They help their practitioners smash previous limits and deliver the mindful, centering confidence and competence the Japanese aikido followers were also seeking. Dr. Marcus Elliott pioneered this new brand of misogi. And he’s convinced it works.
The newspaper was profiling Elliott and his work with Luka Doncic, the 2018 NBA Rookie of the Year, All-Star, etc.
“Over our species’ hundreds of thousands of years of evolution,” Elliott said, “it was essential for our survival to do hard shit all the time. To be challenged. And this was without safety nets. These challenges could be from hunts, getting resources for the tribe, moving from summering to wintering grounds, and so on. Each time we took on one of these challenges we’d learn what our potential is.”
“Well, most of us live in this small space right here. We have no idea what exists on the edges of our potential. And by not having any idea what it’s like out on the edge…man, we really miss something vital.”
Enter misogi, a circumnavigation of the edges of human potential.
“Misogis are that same concept. Except for the modern condition. In misogi we’re using the artificial, contrived concept of going out and doing a hard task to mimic these challenges that humans used to face all the time. These challenges that our environment used to naturally show us that we’re so removed from now,” he said. “Then when we return to the Wild West of our everyday lives we are better for it. We have the right tools for the job.”
Nelson Parrish,
“Misogi is not about physical accomplishment,” said Parrish. “It asks, ‘What are you mentally and spiritually willing to put yourself through to be a better human?’ Misogis have allowed me to let go of fear and anxiousness, and you can see that in my work.”
Misogi may uncover the coveted “flow state.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Lapsing into flow requires two conditions: The task must stretch a person’s limits and it must have a clear goal.
growth. It is the opposite of apathy. Csikszentmihalyi wrote that flow has the “potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strengths and complexity of the self.”
If I ended the day fitter or smarter, then it was a good day.”
“Rule number one is that it has to be really fucking hard. Rule number two is that you can’t die.”
New research shows that depression, anxiety,
and feeling like you don’t belong can be linked to being untested.
They say our current fears are often driven by our past lifestyles.
The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild. The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit. The third is incorporation. The person completes the challenge and reenters their normal life an improved person. It’s an exploration and expansion of the edge of a person’s comfort zone.
“Confronting risk, fear or danger produces optimal stress and discomfort, which in turn promotes outcomes such as improved self-esteem, character building, and psychological resilience,” they wrote.
The hot exercise caused “inexplicable changes to the heart’s left ventricle.” This can improve the heart’s health and efficiency. Hot exercise also activates “heat shock proteins” and “BDNF.”
“AS OUR AIRPLANES get smaller, our adventure gets bigger,”
Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD, has spent much of his career considering what happens to humans in our overbuilt, overpopulated environments. He works at the London School of Economics as an evolutionary psychologist, which basically means he studies how our brains came to be and how our new world is changing them.
A call to something untamed seems to exist deep inside humans. The same Gallup Poll found that most Americans today say they’d prefer to live out in the country or in a small country town. Which, considering our drive for survival, doesn’t make a ton of logical sense, right?
It’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
In solitude you can find the unfiltered version of you. People often have breakthroughs where they tap into how they truly feel about a topic and come to some new understanding about themselves, said Bowker.
transform feelings of loneliness into feelings of rich solitude.”
Occasional outdoor aloneness, the research of Kanazawa and others suggests, can be an antidote to the stress imposed by people-packed cities.
The average American each day touches his phone 2,617 times and spends 2 hours and 30 minutes staring at the small screen. If that seems gross, the study also identified a large group of “heavy users” who spent more than 4 hours a day on their phones.
Take, for example, someone posting a selfie to Instagram. The person is clearly motivated to want to know how her followers will react to her photo. Then Instagram triggers her with a notification that someone has commented on her photo. Did they like it, or is it a snarky comment? She then has the ability to check the comment immediately. She can’t not open her phone.
Famed biologist E. O. Wilson developed a theory, called the biophilia hypothesis, which says we have an ingrained call to be in nature that’s in competition with our evolutionary desire to control our environment.
“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction.”
biophilia hypothesis
John Muir in 1901 put it this way: “Nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Other research shows antianxiety medication use rises a relative 28 percent for every 10-decibel increase a neighborhood experiences, and people who live near loud roads are 25 percent more likely to be depressed. Other studies show that background noise also impairs our attention, memory, learning, and interactions with others.
Silence is worth seeking, even if it’s uncomfortable at first. Where can we find unadulterated natural silence? An acoustic ecologist (real job, apparently) named Gordon Hempton traveled the country in search of silence. He now believes that there are only 12 places in the Lower 48 where we can sit for 15 minutes and not hear a single noise created by humans. No droning planes, trains, automobiles. No blaring TVs, cellphones, or radios. Just natural soundscape. Some of these 12 places are spots in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Hawaii’s Haleakala National Park, and
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Bob Dylan even recorded half of Blood on the Tracks
The Japanese call this kuchisabishii, which literally means “lonely mouth” and describes our constant mindless eating. I couldn’t recall the last time I experienced stomach-deep hunger lasting more than a day.
Food insecurity, defined as not having reliable access to food, is a problem in America—particularly among children, who must rely on others to eat. But the much larger problem seems to be an epidemic of too many of us never feeling hungry. As I noted in chapter 3, more than 70 percent of the country is overweight or obese—a figure that’s projected to be 86.2 percent by 2030—and obesity takes an average of 5 to 20 years off a person’s life, according to a study in JAMA.
A team of NIH scientists discovered that racking up 100 extra calories a day—by burning less and/or eating more—over three years adds ten pounds to the average person. That same NIH team recently found that obesity began to skyrocket in 1978, when Americans added an average of 218 extra calories per day (mostly because we snacked more and moved less). That figure alone—the equivalent of 13 tortilla chips—they believe, is enough to explain the boom in obesity.
‘WHAT???’ He told me to ‘embrace the suck.’ Now, yeah, I’m hungry sometimes. It is what it is. I’m OK with being uncomfortable now. I remind myself that I’m safe, have food, and will eat when it’s time to eat.”
He recommended that I distract the discomfort of reward hunger with another form of discomfort: light exercise. “Find some ‘calorie negative’ ways of dealing with stress,” he said. “Walking is my number one. It relieves more stress and is health promoting. It leads you to burn calories rather than onboard them. And it removes you from the situation and adds time for reflection, where you can realize that you weren’t really hungry.”
