The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

by Michael Easter

Stress eating also, according to Potenza, is why most restrictive fad diets fail. Potenza points to a highly influential study conducted by scientists in the UK. It found that fad dieters who faced heavy work stress crumpled and ate the foods that were off-limits, while their coworkers who weren’t fad dieters didn’t eat any differently when stressed. The all-or-nothing approach seems to make the off-limits foods more attractive and rewarding. Other

person should mostly be eating unprocessed whole grains*7 and tubers, fruits and vegetables, and lowish-fat animal protein.”

I was hungry, of course, but I implemented Kashey’s methods. And eventually the hunger faded. Not only do the body’s hunger chemicals normalize after the internal shock of the initial weight loss, but we also expand our comfort zone and realize hunger isn’t an emergency. “Real hunger is seldom the real issue compared to the desire to eat,” said Kashey.

His work shows that happiness has less to do with external comforts than many Westerners think.

asked him why most Bhutanese seem to be so happy, despite the nation not ranking highly in development.

“There are likely many reasons for this,” he said. “We have deep community connections here, but also deep connections to the landscape.” Roughly 70 percent of the Bhutanese live in rural areas, in small communities of about 200 people (recall the Savanna Theory of Happiness). Most people own land.

Bhutanese rank mental and physical health as the most important source of happiness. The obesity rate in Bhutan is just 6 percent.

“We know access to nature is fundamental,” he continued. “It engages all five senses, and you have to experience it daily to be impacted by it. It can help you see yourself through a different perspective.

In Bhutan we learn that to see yourself as not always a living person, but also a dying person, is a very important pedagogy of life. Death here is part of the culture and communication.”

“Most Americans are unaware of how good you have it, and so, many of you are miserable and chasing the wrong things,” he said. “What are these wrong things?” I asked, looking for the pose and tone one should

“You act like life is fulfilling a checklist. ‘I need to get a good wife or husband, then I get a good car, then I get a good house, then I get a promotion, then I get a better car and a better house and I make a name for myself and then…’

That is, until we’ve had them for a moment, which is when we lose interest and the next material desire consumes our mind.

Sogral Rinpoche, in his 1992 work The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, calls this checklist phenomenon “Western laziness.” It consists of “cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues….If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called

‘responsibilities’ accumulate to fill them up….Going on as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself and a pointless distraction.”

if you understand this cycle and nature of mind and you prioritize mindfulness, then

“Mindfulness.”

It’s roughly defined as purposefully paying attention to what’s happening in the present moment without judgment, according to Jon Kabat Zinn,

This is because we apply what we call mindfulness of the body. We remember that everyone is dying right now,” said the khenpo. “Everyone will die. You are not singled out. Do you know this? To not think of death and not prepare for it…this is the root of ignorance.”

“Don’t you want to know that there’s a cliff?” he asked. Because only then can we change our course. We could take a more scenic route, notice the beauty of the trail before it ends, say the things we truly want to say to the people we’re walking it with.

“When you start to understand that death is coming, that the cliff is coming, you see things differently. You change your mental course—you naturally become more compassionate

“we are all dying right now. To develop this mindfulness of death you have to think of mitakpa.”

I’ve experienced that “creep” phenomenon often. Like when a raise that I thought would radically improve my happiness gave me just a fleeting hit of joy. Or when I thought a purchase might change how people would view me and, therefore, make me happier. But in pursuit of sobriety I realized there are roughly five creatures who deeply care about me. Two

The lasting shifts in happiness I’ve experienced haven’t come from anything societally imposed. Not money, degrees, titles, jobs, stuff. They’ve come from shifts in my mental state. Like

“The mind is afflicted with many delusions. But they come down to three,” continued the lama. “And those are greed, anger, and ignorance. When

When a person realizes death is imminent, their checklist and everyday bullshit becomes irrelevant and their mind begins to center on that which makes it happy. Research from Australia found that the top regrets of the dying include not living in the moment, working too often, and living a life the person thinks they should rather than one they truly want to.

Mitakpa is ‘impermanence,’

This, he said, is the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings. It’s the idea that everything

well, impermanent. Nothing lasts and, therefore, nothing can be held on to.*

“But when you understand that nothing is permanent you cannot help but follow a better, happier path,”

Perhaps when we recognize that death is a reality we all must face, we may then realize…that ‘Life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege’ ” (as turn-of-the-century writer G. K. Chesterton put it). Gratitude has been shown to reduce anxiety and even ailments like heart disease.

“You must think of mitakpa three times each day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. You must be curious about your death. You must understand that you don’t know how you will die or where you will die. Just that you will die. And that death can come at any time,” he said. “The ancient monks would remind themselves of this every time they left their meditation cave. I, too, remind myself of this every time I walk out my front door.”

“Hunting is one of the last ways we have to exercise our passion to belong to the earth, to be part of the natural world, to participate in the ecological drama, and to nurture the ember of wilderness within ourselves.” I understand

“In misogi you’ll reach this edge where you are convinced you have nothing left,” he said. “But you’ll keep going anyway. And then you’ll look back and you’ll be way out beyond what you were certain was your edge. You won’t forget that.” The

He describes past humans as “cognitively engaged ‘endurance athletes.’ ” Over time the exercise of mind and body created a symbiotic relationship, where the combination of physical and mental work improved neural responses and brain health.

“If you can consciously put yourself through physical discomfort and understand the higher purpose of it, the ‘why,’ the mental calluses that come along with that create what is called the Well of Fortitude,” he said.

“We sterilize everything. And here we are, more sick, fragile, and depleted,” she said. “We’ve reduced the effectiveness of our immune system in determining what’s actually harmful to us and what’s not,”

Prolonged, repeated bouts at altitude—mountain misogis, perhaps—lead to the most profound changes.

The World Health Organization recently discovered that Icelandic men are the longest living on Earth. Guys from Iceland rack up roughly 81.2 years. That’s 13.2 more years than the global average and 5.2 more years than men in the United States.

Marcus Elliott told me that a critical benefit of misogi is what he called “creating impressions in your scrapbook.” “If you’re seeing and doing all the same things over and over, your scrapbook looks pretty empty when you take inventory of your life,” he said. “So we need to do more novel things to start creating more impressions in our scrapbooks, so we don’t feel like the years are flying by. I mean, you remember every single detail of novel, meaningful experiences. You have no chance to forget them the rest of your life.”

About a 19-mile, open-water Pacific Ocean swim misogi Nelson Parrish said, “As an artist, I thought I knew blue. But that misogi fully immersed me in so many

shades, gradients, vibrancies, and transitions of blue. The water and sky. I now know blue. The experience drastically impacted my ar...