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

by Michael Easter

New research shows that depression, anxiety, and feeling like you don’t belong can be linked to being untested.

In fact, Donnie says an easy way to die in the wild is packing the wrong gear. First off, cotton will kill you. When wet, cotton becomes cold, and hypothermia sets in before you can say “I’m c-c-cold….Do you think we’re in t-t-trouble?”

OUR AIRPLANES get smaller, our adventure gets bigger,”

interestingly enough, money doesn’t seem to overcome the rural/urban happiness gap. Studies show that even dirt-poor people who live in rural China report being happier than infinitely wealthier Chinese city-dwellers.

boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’

More than half of adults said they were under “high stress” in 2017. Anxiety grew by 39 percent in a recent one-year period. Attention spans fell by 33 percent from 2000 to 2015. Depression diagnoses are up 33 percent since 2013. Dr. Judson Brewer, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University Medical School, studies addiction, deals with many addicts, and develops methods to get them better. He’s particularly interested in the tie between screen time and our growing mental health issues. “I wouldn’t pin this on mobile technology one hundred percent,” said Brewer. “But I’d say it’s ninety percent due to it.”

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. And then, of course, she ends up checking her likes and comments all day, each time falling into an Instagram blackout where she scrolls her feed to find perfectly edited photos from a frenemy or conspiratorial posts from some glue sniffer she knew back in high school. All the while she’s also seeing a ton of advertising, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is worth about $100 billion. A rule: If you’re not paying for a digital service, YOU are what the company sells. The corporation games the system to take as much of your attention as it can in order to sell it to the highest advertorial bidder.

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.”