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

by Michael Easter

I understood the not-dying part, but asked him how he determines if something is hard enough. “We’re generally guided by the idea that you should have a fifty percent chance of success—if you do everything right,” he said. “So if you decided you wanted to run a twenty-five-mile trail, and you’re preparing by working up to a twenty-mile training run and doing thirty-five or forty miles a week of running…that’s not a misogi. Your chance of failure is too low. But if you’ve never run more than ten miles, think you could probably run fifteen, but are iffy on whether you could run twenty…then that twenty-five miles is probably a misogi.”

“Failure even a hundred years ago could mean that you die,” said Elliott. “But people vastly overestimate the consequences of failure today. Failure now is that you fuck up a PowerPoint presentation and your boss gives you a bad look.”

Engaging in an environment where there’s a high probability of failure, even if you execute perfectly, has huge ramifications for helping you lose a fear of failing. Huge ramifications for showing you what your potential is.

My job is to help people prepare for death. I have found that the people who have not thought about death are the ones who have regrets on their deathbeds, because they have not used a necessary tool that could have made them live a fuller life.”

“The mind is afflicted with many delusions. But they come down to three,” continued the lama. “And those are greed, anger, and ignorance. When your mind is not taken care of, these three things have an advantage.

Teddy Roosevelt put it this way: “Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation—these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness;…life

“Endurance exercise is not muscle building, and it probably isn’t even muscle maintaining,” said Kohrt. She served on the federal advisory committee that wrote the report the physical activity guidelines are based on. “This is why we recommended in addition to a hundred and fifty minutes a week of endurance exercise that people also do resistance exercise to build and maintain muscle mass.”