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

by Michael Easter

Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. 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. But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.

But day by day I embraced the raw discomfort of hard change, and soon the world opened up. I became aware of the beauty of being alive and better understood my role. Before sobriety, for example, all signs seemed to indicate that I was the absolute center of the universe. But upon drying out I realized that I’m just not that damn important in the grand scheme of things. This is a deeply unnerving recognition. But once I started to act on it—admitting that I don’t know things and that I could use some help—I gained some peace and perspective. I began connecting with the people I love in new, deeper ways. I started to find silence, experience calm, and feel OK with myself.

I wasn’t a completely new person and I’d never be confused with Mr. Rogers. But I was more aware, which allowed me to see that I was still surrounded in comfort. I was marinating in the stuff. Except that these were less acutely destructive but potentially more insidious forms of it.

Constant comfort is a radically new thing for us humans.

Sure, modern humans are stressed. More stressed than ever before, according to the American Psychological Association. But we don’t suffer from the type of acute stresses humans fretted over for millions of years. Most of us don’t experience physical stresses like feeling intense hunger, exhaustion from running down food, carrying heavy loads, or exposing ourselves to freak germs and wild temperature swings. Nor do we suffer from mental stresses like wondering where our next meal is coming from, fearing fanged predators, or dreading that a little nick could get infected and kill us off in a week. The Covid-19 pandemic, in fact, was likely the first time that many of us felt our forgotten stresses and realized that humans can still be powerless against the natural world.

But there’s a catch: Because our ancestors dealt with so much discomfort, there were many things they didn’t have to deal with. Namely, the most pressing problems that modern cultures are facing right now. Problems that are making many of our lives unhealthier, unhappier, and less than they could be. Thanks to modern medicine the average person is, yes, living longer than ever. But the data shows that the majority of us are living a greater proportion of our years in ill health, propped up by medications and machines. Life span might be up. But health span is down. Thirty-two percent of Americans are overweight and 38 percent are obese. Eight percent of the latter classify as “extremely obese.” That makes a collective 70 percent of us too heavy.

Nearly a third of us now have diabetes or prediabetes. More than 40 million Americans have mobility problems that hinder them from getting from point A to B. Heart disease kills a quarter of us. These are all medical issues that were essentially nonexistent until the twentieth century. People today are also suffering more and more from diseases of despair: depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide. Overdose deaths in the last two decades are up more than threefold, and the average American is now more likely to kill themselves than ever before. Evidence suggests that suicide didn’t happen throughout nearly all of human history. My high school graduating class of 400, for example, has lost anywhere from 1 to 3 people each year to overdoses or suicides since we earned our diplomas. These diseases of despair caused the US life expectancy to fall in 2016, 2017, and 2018. There hasn’t been a life span drop like this since the period from 1915 to 1918, when World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic united in a symphony of death. 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 det...

connection, being in the natural world, effort, a...

Comforts and conveniences are great. But they haven’t always moved the ball downfield in our most important metric: happy, healthful years. Perhaps existing only in our increasingly overly comfortable, overbuilt environment and always obeying our comfort drives has had unintended consequences and caused us to miss profound human experiences.

As the threatening faces became rare, the study participants began to perceive neutral faces as threatening. When the unethical research proposals became less frequent, people began deeming ambiguous research proposals unethical. 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. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.

So Levari got to the heart of why many people can find an issue in nearly any situation, no matter how good we can have it relative to the grand sweep of humanity. We are always moving

the goalpost. There is, quite literally, a scientific basis for f...

This creep phenomenon applies directly to how we now relate to comfort, said Levari. Call it comfort creep. When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable.

“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.”

“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.”

As a young psychology researcher in the 1960s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noticed something fascinating about artists. They could become completely present and engrossed in their work. In these instances their action and awareness would merge. Random thoughts, bodily sensations like pain or hunger, and even their sense of ego and self would all fade. It was a sort of prolonged Zen in the art of…art.

So he began studying the state, which he eventually named “flow state.” Over Csikszentmihalyi’s career—where he ran the psychology department at the University of Chicago and was president of the American Psychology Association—he interviewed thousands of high-level performers. They ranged from chess players, rock climbers, and painters to surgeons, writers, and Formula 1 drivers. Lapsing into flow requires two conditions: The task must stretch a person’s limits and it must have a clear goal. The flow state, Csikszentmihalyi and the other researchers now believe, is a key driver of happiness and 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.”

“Misogis can show you that you had this latent potential you didn’t realize, and that you can go further than you ever believed. When you put yourself in a challenging environment where you have a good chance of failing, lots of fears fade and things start moving.”

“In our model of misogi, there are only two rules,” said Elliott. “Rule number one is that it has to be really fucking hard. Rule number two is that you can’t die.” 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.” This rule also renders misogi a moving target. One person’s 50 percent is often not the same as another’s.

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

The human mind is programmed to overestimate the consequences of something like screwing up a PowerPoint, because past social failures often got us kicked out of the tribe, after which we’d usually die at the hands of nature, according to those Michigan scientists.

“So this evolutionary machinery we have doesn’t serve us anymore,” Elliott said. “Because I can tell you that nothing great in life comes with complete assurance of success. 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.

“The idea of a rite of passage is that the elders are seeing in you the potential to rise up and achieve this really important, challenging thing that is going to benefit you and everyone around you on many levels,” said Elliott. “They’re saying, ‘We think you’re ready, but you’re really going to have to dig deep and find your shit.’ ”

In 1909 van Gennep wrote a seminal text about these events, which he called The Rites of Passage. (He’s the person who coined the term.) He found that these processes—whether walking around the outback, hunting a lion in Kenya, tripping out on the Columbia River Plateau, or perhaps, even, undergoing a misogi—all have three key elements. 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.

Misogi, Elliott said, is the same. “Misogis are an emotional, spiritual, and psychological challenge that masquerades as a physical challenge.”

Scientists at New York University identify 1990 as the beginning of helicopter parenting.

We’ve now deteriorated from helicopter parenting to snowplow parenting. These parents violently force any and all obstacles out of their child’s path.

“Misogis are inward facing,” he said. “A big part of the value proposition is that I’m going to do something that’s really uncomfortable. I’m going to want to quit. And it’s going to be hard not to quit because no one is watching. But I’m not going to quit because I’m watching.

In newness we’re forced into presence and focus. This is because we can’t anticipate what to expect and how to respond, breaking the trance that leads to life in fast forward. Newness can even slow down our sense of time.

This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids. Everything was new then and we were constantly learning.

Two phenomena help explain this city/country happiness gap. The first is a rather curious number: 150. Consider the following set of figures: 148.4 150 150-200 125 Those numbers represent the population averages of hunter-gatherer tribes, Stone Age groups, villages in ancient Mesopotamia, and ancient Roman military legions. A group of roughly 150 people or fewer seems to be an ideal community. It even has a name, Dunbar’s number, after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who discovered it. As we evolved, groups of fewer than 150 people gave us enough resources to hunt, raise kids, share, and thrive.

The physical and mental health effects of this epidemic are substantial. Scientists at Brigham Young University found that it doesn’t matter how old you are or how much money you have, being lonely increases your risk of dying in the next 7 years by 26 percent. Overall, it can shorten life by 15 years. That’s equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Good relationships are also, according to another study conducted over 80 years by researchers at Harvard, a key ingredient to happiness across your life span. Good relationships beat fortune and fame.

A growing field of scientists today think that these solitude-seekers were onto something. Building “the capacity to be alone” may be just as important for you as forging good relationships. “The capacity to be alone is essentially the ability to be alone with yourself and not feel uncomfortable or like you have to distract yourself,” said Matthew Bowker, PhD, a professor of psychology at Medaille College.

boredom can be pretty damn uncomfortable no matter how healthy you are.

Our brains essentially have two modes, focused and unfocused. Focused mode is a mind at attention. It’s on when we’re processing outside information, completing a task, checking our cellphone, watching TV, listening to a podcast, having a conversation, or anything else that requires us to attend to the outside world. Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

Our collective lack of boredom may be causing us to reach near-crisis levels of mental fatigue. Research shows that the onslaught of screen-based media has created Americans who are “increasingly picky, impatient, distracted, and demanding,” as one media analyst put it. These terms fall under the umbrella of “insufferable.” And overworked, undermaintained minds are linked to depression, life dissatisfaction, the perception that life goes by quicker, and increasingly missing the beauty of life that only presents itself when we allow our mind to wander and be aware of something other than a screen.

“But now people want to say that boredom makes you more creative,” said Danckert. “I call bullshit on that. Boredom doesn’t make you more creative. It just tells you ‘do something!’ ” And when that “something” is letting our mind revive unfocused mode—or sitting down to write a screenplay—rather than blanketing it with the exact same media that everyone else is consuming, we begin to think, quite literally, on a different wavelength. That’s what creativity requires.

They discovered that 20 minutes outside, three times a week, is the dose of nature that most efficiently dropped people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The catch to that study, of course, was that the participants couldn’t take their phones outside with them.

In nature your brain enters a mode Hopman called “soft fascination.” It’s similar to unfocused mode—but with one key difference. “Instead of mind-wandering and lightly focusing inwardly, you’re lightly focusing outwardly on the nature around you,” she said. “You’re taking in all these things in the outside world that are nice to look at. But they’re not overwhelming. Your attention network is turned down, but you’re aware of the outside world.”

When your body fat drops enough, your brain responds by making you hungrier while at the same time decreasing how satisfying your meals are. A team at the NIH recently found that for every two pounds a person loses, for example, their brain unconsciously ramps up their hunger and causes them to eat about 100 more calories. Had our bodies not developed these defense mechanisms, we likely wouldn’t have survived the crucible of evolution.

It’s our inability to persist against the discomfort of hunger—a necessary state for weight loss. Just 3 percent of the people who lose weight in a given year manage to keep it off. Their secret isn’t some special food or exercise no one else has. It’s their ability to get comfortable with discomfort.

“There are basically three reasons,” he said. “The number-one priority is to keep a food safe, the next is to transport it to areas that can’t cultivate their own food, and the third is to maintain the texture, flavor, and mineral and vitamin content in storage. For example, meat starts to spoil if we don’t immediately cool it, cook it, or salt it, which are all forms of processing. Vegetables and grains are often treated with pesticides, cleaned, cut, flash frozen, blanched, or canned to maintain their freshness. So if you think processed food is bad, well, then, tell me what you think would happen if we didn’t process food?”

“Processing food is literally the cornerstone of human civilization. Hunting, foraging, and farming only go so far. It’s keeping food that’s hard.

“Processed food is not always junk, but junk is usually processed. I do think junk food is unhealthy, but it’s not because sugar is ‘toxic’ or any of that nonsense,” he said. “It’s mainly because it’s more calorie dense, less filling, and is more likely to lead someone to overeat and gain weight. And being overweight or obese is one of the largest risk factors for disease.”

Kashey knew that even though weight gain or loss is mainly driven by how much food a person eats, how much food a person eats is driven by everything that is happening in his or her life. Consider: People eat 550 more calories—a whole extra meal—after nights where they sleep just five hours versus eight, according to research conducted at the Mayo Clinic. Another experiment found that 40 percent of people eat significantly more food when they’re stressed. And they’re not bingeing on wheatgrass shots. Stressed people were more likely to snack on M&Ms rather than grapes. That’s thanks to another life-saving evolutionary mechanism. Kashey explained that humans essentially have two reasons for eating. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them real hunger and reward hunger. The first is set off when the body requires food to function. It fills a physiological need. It’s like the body has an empty gas tank. The second is spurred by a psychological or environmental cue. Reward hunger turns on when the body actually needs food and is experiencing real hunger, or else we wouldn’t eat. (This is like sex. If sex weren’t pleasurable, we wouldn’t be as driven to procreate.) But reward hunger also and more frequently pops up by itself, in the absence of real hunger. Because a clock says so, because food eases stress, because we’re celebrating, or because food is simply there and why not eat it? It fills a psychological want. Real hunger is an honest dialogue between the brain and the stomach.

Beyond weight, the trouble with rarely feeling real hunger is that our bodies evolved to leverage lean times for good. Lean times are, in fact, a necessary state for optimizing long-term health. This is because a hungry human body undergoes a sort of cellular natural selection. We fully metabolize our last meal after 12 to 16 hours, depending on how much we ate. That’s when our body releases testosterone, adrenaline, and cortisol: a symphony of hormones that act as signals to burn stored tissues for energy. But we don’t burn our finest tissues. “We get rid of a lot of dead and damaged cells,” said Panda.

But our 15-hour daily eating windows disrupt the process, said Panda. They rob our bodies of the 12 to 16 hours we need to fully metabolize food and lapse into autophagy mode. Or, as the Cedars Sinai scientist put it, “If you eat…before bed, you’re not going to have any autophagy. That means you’re not going to take out the trash, so the cells begin to accumulate more and more debris.”

One scientist calculated the numbers and found that a person’s odds of being alive are 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000 power. The scientist explains that these odds are the same as having a group of 2 million people each roll a trillion-sided die and every roll landing on the same number. Like 550,343,279,007. This figure also doesn’t factor in my luck of being born in a developed country in recent time. Even about a century ago, for example, between 30 and 40 percent of European children died before turning 5. That’s why in 1900 the average life expectancy in the world was 31. Now the world’s average life expectancy is 72.

Yet as modern medicine, comforts, and conveniences have allowed humans more years, we’ve seemingly become less comfortable with death, life’s only guarantee. Eight out of ten Westerners say they feel uncomfortable with death. Only half of people over 65 have considered how they want to die.

Ignoring death wasn’t always the American way, said Gary Laderman, PhD, a death historian at Emory University. “In the nineteenth century and before, Americans were much more intimate with death and it was much more a part of everyday life—death was family and community based. It was homespun and homegrown. When someone died the corpse was right there. “The key turning point is Abraham Lincoln’s death and funeral. Lincoln becomes the most public figure ever to be embalmed, and the process is described in newspapers,” Laderman told me. “Embalming then becomes mainstream and the funeral industry grows and expands. For some it’s the way to keep death distant, a way to not see death or face it.” This coincided with “the rise of the modern hospital. Funerals and hospitals began to kind of take over the process of dying and the dead body,” said Laderman. A sick person goes into the hospital, then to the funeral home, then into the ground—the process is off our hands. “Hospitals leveraged knowledge and expertise to bring death out of its former intimacy.”