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

by Michael Easter

With the rise of medicine, we also began believing science would always save us, said Laderman. We now overmedicalize, undergoing more pain and suffering at the end of life for the possibility of delaying death.

“The reduction of life expectancy is a very serious indicator that means there are many underlying factors that are undermining well-being,” he said. “I think that external conditions may be improving in the United States.” He pointed out that our economy is strong and that we have many opportunities and creature comforts. “But the internal conditions in the United States may not be. Because well-being is really a by-product of the interaction between a person’s external and internal conditions. And you can become very brittle and make fatalistic decisions without your internal conditions well maintained.” His work shows that happiness has less to do with external comforts than many Westerners think. And Western scholars agree. Researchers at Stanford noted, “An extraordinary finding that’s been replicated over and over is that once you get past the 25 percent or so poorest countries on earth, where the only question is survival and subsistence, there is no relationship between gross national product, per capita income, any of those things, and levels of happiness.”

“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…’ ” He rattled off more accomplishments that fulfill the American Dream. “But this plan will never materialize perfectly. And even if it does, then what? You don’t settle, you add more items to the checklist. It is the nature of desire to get one thing and immediately want the next thing, and this cycle of accomplishment and acquisitions won’t necessarily make you happy—if you have ten pairs of shoes you want eleven pairs.”

The khenpo then pointed out that by blindly pursuing this checklist, we’re often forced into acts that take us away from that higher reality and happiness.

“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 and mindful,” said the khenpo. “But Americans, they don’t want to hear about the cliff. They don’t think about death. After a funeral they want to get their mind off the death and just eat cake. The Bhutanese, they want to know about the cliff and they will be happy to talk about death and ruin the cake-eating.

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.”

“But when you understand that nothing is permanent you cannot help but follow a better, happier path,” he said. “It calms your mind. You tend not to get overly excited, angry, or critical. With this principle people interact with others and it improves their relationships. They become more grateful and gratuitous. Because they realize all their material goods and status will not matter in the end.”

Nature can be brutal.” Philosophers call this flawed-but-common thinking the “appeal to nature” fallacy. It’s the belief, argument, or rhetorical tactic that proposes that anything “natural” is good, harmonious, and morally correct.

When a person does physical labor their muscles demand more oxygen, which their body must work to deliver. This causes a faster heart rate and heavier breaths, leading to burning sensations in our lungs. When we lift and carry things, the energy-burning by-product lactate builds up in our muscles. This makes them gradually feel like they’re engulfed in flames.

The US government recommends that Americans each week get 150 minutes of what they call “moderate to vigorous physical activity,” or MVPA. Less than half of Americans manage this 20 or so minutes a day of exercise. And, like, vacuuming and mowing the lawn count as MVPA.

Only 20 percent of Americans meet the national guidelines for weekly endurance and strength exercise. And 27 percent of us don’t do any type of physical activity at all. Literally nothing—life as a sort of prolonged shuffle from bed to office chair to sofa to bed.

This, along with our jones for ultraprocessed foods, is why research from the CDC shows that we modern humans are fatter and less muscular than we were a decade ago. Which was when we were fatter and less muscular than we were the decade before that, and so on. Scientists say our impossible laziness—once exceedingly rare—is leading to dangerously low levels of muscle. This condition is called sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass and function, and it’s now creeping into younger populations for the first time in any species in all of history. Humans are slowly becoming as unique for our fatness and lack of fitness as we are for our intelligence. The numbers suggest that our forefathers in just three-quarters of a day logged more activity than most of us now do in a week or two. And they basically stayed at this activity level until they died.

How’d we become the least fit humans of all time? “Technologies often end up reducing our physical activity levels,” said Raichlen.

The first great change in human physicality began with the advent of farming about 13,000 years ago. Studies show that prehistoric farmers, for example, were fitter than their ancestors in some ways but not others. They had stronger upper bodies from grinding grain and tilling soil but relatively weak lower bodies because they covered long distances in search of food less often. But the data shows that early farmers were at least as active as early hunter-gatherers. Most of humanity rather quickly transitioned to farming, and at least 80 percent of civilized people were farmers until the next big shift. The second great change in human fitness began around 1850. It marked the start of the Industrial Revolution, and today just 13.7 percent of jobs require the same heavy work as our past days of farming. Roughly three-quarters of jobs are now sedentary, and we’re sitting more every year. Over the last decade, the average American added another hour of daily sitting. Adults now sit for six and a half hours, while kids sit more than eight (the removal of recess hasn’t helped, either). And we don’t sit like our ancestors, squatting and being forced to move around. We melt into plush chairs that require no muscle activation.

The research shows that anyone can become cold acclimatized. I noticed this with William and Donnie. People who spend a lot of time in colder temperatures, scientists say, are less impacted by temperature extremes. We need a week or two of exposure to reach the point where we feel comfortable in the cold and begin optimizing our cold furnaces. In winter, the scientists recommend people lower their thermostats by three to four degrees each week. This slowly pushes our comfort zone, allowing us to adapt without unnecessary suffering. Then we can stop once we’re living in 64 degrees.

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.”

I’d experienced firsthand the phenomenon first theorized by William James and proven by recent studies, which shows that new events decelerate our perception of time. I found myself applying these two lessons to my everyday life. I was thinking less and noticing more.