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

by Michael Easter

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.

He believes that our collective lack of boredom is not only burning us out and leading to some ill mental health effects, but also muting what boredom is trying to tell us about our mind, emotions, ideas, wants, and needs.

The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we’re handing over to digital media isn’t free. It’s all spent in focused mode. Think of this focused state like lifting a weight, and the unfocused state like resting. When we kill boredom by burying our minds in a phone, TV, or computer, our brain is putting forth a shocking amount of effort. Like trying to do rep after rep after rep of an exercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life overworks the hell out of our brains.

Fogg’s Behavior Model. If that sounds like something menacing that was cooked up in a mind-control lab, that’s because it…kind of was? “Three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt,” wrote Stanford psychologist B. J. Fogg. It’s a formula leveraged by smartphone apps to make them behave like crack cocaine for our attention, and was created by scientists at Stanford’s euphemistically named Behavior Design Lab.

One of his 2007 classes, now known as the Facebook Class, built apps that integrated with Facebook. Over one semester they grabbed 16 million users and a million dollars in ad revenue. Those students went on to work at companies like Facebook, Uber, Twitter, and more—and they took Fogg’s Behavior Model with them.

Take, for example, the fact that notifications in Twitter and likes on Instagram take a few seconds to show up when you open the app. That’s no accident. That brief moment is like waiting for the wheels on a slot machine to line up. It leverages the same biological mechanisms to keep us coming back. These Silicon Valley savants have big data

“I like the simple definition of addiction being ‘continued use despite adverse consequences,’

“cancer is a multifactorial disease that is fueled by a deranged metabolism.” Which is why they concluded that being at a healthy weight was the number-one thing a person could do to prevent cancer.

practical takeaway is important: A person should mostly be eating unprocessed whole grains*7 and tubers, fruits and vegetables, and lowish-fat animal protein.” These foods lead us to the sweet spot where we find a healthy weight and keep meal satisfaction high, he said. “An average plate could be a quarter animal protein, a quarter whole grains or tubers, and half vegetables or fruit. Highly active people might want to do half whole grains or tubers and a quarter vegetables or fruit.”

It’s also one that’s at odds with most fad diets: It’s not low carb or low fat. It’s not vegan or paleo. “It’s eating like a fucking adult,”

He called the idea the “central governor theory,” and began conducting research. Over three decades he’s shown that exercise-induced fatigue is predominantly a protective emotion. It’s a psychological state that has little to do with a person’s physical limits.