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

by Michael Easter

None of this sounds anything like my safe, comfortable life at home. And that’s the point. Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.

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.

Except that our original comforts were negligible and short-lived, at best. In an uncomfortable world, consistently seeking a sliver of comfort helped us stay alive. Our common problem today is that our environment has changed, but our wiring hasn’t. And this wiring is deeply ingrained.

It wasn’t until the 1920s, when radio was broadcast to the masses, that there was a full-time, brainless escape from boredom. Then came Big TV in the 1950s. Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. And so our imaginations and deep social connections went with it.

In fact, the reason the human body is built the way it is—with arched feet, long leg tendons, sweat glands, and more—is because we evolved to run down prey.

They faced stress. Lots of it. If they didn’t find food, they died. If a lion decided he wanted their food, they died (or ran, or got mauled). If they got too far away from water, they died. If violent weather hit, they died. If they got an infection, they died. If they tripped and fractured a leg, they died. And on and on.

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.

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.

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.

With that in mind, Levari recently conducted a series of studies to find out if the human brain searches for problems even when problems become infrequent or don’t exist.

When he looked at all the data, Levari discovered that humans can’t see black or white. We see gray. And the shade of gray we see depends on all of the other shades that came before it. We adjust expectations.

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.

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 trouble...

What’s more, new comforts have moved the goalpost further away from what we consider an acceptable level of discomfort. Each advancement shrinks our comfort zones. The critical point, Levari told me, is that this all occurs unconsciously. We are terrible at noticing that comfort creep is consuming us, and what it’s doing to us.

“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.”

Zen monks meditate for decades to achieve the state of presence I discovered. My senses converged on that elk and my relation to it. I was aware of the thick texture of its fur and the way it elegantly transitioned from tan to brown to white.

As he inched toward the record, his teammates would remind him that he had only, say, 12 more games with a three-pointer to go. He’d tell them that all he cared about was the next perfect stroke.

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.

“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.”

“We’re generally guided by the idea that you should have a fifty percent chance of success—if you do everything right,” he said.

“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.”

Rites of passage still exist in a few cultures. The Dutch continue to uphold a scouting tradition called “dropping.” It involves blindfolding kids and then dropping them in the woods at night with limited resources to see if they can find their way home.

Scientists at New York University identify 1990 as the beginning of helicopter parenting. The researchers say that’s when many parents stopped allowing their children to go outside unsupervised until they were as old as 16, due to unfounded, media-driven fears of kidnapping.

We’ve now deteriorated from helicopter parenting to snowplow parenting. These parents violently force any and all obstacles out of their child’s path. Preventing kids from exploring their edges is largely thought to be the cause of the abnormally high and growing rates of anxiety and depression in young people.

Compared to the people who’d been sheltered their entire lives, “the people who’d faced some adversity reported better psychological well-being over the several years of the study,” said Seery. “They had higher life satisfaction, and fewer psychological and physical symptoms.

And my exercise in the heat delivered effects I couldn’t get doing biceps curls and treadmill work as I watched Dog the Bounty Hunter down at some climate-controlled Mega Gym.

According to scientists at the University of Oregon, people who exercised in a 100-degree room for ten days, for example, increased their fitness performance markers significantly more than a group who did the exact same workout in an air-conditioned room.

Scientists in the United Kingdom recently found that our brain has a trancelike “autopilot” or “sleepwalking” mode. Once we’ve done something over and over, our mind zones out of whatever old thing it’s doing. Instead of being present and aware, we’re far more likely to be lost somewhere inside our noggin.

We’re planning what we’ll eat for dinner, wondering when the new season of that one show comes out, speculating about our office frenemy’s salary. We live in a state of constant mental churn and meaningless chatter.

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.

Additionally, stepping outside our comfort zone to learn useful skills that require both mind and body alters our brain’s wiring on a deep level. This can increase our productivity and resilience against some diseases.

Learning improves myelination, a process that essentially gives our nervous system a V-8 engine, creating stronger, more efficient nerve signals throughout our brain and body. Brains with more myelin are linked to improved performance across the board. Having too little of the stuff is connected to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

The Japanese government reports that there are half a million young Japanese who refuse to leave their bedrooms.

They are called hikikomori, basically people who have sent themselves into an extended time-out. A third of them have spent more than seven years in self-isolation.

Studies show that even dirt-poor people who live in rural China report being happier than infinitely wealthier Chinese city-dwellers.

The notion that cities depress us is backed by numbers. People who live in cities are 21 percent more likely to suffer from anxiety and 39 percent more likely to suffer from depression than people who live in rural areas.

Kanazawa calls his idea the Savanna Theory of Happiness, and the general rule of thumb is, the higher the population density wherever a person is, the less happy they’ll likely be.

Fear is apparently a mindset often felt prior to experience.

Alaska law stipulates that you can’t hunt on the same day you fly. It’s a perfect piece of legislation designed to prevent hunters from searching for animals while buzzing above the land in a Super Cub plane. “That isn’t hunting,”

The average American each day touches his phone 2,617 times and spends 2 hours and 30 minutes staring at the small screen.

Let’s say I live 60 more years and keep up that pace. I’ll have spent seven and a half years of the rest of my life looking at my phone.

For 2.5 million years, or about 100,000 generations, we had nothing digital in our lives. Now the average person spends 11 hours and 6 minutes a day using digital media. That’s from cellphones, TV, audio, and computers. Smartphones only stand out because they’re newer, actively steal our attention with notifications, and are accessible at anytime.

So all these measures that help us “break up with our phone” are great. Unless we swap our phone time to binge-watch some Netflix series or surf the Internet on our laptop. That’s like quitting smoking Marlboro Reds to pick up chewing Red Man.

When the ideas stopped flowing, when the return on my time had worn thin, my mind would go somewhere else. Thinking of friends I needed to call, and on and on, to new places far more interesting or productive than anything I’ve found inside an app.

A massive swell of Silicon Valley workers who develop mobile tech and apps don’t allow themselves or their kids to use the Valley’s products.

If we feel something unpleasant, like boredom, typically we would have to just be with that unpleasantness, and then we’d find a productive outlet. But we don’t have to do that anymore. We can use our phone to distract ourselves.” Or, as Danckert put it, we simply consume more “junk food for the mind.”

Sorkin’s takeaway is that we should learn to deal with boredom, and then discover ways to overcome it that are more productive and creative than watching a YouTube video or scrolling through Instagram.

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.