The Comfort Crisis Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
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impending
about to happen
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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.
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sleet.
rain with some ice
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grizzly
a type of baar
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ricocheted
rebounded
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maimed
injured
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pummeled
strike repeatedly by fist
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We’re detached from the things that make us feel happy and alive, like connection, being in the natural world, effort, and perseverance.
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impeccably
Fault lessly
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We see gray. And the shade of gray we see depends on all of the other shades that came before it. We adjust expectations.
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“prevalence-induced concept change.”
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When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable.
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Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort.
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strode
walk with decisive steps
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The process is the reward. But a successful outcome makes the process that much more rewarding.
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trudging
Walk slowly
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humans basically evolved from single-celled organisms, into apes, into humans. We are animals. And we are fundamentally hunting and gathering animals.
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ravenous.
Extremely hungry
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the moment where the life cycle ends for one living thing so that it may continue for another.
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“I believe people have innate evolutionary machinery that gets triggered when they go out and do really fucking hard things. When they explore those edges of their comfort zone.”
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Lapsing into flow requires two conditions: The task must stretch a person’s limits and it must have a clear goal.
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New research shows that depression, anxiety, and feeling like you don’t belong can be linked to being untested.
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nothing great in life comes with complete assurance of success.
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“the hero’s journey.” The hero exits the comfort of home for adventure.
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three key elements.
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The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild.
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The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit.
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The third is incorporation. The person completes the challenge and reenters their normal life an improved person.
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masquerades
pretends
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1990 as the beginning of helicopter parenting.
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allowing their children to go outside unsupervised until they were as old as 16, due to unfounded, media-driven fears of kidnapping.
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overwhelmed by negative, stressful things wasn’t good. But it also theorized being totally sheltered shouldn’t be optimal, either.
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stressful experience like misogi, you’re transferring short-term memories into long-term memories
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“We retain experiences that may be of survival value at another time.”
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mauling.
Serious injury
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Who needs to chat up a $100/hour therapist when there are long, quiet, empty trails waiting to be walked?
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The Big Game Animals of North America, a book Donnie considers his bible.
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But learning new skills is also one of the best ways to enhance awareness of the present moment,
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In newness we’re forced into presence and focus.
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A group of roughly 150 people or fewer seems to be an ideal community.
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Dunbar’s number,
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But Kanazawa is more interested in what Dunbar’s number has to do with our desire to flee the city and live in the sticks.
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higher the population density wherever a person is, the less happy they’ll likely be.
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epiphany.
A movement of great revelation.
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Fear is apparently a mindset often felt prior to experience.
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stratus
Featurless
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Solitude is something people generally suck at.
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I’m often wary of being unconnected for too long and my default behavior is to shape my personality to suit what other people will positively respond to.
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Sometimes it’s like I live my life as a reaction to someone else.
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“Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.”
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build a relationship with yourself.
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“The rules for surviving in the wild are shelter first, water second, food last,”
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thickets
dense group of bushes and trees
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stake
Strong wooden post
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chuckle.
Laugh inwardly.
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boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’
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When the participants were bored, a part of their brains called the “default mode network” fired on.
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our attention eventually tires when we overwork it.
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“Three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt,”
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Torrance Test of Creative Thinking,
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“If given a choice, human brains are going to say, ‘Give me something that I can control or predict,’
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shinrin-yoku,
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recluse.
solitary life
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what doses we need across the days, months, and years for the optimal effects.
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people who used their cellphone on the walk saw none of those benefits.”
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magic in 20 minutes.
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20 minutes outside, three times a week, is the dose of nature that most efficiently dropped people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
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“soft fascination.”
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Almost immediately when people are in nature or even see nature they report feeling better and their behavior changes.”
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“Having plants in your office can increase your productivity,”
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Fractals are organized chaos, which our brains apparently dig.
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“the three-day effect.”
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plummet.
Drop at high-speed.
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first day stress and health markers improve,
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day two our mind is settling and awareness is heightening.
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Then day three hits.
Now our senses are completely dialed in and we can reach a fully meditative mode of feeling connected to nature.
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Time in nature is a hell of a way to calm the turbulent sea inside our minds.
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The workers in the loud office said they didn’t feel any more stressed than the workers in the quiet office. But the data said otherwise. Their bodies pumped out significantly more of the stress hormone adrenaline and they completed less work. They were also less motivated to work.
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When your body fat drops enough, your brain responds by making you hungrier while at the same time decreasing how satisfying your meals are.
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discomfort is inherent to physical change
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“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.
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“Processed food is not always junk, but junk is usually processed.
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Hawthorne effect,”
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how people change the way they act when they know they are being watched.
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the gap between how much a person thinks they are eating and how much they are actually eating.
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everyone measures their food somehow. How else would you determine a portion? But they just do it subconsciously, without precision.
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two kinds of stress: acute and chronic.
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Acute stress is an alarm response, like a “jump scare” in a horror movie.
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Chronic stress is less intense but long-lasting.
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Humans and other primates are uniquely predisposed to chronic stress.
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The slow drip of cortisol from chronic stress not only kickstarts reward eating in many people but also erodes their self-restraint. This creates “a potent formula for obesity,” wrote Potenza.
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“The reason I belabor this concept with my clients is because of those mechanoreceptors in our stomachs that communicate with our brains to signal fullness,” Kashey said. “Pretend that in a perfect world it takes one pound of food for these mechanoreceptors to be happy. You can see how a person could leverage this to be full on fewer calories.”
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food that has about five hundred sixty-seven calories per pound.
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A person should mostly be eating unprocessed whole grains*7 and tubers, fruits and vegetables, and lowish-fat animal protein.”
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“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.”
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It’s not low carb or low fat. It’s not vegan or paleo. “It’s eating like a fucking adult,” said Kashey.
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our weight most of the year, then experience periods of gain,
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The mTOR pathway senses whether your body is fed
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autophagy,
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“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.”
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paradoxically, a lack of food typically leads to a surge of energy. “The ability to function at a high level, both physically and mentally, during our extended periods without food may have been of fundamental importance in our evolutionary history,”
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people who stop eating a few hours before bed sleep better, said Panda.
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“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.”
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“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”
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we learn that to see yourself as not always a living person, but also a dying person, is a very important pedagogy of life.
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being overly materialistic leads to unhappiness.
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minimalism looks good on Instagram.
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In other words, whether I’m rich or poor or famous or a nobody, I should avoid becoming caught up in the narratives my mind spits out and just accept the direction of things. This will help me go beyond the checklist and be just fine.
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To not think of death and not prepare for it…this is the root of ignorance.”
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“And those are greed, anger, and ignorance.
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When a person realizes death is imminent, their checklist and everyday bullshit becomes irrelevant and their mind begins to center on that which makes it happy.
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Nothing lasts and, therefore, nothing can be held on to.* By trying to hold on to that which is changing, like our life itself, we ultimately end up suffering.
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“death can come at any time. Any time.”
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“Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation—these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness.
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“central governor theory,” and began conducting research. Over three decades he’s shown that exercise-induced fatigue is predominantly a protective emotion.
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average-size people who are exceedingly strong are said to possess “farm-boy strength.” “Gym strength,” on the other hand, is a criticism of people who look fit but suffer under real physical labor.
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striations
grooves
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Fifty pounds is the heaviest load that allows soldiers to fight like hell, become physically bulletproof, and forge elite strength and endurance.
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Rucking taxes the body’s tactical chassis.
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The tactical chassis is everything between the shoulders and knees:
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Doing physically hard things is an enormous life hack. Do hard things and the rest of life gets easier and you appreciate it all the more,”
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Being out of shape is the new smoking, only worse.
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Exercise helped their other arteries, fought back cancer, made them more robust and slightly better looking when naked, etc.
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Exercise and antidepressants lead to similar brain changes. Both grow the hippocampus, a section of the brain that is often shrunken in depressed people.
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“Endurance exercise is not muscle building, and it probably isn’t even muscle maintaining,”
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Our inactivity seems to mess up our movement patterns and cause muscular imbalances.
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activity with people—that’s foundational. That’s what Homo sapiens evolved to do, and it makes us happy.”
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Without conscious discomfort and purposeful exercise—a forceful push against comfort creep—we’ll only continue to become weaker and sicker.
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movement is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.
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Back pain from “too much” seems to be due to performing one physical activity at the expense of all others.
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Brown fat is a metabolically active tissue. Brown fat in the cold acts like a furnace that burns our white fat (the type we try to lose with diet and exercise) to generate heat.