The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter 

My key takeaway:

I shouldn't try to always avoid discomfort. I can embrace it and see it as a strengthening force

What changes will I make because of this book?

1. See uncomfortable situations as strengthening moments, not something to run from

2. Do an experiment with rucking

3. Pay more attention to non-phone screen time and control it based on my priorities

Highlights:

• Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.
• Life span might be up. But health span is down.
• That makes a collective 70 percent of us too heavy.
• 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

Comfort creep

• 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
• 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.
• As people make all these relative judgments,” Levari said, “they become less and less satisfied than they used to be with the same thing.”
• 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.
• The critical point, Levari told me, is that this all occurs unconsciously.

Notes: We have a quote that's related to this topic on our wall. It serves to remind us to appreciate the life we currently have:

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not. Remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." - Epicurus

A piece of writing by Seneca might offer a way to battle Comfort creep:

"Let the pallet be a real one, and the coarse cloak; let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. Then, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry she grants enough for our needs

For though water, barley-meal, and crusts of barley-bread, are not a cheerful diet, yet it is the highest kind of pleasure to be able to derive pleasure from this sort of food, and to have reduced one’s needs to that modicum which no unfairness of Fortune can snatch away"

This was taken from Tao of Seneca by Tim Ferriss

Slowing down the passage of time

• But learning new skills is also one of the best ways to enhance awareness of the present moment, with no burning incense, Buddhist mantras, or meditation apps involved.
• Psychologist William James wrote about this in his 1890 work, The Principles of Psychology: “The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older….In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine that we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
• They surveyed groups of people doing things that were either new or old to them. “In all studies,” the scientists wrote, “we found that…people remember duration as being shorter on a routine activity than on a nonroutine activity.”

Notes: This was our experience when we were studying a lot. We often talked about how time seemed to slow down. A couple of days felt like weeks.

Screen time

• The average American each day touches his phone 2,617 times and spends 2 hours and 30 minutes staring at the small screen.
• If that seems gross, the study also identified a large group of “heavy users” who spent more than 4 hours a day on their phones.
• 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. But the average person still spends double the time watching TV than they do on their smartphone.
• Tolstoy had this great quote in Anna Karenina that says boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’ ” said Danckert. “So boredom is a motivational state.”
• 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.
• Steve Jobs famously wouldn’t let his children use the iPad.
• 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. One former Facebook exec told the New York Times that she is “convinced the devil lives in our phones.” Another said that Silicon Valley tools are “ripping apart the social fabric of society.”
• Apps are engineered around Fogg’s Behavior Model
• 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.
• Take, for example, someone posting a selfie to Instagram. The person is clearly motivated to want to know how her followers will react to her photo. Then Instagram triggers her with a notification that someone has commented on her photo. Did they like it, or is it a snarky comment? She then has the ability to check the comment immediately. She can’t not open her phone.
• There’s a trigger, a behavior, and a reward,” said Brewer. “But this brain process can get hijacked in the modern day. The trigger instead of food is boredom. And the behavior is going on YouTube or checking our news feed or Instagram. And that distracts us from the boredom. We become excited and get a hit of dopamine, which is a reward.
• 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.
• Steve Jobs once said, “I’m a big believer in boredom….All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”

Notes: This section of the book made me realize I was fighting the wrong battle. I've focused a lot on making my phone less distracting and even wrote a couple of posts on the topic. But I failed to notice how much time I was spending watching movies and shows.

This is a nice reminder to make a system to control those activities too. We're currently doing an experiment where we blocked all shows and movies on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. We'll se how it goes.

Nature bathing

• More than half of Americans don’t go outside for any type of recreation at all. That includes the simple stuff like walking and jogging. The time we spend outdoors has declined over the past few decades, and American kids play outside 50 percent less than their parents did. Camping in the woods is down about 30 percent since 2006.
• The Japanese government told its citizens to improve their health by forest bathing. They even created parks across the country to do so. Japanese scientists then started to probe whether the tax-funded program had any positive impact. They’ve since published a flood of studies on shinrin-yoku—and pushed biophilia from hypothesis to hard science.
• One of these Japanese studies found that people who spent about 15 minutes sitting in and then walking through nature experienced all kinds of drops in the measurements that doctors care about. Blood pressure readings, heart rates, and stress hormone levels all went down. In another study, people with the highest levels of stress felt a significant drop in anxiety, depression, and hostility after only two hours in the woods.
• In 2016, she led a study that found something as painless as a 20-minute stroll through a city park, like the one we’re in right now, can cause profound changes in the neurological structure of our brains.
• This leaves us feeling calmer and with sharper and more productive, creative minds. “But,” she said, “we found that people who used their cellphone on the walk saw none of those benefits.”
• 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.
• 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.

Rucking

• It seems [our ancestors] had just enough strength for day-to-day tasks,” said Lieberman. “There’s published data that suggest that hunter-gatherers are moderately strong. But they’re not like today’s gym rats in any sense.
• Our most radical strength feats were muscling loads great distances over rough ground. Humans are, in fact, “extreme” in their ability to move items from point A to B, wrote researchers in a study in the journal PLOS One.
• And natural selection over time seems to have picked humans who were the best, most efficient carriers, found a study in the Journal of Anatomy. Carrying, the research suggests, is a driving force behind why we became apex predators.
• Rucking is strength and cardio in one,” McCarthy said. “It’s cardio for the person who hates running, and strength work for the person who hates lifting.”
  “So then what kind of body type does it build?” I asked.
  “We call it super medium,” he said. “Just think of Special Forces guys. We can’t be too thin, but we also can’t be too muscular. Rucking corrects for body type. Have too much fat or muscle? It’ll lean you out. Too skinny? You’ll get stronger and put on some muscle.” This claim was recently confirmed in a study conducted by a team of researchers in Sweden.
• “But based on how voracious I am after a long, heavy ruck, I think it burns more than what many of the studies say,” McCarthy said. “After long rucks in training I would sit down with a jar of peanut butter and eat a third of it. Then I’d pour M&Ms and granola in the jar, mix it, and finish the entire thing. I’d still lose weight.”
• Rucking taxes the body’s tactical chassis. That’s according to Rob Shaul, who owns the Mountain Tactical Institute,
• The tactical chassis is everything between the shoulders and knees: hamstrings, quads, hips, abs, obliques, back, etc. And rucking works this chassis as an integrated system
• Walking is great. All my patients can walk,” she said. “Then if the person walks with a pack with a little weight it’ll increase the challenge and their heart rate.”
  The Pollaks are rucking converts because it takes an approachable exercise like walking and allows a person to increase the strain to their heart incrementally. This in turn dials up their cardio fitness. And the higher a person’s cardio fitness, according to stacks of medical literature, the further that person is from nearly all of the popular ways humans now die.
• Research from the National Cancer Institute and Johns Hopkins suggests that the more a person marinates in exercise-induced discomfort, the more death resistant they’ll be. A massive study discovered that for every small increase in fitness, a person’s risk of keeling over drops by 15 percent.
• McGill is a leading authority on fitness and back health. “It’s no coincidence that the militaries of the world have chosen rucking as the tool to create that physical and mental fusion of toughness,” McGill told McCarthy. “You can push someone and really give them a little bit of toughness exposure without high risk of injury.”
• One analysis found that “27% to 70% of recreational and competitive distance runners sustain an overuse running injury during any 1-year period.”
• Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh, for example, investigated what activities most often injure Special Forces soldiers. Running was the top offender. It caused six times more injuries than rucking.
• Walking’s injury rate is roughly 1 percent. The figure climbs as a person loads a pack. But the risk is comparatively negligible at loads below 50 pounds, according to studies from the British and US militaries. (People who weigh less than 150 pounds may want to use less than 50 pounds, though.)
• The weight in the ruck is also a great equalizer, which also makes it more social,” McCarthy said. “I ruck with my mom all the time. She takes ten pounds. I take fifty. We go the same speed but get the same effect. Outdoor physical activity with people—that’s foundational. That’s what Homo sapiens evolved to do, and it makes us happy.”
• Or adding carrying into our daily routines. Rucking was found not only to have no association with low back pain, it even helped prevent it. The weight pulls people out of the slumped-over position that’s so common among desk workers. And it engages all the core muscles and glute muscles. Strong core and glutes, which become particularly weakened through too much sitting, are two of the best defenses against back pain, according to the Cleveland Clinic and Bowman.

Notes: There's a good podcast episode where the author of the book talks to Peter Attia. They talk about rucking there too, which I found very interesting. The episode is here.