In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.
Link: https://eastermichael.com/book/
I really enjoyed this book! I hadn’t heard of Michael Easter before, so this was my introduction. Frankly, it read very “bro-ish”, but I don’t mean that in a disparaging way at all. I feel like if you read title and summary without cringing, you’ll probably like the book too.
The book touches on a lot of feelings that I’ve felt before, the big one being doing hard things is important. When mentoring other software engineers, I often find myself reminding them that the gnashing of teeth is an important learning step in actually figuring things out. The tl;dr I guess is that if you don’t try and push your limits, you’ll never figure out what those limits are.
Michael expounds on that idea in much more detail, giving lots of specific examples of how and why he thinks this is the Way. He talks about specific ways in which the lack of challenge in our lives is affecting us negatively, and I don’t think I disagree with any of the sentiments.
Kindle Highlights
“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.” — location: 609 ^ref-64777
The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild. The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit. The third is incorporation. The person completes the challenge and reenters their normal life an improved person. It’s an exploration and expansion of the edge of a person’s comfort zone. — location: 688 ^ref-8098
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.” — location: 956 ^ref-4164
Fear is apparently a mindset often felt prior to experience. — location: 1095 ^ref-14705
Indeed, the problem—as with all foods that come from the earth—is with us and our drive to turn natural foods into dopamine-jacking comfort foods. — location: 2405 ^ref-37437
This is why popular “intuitive eating” programs usually fail. Our hardwired intuition tells us to eat in a way that fattens us. “Humans are programmed to prepare for the future. More of any resource is favorable to less of any resource,” said Kashey. “Overcoming that, therefore, means thinking and acting purposefully, in direct opposition to intuition.” This explains why Kashey has clients track food with data rather than feelings. — location: 2424 ^ref-1166
data shows that we don’t typically gain weight in a linear fashion, like a quarter pound each month for a total of three pounds at the end of the year. Most of us maintain our weight most of the year, then experience periods of gain, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. — location: 2457 ^ref-14859
In 1992, David Sabatini, PhD, MD, a biologist at MIT, discovered what’s called the mTOR pathway. He told me to think of it as a general contractor, signaling to the body to demolish its old cells and replace them with newer, healthier ones. The body’s oldest cells have all sorts of problems and are implicated in many of the diseases that end up killing us. — location: 2484 ^ref-8306
researchers at Harvard report that occasional 24-hour stints without food can help reduce our appetite during our normal eating hours. This decreases average levels of insulin, a hormone that may determine the body’s “set weight.” — location: 2534 ^ref-55175
Harvard Medical School surgery professor and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant Dr. Atul Gawande notes that 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients in their final year of life. — location: 2746 ^ref-30398
Martin Heidegger said, “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.” — location: 2755 ^ref-39747
“Everyone will die. You are not singled out. Do you know this? To not think of death and not prepare for it…this is the root of ignorance.” — location: 2933 ^ref-27983
Mitakpa is ‘impermanence,’ ” said the lama. He raised an arm and finger, like a professor stressing a point. “Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence.” This, he said, is the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings. It’s the idea that everything is, well, impermanent. 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. The Buddha’s final words were on impermanence, a reminder that all things die. “All things change. Whatever is born is subject to decay…,” he said. “All individual things pass away.” — location: 3004 ^ref-3035
“You must think of mitakpa three times each day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. You must be curious about your death. You must understand that you don’t know how you will die or where you will die. Just that you will die. And that death can come at any time,” — location: 3029 ^ref-53247
A study funded by the UK’s Ministry of Defence discovered that people who engaged in a mentally demanding task while exercising increased their time to exhaustion a relative 300 percent more compared to a group who zoned out while doing the exact same 12-week exercise program. — location: 3208 ^ref-37013
“In misogi you’ll reach this edge where you are convinced you have nothing left,” he said. “But you’ll keep going anyway. And then you’ll look back and you’ll be way out beyond what you were certain was your edge. You won’t forget that.” — location: 3231 ^ref-14598
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. — location: 3245 ^ref-36461
Even modern athletes are unimpressive compared to a run-of-the-mill ancient. The arms of the average prehistoric woman, for example, were 16 percent stronger than those of today’s Olympic rowers, according to scientists at the University of Cambridge. — location: 3309 ^ref-57848
Primates are unique because we can carry stuff in our hands while we cover ground with our feet. — location: 3396 ^ref-5480
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. — location: 3633 ^ref-17237
Heart disease is the Jeffrey Dahmer of modern ailments. It kills more than 25 percent of us. That’s one person in the United States dying of it every 37 seconds. — location: 3634 ^ref-30135
A study in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found running hits the knees with forces 8 times greater than body weight per stride. The same figure for walking is about 2.7. So, in practice, this means that with each running stride a 175-pound person loads their knees with about 1,400 pounds. For walking the figure is about 470. — location: 3711 ^ref-33583
Even today people are more likely to stick with more social exercise routines, says a study in Frontiers in Psychology. — location: 3728 ^ref-19360
Back pain costs our economy $100 billion every year. — location: 3822 ^ref-42674
studies show that people who perform what we think of as “backbreaking work” experience roughly the same amount of back pain compared to office workers. For example, 38 percent of farmers in northern China experienced back pain over a handful of months, while the number was anywhere from 33 to 46 percent among Chinese office workers. Research — location: 3829 ^ref-22713
“Human physiology likely evolved in a context that included substantial inactivity, but increased muscle activity during sedentary time, suggesting an inactivity mismatch with the more common chair-sitting postures found in contemporary urban populations,” Raichlen wrote in the study. This theory is called the inactivity mismatch hypothesis. — location: 3849 ^ref-34332
Just ten days of not using a muscle significantly weakens and shrinks it. — location: 3853 ^ref-62001
After two years, 75 percent of those who had surgery were still in excruciating pain and unable to return to work. But 67 percent of those who didn’t have surgery were working again. Of the people who went under the knife, 36 percent had complications, 27 percent required another surgery, and the whole group had higher rates of opioid use. — location: 3867 ^ref-14815
“But people now become slaves to their computer and think, ‘Oh, I just have to exercise. I’ll just go blast in the gym for forty-five minutes,’ ” said Dr. McGill, the back health and fitness expert. “That’s a problem in terms of intensity and workload—people cross a biological tipping point.” His work shows that people who sit all day then attack the gym have higher rates of back dysfunction compared to couch potatoes. — location: 3869 ^ref-11755
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.” — location: 4200 ^ref-35196
Chasing that which makes humans harder to kill was, it seemed, making it easier for me to live. — location: 4212 ^ref-40223
In sobriety there’s something called the “pink cloud” phenomenon. It describes the intense feelings of awareness, euphoria, connectedness, confidence, and calmness that occur in the early stages of recovery, right after a person has gone through the most uncomfortable phases of drying out. We realize we’ve pulled ourselves out of a slow death and become eager to live. — location: 4214 ^ref-21099