Michael Easter

Unlock the evolutionary mind and body benefits of engaging with nature, leaning into boredom, and taking on hard physical challenges. Unlock the evolutionary mind and body benefits of engaging with nature, leaning into boredom, and taking on hard physical challenges. In this bold call to action that blends the latest in health science with adventure writing, health and outdoors journalist Michael Easter investigates how our soft, temperature-controlled, overfed, under-challenged lives are actually killing us, and argues that only by becoming comfortable with discomfort can we become mentally sharper, physically harder, and spiritually sounder. Easter's exploration takes him around the world to interview many of today's leading scientists and rewilding experts. He travels to an Icelandic genetic lab that has uncovered a gene that makes us harder to kill, the mystical country of Bhutan to study what death can teach us about happiness, a secret location where Special Forces soldiers are teaming up with Mayo Clinic researchers, and the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day bowhunting expedition and nature cleanse in one of the last wild lands on Earth. Along the way he uncovers what he calls a rewilding prescription: a framework for embracing discomfort both in nature and within ourselves that will dramatically improve our health and happiness and help us rediscover what it means to be human. Following this plan will lead to better life satisfaction and increased creativity, and will lessen anxiety and burnout. Break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.

Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

The Comfort Crisis

Piper Loyd

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. 

Our collective lack of boredom may be causing us to reach near-crisis levels of mental fatigue. 

New situations kill the mental clutter. In newness we're forced into presence and focus. This is because we can't anticipate what to expect and how to respond, breaking the trance that leads to life in fast forward. New- ness 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.

good reminder why i stop reading self help book, general message is clear but read like an under researched bro-y podcast, still good ideas here and there, just too bloggy and annoying 

mimi nguyen

This was a fun and easy read. Easter has an approachable style and seems to write from a place of natural curiosity, meandering through a variety of topics — time in nature and “forest bathing”, technology addiction, sobriety, exercise, over-medication, nutrition and fasting, hunting and wilderness survival, philosophy of death, and more. I really appreciated his discussion of impermanence and felt it was an impactful and passionate deep dive that supported the overall argument nicely. This book can offer interesting takeaways for a diversity of readers and it was effective overall at inspiring me to explore the benefits of embracing discomfort in life.

I was, however, skeptical of some of Easter’s treatment of animal ethics in this book. His claims that killing the oldest animal in a herd benefits the entire population and that caribou are incapable of grief seem to be on questionable ground scientifically, and feel like an over-eager attempt to justify the hunting he performs in the book. He also suggests that hunting with more rudimentary weapons is more ethical because it helps to even the playing field between us and animals. I understand this may instinctively feel more justifiable to a human hunter — we’ve been taught to pick on someone our own size, after all, and this gets us closer — but isn’t the outcome for the hunted individual roughly the same? If a simpler weapon is more ethical because fewer deaths occur in the end, it follows that not killing any animals — proverbially, not picking on anyone of any size — would be the most ethical action of all. 

For a work with a thesis that is meant to encourage the discomfort of doing hard things, it was surprising that Easter seemed unwilling to take on the challenge of genuine engagement with vegetarianism as a nutritional and ethical undertaking, despite some poignant passages grappling with the action of taking animal life. I enjoyed the book overall and it’s absolutely worth reading. Meanwhile, I hope to see authors like Easter continue to undertake honest discussion in this area in the future.

fvrests

This was a fun and easy read. Easter has an approachable style and seems to write from a place of natural curiosity, meandering through a variety of topics — time in nature and “forest bathing”, technology addiction, sobriety, exercise, over-medication, nutrition and fasting, hunting and wilderness survival, philosophy of death, and more. I really appreciated his discussion of impermanence and felt it was an impactful and passionate deep dive that supported the overall argument nicely. This book can offer interesting takeaways for a diversity of readers and it was effective overall at inspiring me to explore the benefits of embracing discomfort in life.

I was, however, skeptical of some of Easter’s treatment of animal ethics in this book. His claims that killing the oldest animal in a herd benefits the entire population and that caribou are incapable of grief seem to be on questionable ground scientifically, and feel like an over-eager attempt to justify the hunting he performs in the book. He also suggests that hunting with more rudimentary weapons is more ethical because it helps to even the playing field between us and animals. I understand this may instinctively feel more justifiable to a human hunter — we’ve been taught to pick on someone our own size, after all, and this gets us closer — but isn’t the outcome for the hunted individual roughly the same? If a simpler weapon is more ethical because fewer deaths occur in the end, it follows that not killing any animals — proverbially, not picking on anyone of any size — would be the most ethical action of all. 

For a work with a thesis that is meant to encourage the discomfort of doing hard things, it was surprising that Easter seemed unwilling to take on the challenge of genuine engagement with vegetarianism as a nutritional and ethical undertaking, despite some poignant passages grappling with the action of taking animal life. I enjoyed the book overall and it’s absolutely worth reading. Meanwhile, I hope to see authors like Easter continue to undertake honest discussion in this area in the future.

Andrew John Kinney

This was an interesting take on a subject which is not new - the tendency of Americans to overeat and and under-exercise, and the consequences of those choices. Easter takes the discussion a bit further by using recent scientific research on the beneficial effects of being in nature to suggest that humans need time in nature, if only for twenty minutes a day, and lack of such time has negative physical and mental consequences. I think he is onto something, but I'm naturally disposed to think that. His central thematic device is a description of a 31-day wilderness experience on Alaska's North Slope, and this may be off-putting to many readers, because the purpose of the trip was a caribou hunt. Easter says he is trying to recreate the experience of our hunter-gatherer forebears who regularly went out hunting for big game to bring protein back to the tribe. It is an interesting experience, and as one who had grandparents who were Alaska "pioneers", and friends who lived there, I understand that this kind of hunt is a part of the culture, and Easter makes the point that anyone who eats meat is simply outsourcing the killing to someone else. Fair enough, and he makes some good points that I had not thought of, like his disquisition on humans' unique ability among primates to carry heavy loads, and how such carrying, in the form of "rucking" might be a good form of exercise. 

I was interested by his discussions with PhD's who study the beneficial effects of time in nature, and I completely agree with the need for young people to have those experiences, in multi-day wilderness hiking form, and I worked hard as a father to provide those for my sons. There is apparently a magic to being in nature for at least four days straight, but even on a day to day basis, just being in a park for 20-30 minutes a day is tangibly beneficial to multiple metabolic metrics. I read this book, which is an easy, quick read, because it was name-checked by Peter Attia in his book, Outlive. Attia's book is much more dense from a research standpoint, but Comfort Crisis covers slightly different ground for the most part. The short version is that we should embrace discomfort a bit more, and try to live a bit more like the painters of the Lascaux Cave, spend less time looking at our phones, and this will be good for us individually, and arguably for society in general.

Matt Stein

My review: https://mattstein.com/books/comfort-crisis

jordan

10/10 recommend. I loved it so much I bought it after picking returning it to the library.

Removing ~some~ (really not that much) comfort from our lives can positively impact us for the better. Simple actions like ignoring reward hunger food cravings, turning down the AC a few degrees, or allowing yourself to sit in boredom can improve your mental and physical well-being.

Even though the only personal limit I have pushed is how many pieces of sushi I can eat at dinner, I love reading about how I can push myself to be better. If you have any interest in mental or physical well-being, pick up this book. If you want to be more conscious about the impacts of our cushy modern life, pick up this book.

My key takeaways: it’s good to be bored, the body uses small stressors to be resilient, craft my own misogi, make it novel each time, and push my limits -- but do not die.

Maxence

Stephen Hutson

Gerbert-Jan

Jannis M

André Silva

“If you've been looking for something different to level up your health, fitness, and personal growth, this is it.”—Melissa Urban, Whole30 CEO and New York Times bestselling author Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild. 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. Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more. Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human. The Comfort Crisis is a bold call to break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.

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

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