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

Product Information

There has been a lot of talk directed at the FIRE community recently about how bad we are at spending our money, and how we all need to loosen up. And there’s a small amount of truth to it, as my local friends Carl and Mindy recently admitted during a grilling on the Ramit Sethi podcast. Boredom is good for us. It forces us to tap into our creativity and look for new pathways. Today's digital menu of smartphones, streaming content, and the internet robs us of those opportunities, and addicts us to attention-grabbing cotton candy for the mind. Easter claims we spend 11 hours per day on digital media, but I've seen 8-9 hours elsewhere. In any case, it's an enormous chunk of our day. One of the best things about a Misogi like this is that it took the author away from all of his content, which forced his brain to adapt and find new ways to combat boredom. Having everything ready to be consumed keeps our brain inactive, and makes our body always crave more, as the dopamine secretion diminishes or becomes inexistent as we find our resources available at any given time. Hence, it’s time for a change. The author suggests that a good place to start is by distinguishing craving from real hunger. Are you feeding your body fuel for the day, or simply exciting your taste buds?

Like many of the other cool kids in Boulders, I enjoy the challenge of running ultramarathons. I don’t do this to feel special; lots of people do them here, and the finisher rate for even a mountainous 100-miler is pretty high. It’s more that it is a challenge that gets me out of the house (yay outdoors!) and puts me in a place of discomfort that I would normally never have to face. The problem-solving I need to do 12 or 20 hours into a race is good for the mind in much the same way that crosswords are great for my 93-year-old dad. Just yesterday I finally got around to some things that needed to get done and those tasks involved me being outside for around 5-6 hours in the sun (mid 90s temp). It turns out that there’s a scientific explanation for these unfortunate people, along with most of our other problems:

This reminds me a lot of an episode of the podcast The Hidden Brain where they examine the paradox of plenty and the path to enough.

The three women experts cited (of ~40+) are “shy”, working in surprisingly “unsexy fields”, or in “pink running shoes”. There’s something in our biological wiring that responds instantly and powerfully to everything natural, in ways that you can’t get anywhere else. So far the book seems to be a whole lotta words to justify taking thousands of dollars from the family budget and leaving the kids with your wife (and her parents and church?) so you can go moose hunting in the Alaskan wild. At least Chris McCandless didn't have people depending on his income. Great post! I’m a big fan of Dr. Attia’s and agree that life in the west is far easier than most other parts of the world, but most Americans have no idea what I’m talking about when I try to explain it. People complain about poverty here, which we have, but I always tell them they haven’t seen poverty until they’ve seen it in the third world. There is absolutely nothing like it. So, yes, we do have it pretty easy here. Internal triggers are negative feelings like boredom, sadness, stress, and self-doubt. They pop up and can prompt distraction from what we’re supposed to be doing.Another issue : though “suffering” in comfortable situations is ridiculous, being happy even in awful conditions is also odd, a kind of conformism I reject. For example, in my country (Mexico), many people don´t see the ugliness, noise and dirt of their neighborhood, or they perceive it and say “So, what´s the problem?”. That´s another extreme we should avoid. Reply In newness we are forced into presence and focus. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids.”

People apparently never carry heavy things anymore which is probably news to every toddler-carrying mom/parent out there. 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. Expanding fitness just a bit—the equivalent of a person improving their max running speed from five to six miles an hour—reduces the risk of heart disease by 30 percent, according to the American Heart Association. Next is cancer. It kills 22.8 percent of us. The most fit people face a 45 percent lower risk of dying from the disease, according to a study in the Annals of Oncology. Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, according to a study in the Emergency Medical Journal. If the docs have to operate—regardless of whether it’s an emergency or a planned surgery—fitter people also face fewer surgical complications and recover faster than unfit people, say scientists in Brazil.” For example, have you ever wondered why the type of bored, rich suburbanites who populate the board of your local Homeowner Association and whine about unacceptably tall weeds or unauthorized skateboarding on Nextdoor are so insufferable?Easter calls this trip, where he goes as far from civilization as you can get in North America, a Misogi. Taken from Japanese mythology, a Misogi is a purification ritual that is meant to be an epic challenge, one where there is a substantial risk of failure that somehow stretches humans past boundaries they didn't know they had. By embracing comfort, so many of us have lost sight of our potential, and this intense ritual is a way of breaking past the barriers that make us cozy and contented. the stuff that is hard and uncomfortable is very likely to be the stuff that improves your life the most.” We spend a great amount of our modern lives completely comfortable. We live in the most optimal temperatures, we eat whenever we feel slightly hungry, and sit in soft chairs most of the day. We live our lives in a tiny circle of routine, rather than explore the boundaries of our potential. The author supports that a part of depression may be the result of never testing yourself.