The Book in Three Sentences
In this summary of The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter argues that we’ve never been this comfortable in history and that’s causing mental and physical problems. Easter suggests that we have an evolutionary need for discomfort. With this in mind, the book helps us leverage the power of discomfort to challenge ourselves and improve our health and happiness.
The Comfort Crisis Summary
Part One: Rule 1: Make It Really Hard. Rule 2: Don’t Die
Chapter 1: 33 Days
Easter traveled to Alaska, one of the most inhospitable and dangerous places, and spent 33 days on a hunting trip. As part of the trip, the author wanted to prove that modern life is too safe and comfortable. We experience life sheltered, under-challenged, and overfed, but that’s not what defines the human experience. People thrive when they are challenged physically, mentally, and spiritually. Discomforts are what protect us from some of the most common diseases and mental conditions, such as obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and anxiety.
Chapter 2: 35, 55, or 75
Easter had been dealing with some personal problems before his trip. He drank too much alcohol and wasn’t feeling passionate about his job. One day, he experienced a moment of clarity and decided to fix his life. If he continued on the trajectory he was in, he was going to lose his job, ruin his relationships, and waste his possessions. He didn’t know if he was going to die at 35, 55, or 75, but he knew drinking was going to be his cause of death. His choices were to choose comfort or to choose discomfort. He chose the latter.
The first step involved quitting drinking alcohol, but as soon as he did it, he realized that he was surrounded by other things that brought him comfortable: a temperature-controlled house, a car, a smartphone, an ergonomic chair, high-caloric foods, streaming services, and so on. Generally speaking, discomfort isn’t something we experience regularly.
Chapter 3: 0,004 Percent
We’ve evolved to look for comfort. We’re after safety, shelter, warmth, and food because, to our ancestors, those things meant survival. Originally, our comforts were small and short-lived, but now, we can live comfortably from the moment we’re born to the day we die. When we put it in context, the modern comforts we use daily (smart devices, cars, ultra-processed food, and so on) represent 0,004 percent of our time on the planet. In other words, comfort is new for humans. Early humans had to deal with the elements, they were constantly hungry, they exercised a lot, and they faced stress.
For every problem our ancestors faced, some things were unthinkable to them. We now live longer than ever, but we live worse. Our lifespan increased, but our health span decreased. Obesity, diabetes, mobility, and heart disease are modern medical issues. People also suffer mental issues nowadays, including depression, anxiety, addiction, and suicide. All of this indicates that there are side effects to living a life of comfort.
Chapter 4: 800 Faces
Humans are wired to look for problems. This is another trait that allowed us to survive as long as we did. This bias toward negativity makes us look for problems even when there aren’t any. In a psychological study, people had to see 800 human faces and judge the ones they perceived as threatening. At around the 200th mark, the data started showing fewer and fewer threatening faces, but people still labeled certain faces as such. This study explains that even if we experience fewer problems, we are less satisfied. Something similar happens with comfort. A new comfort appears, we adapt to it, and going back to a state of discomfort feels unacceptable. What we consider to be a base level of comfort changes all the time.
Chapter 5: 20 Yards
Some people are trying to maintain our ancestors’ tradition of hunting animals. This involves knowing how to hunt, being an ultra-endurance athlete, and having advanced survival skills. These people leave the modern world for months at a time to hunt their prey. When they successfully kill the animal, they use every ounce of it. For these people, hunting is about being part of the ecosystem, not about killing defenseless animals. In a way, hunting is a way to be present in nature. With this in mind, the author joined a group of modern hunters who escaped the rat race to see what the process felt like. He felt alive as a result and he didn’t want to go back to his comfortable life again.
Chapter 6: 50/50
Doing hard things was essential to our species’ survival. Humans are supposed to challenge themselves. Modern society isn’t conducive to challenges, so we never realize our full potential. Our environment naturally presented these challenges, so being aware of what was beyond our comfort zone made us better equipped for our daily lives. Now though, we live a life devoid of challenge. There’s a Japanese concept known as misogi, a journey through uncomfortable situations that helps you achieve a state of what the author describes as “pure clarity of mind and body”. Experts refer to this idea as “flow”. Flow is when we’re so engrossed in an activity that we forget about everything else, including the passage of time. To get into a flow state, you need two things: to stretch your limits and have a clear goal.
To choose an activity that’s hard enough, you should have a fifty percent chance of success, even if everything goes according to plan. In other words, you’re pushing yourself to the limit. This is difficult to comprehend from a psychological standpoint because our brains hate failure. To our ancestors, failure meant death. In comparison, failure now means a glare from our boss. That said, the emotional process our ancestors went through when they lost social status is similar to what we feel when we make a mistake in a PowerPoint presentation at work. The lessons that are hardwired into our brains don’t serve us anymore. Surmounting challenges makes you tougher physically and mentally, but most people never engage with them.
Most parents don’t let their kids go outside unsupervised, for example, but that’s one of the most important parts of their development. When kids grow up without obstacles and they become adults, they don’t know how to deal with setbacks. Scientists discovered that there’s such a thing as a healthy amount of adversity and that when you deal with it, you come out the other end more resilient.
Chapter 7: 50. 70. Or 90.
The author wanted his own misogi, so he decided to join a group of adventurers who went on a hunting trip to Alaska. To prepare for the trip, Easter had to learn a lot in a short amount of time. Hunting requires you to learn to use a bow and a gun, for example. It also demands that you know hunting regulations, weather patterns, and the animal’s biology. Failing to hunt can be the difference between life and death after all. Similarly, Easter needed the right equipment, as well as the proper physical training.
Chapter 8: 150 People
Most people live in cities, but a lot of them would gladly leave civilization if they could. Throughout history, there have been a lot of people who have done that: Christopher McCandless, Henry David Thoreau, the Buddha, and Jesus, among others. The average number of people who were part of a tribe was 150. This is known as Dumbar’s number. Interestingly when a person has to interact with more than 150 faces, problems start to happen. It’s like our brains are wired to interact with that many people due to millions of years of evolution. Modern cities are the antithesis of this.
Chapter 9: 101 Miles
As soon as the author left civilization, he started appreciating the comforts of modern life: television, coffee, bathrooms, and running water. Soon, that feeling was gone. There’s something incredible about being in a remote location 101 miles from the nearest town. Despite living in cities, people are lonely. This negatively impacts our mental and physical health. To be happy, we need good relationships. That said, there are benefits to solitude too. Seeking solitude makes you more resilient and it might be as important as building strong relationships. In the modern world, solitude is used as torture or as a way to discipline children. Solitude is the only way to get to know yourself. Once you discover yourself, you’ll have richer interactions with others.
Chapter 10: <70 Miles an Hour
To survive in the wild, you need to find shelter, water, and food in that order. As part of this trip, the author and his team had to deal with unpredictable weather which is one of the most difficult parts of living in the wild.
Part Two: Rediscover Boredom. Ideally Outside. For Minutes, Hours, and Days
Chapter 11: 11 Hours, 6 Minutes
The average person doesn’t experience boredom because we have access to an endless stream of distractions. That’s not the case when you’re in nature. Boredom can lead to creativity and when you give yourself time to do nothing, you can be productive. Having access to a phone, TV, computer, and the internet is not conducive to creativity and productivity. While technology can be useful, we mostly use it for banal activities like googling for unimportant questions or to watch dull YouTube videos.
Boredom makes us uncomfortable, but it leads to a mental state of wonder scientists call unfocused mode. In focus mode, we process external information and this happens when you listen to a podcast or watch a television show. In unfocused mode, we don’t pay attention to anything in particular, so our minds rest and prepare to be more efficient when they go into focus mode again. To sum up, we need to be bored to get things done later on. Killing boredom by using technology means that we’re always mentally exhausted. Before living a life of comfort, boredom played an important role in our lives. Boredom was good for our brain’s health and productivity, but we’ve killed it.
Since we live in an overstimulated society, stress, depression, anxiety, and shorter attention spans are becoming recurring problems. Scientists have linked the use of screens with mental issues. Most of the apps we use regularly manipulate our psychology so we become addicted. Most of those apps didn’t start that way, but the people behind them embraced an advertising model that benefits from users who are glued to their screens. Your attention makes those companies money. We’ve evolved to respond to a trigger/behavior/reward loop and that’s exactly what smartphones give us.
Dealing with boredom forces us to overcome it and when we do, we become more creative as a result. Distracting ourselves kills boredom, but we never do anything creative either. In our day-to-day lives, we need creativity to solve problems. Since the 90s though, we’ve been experiencing a creativity crisis. Simply put, boredom is becoming increasingly rare.
Chapter 12: 20 Minutes, 5 Hours, 3 Days
The problem with screen time isn’t only that we add something bad, but the fact that we miss the opportunity to experience something good. A lot of people don’t do recreational activities outside, for example. The mere act of being outside encourages us to exercise and there are numerous benefits to doing so. One of the best things about nature is that it lets us recover physically and mentally. The ideal dose is twenty minutes of mind-wandering, three times a week, for a total of five hours a month. Parks work well enough, but if you’re willing to leave town to visit more remote places, you’ll get more benefits.
Chapter 13: 12 Places
Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our health. Despite this, a lot of people sleep less than seven hours a night. This happens for two reasons: we rarely have darkness and we rarely have silence. Also, we seldom go to bed physically tired.
Complete silence doesn’t exist because all places have a degree of white noise. Cities are incredibly noisy and humans aren’t meant to experience that, but we got so used to noise that we feel uncomfortable without it. For instance, a lot of people watch TV not for the content, but because its noise keeps them company. Being exposed to constant noise stresses us out and we don’t even notice it. Silence might make us uncomfortable, but it’s worth seeking nonetheless. Some ecologists believe there are only twelve places in the United States where you can go for 15 minutes and not hear a human-made sound.
Part Three: Feel Hunger
Chapter 14: -4,000 Hunger
In first-world countries, most people don’t have to deal with hunger, which is why we eat mindlessly. On top of that, we eat cheap, ultra-rich processed food that’s light in calories. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion around nutrition. Experts in certain diets believe they have the answer to this problem, but that’s not the case. If there’s an absolute truth, is that to lose weight, we should eat less. There’s no unique diet for everyone, so to lose weight, you must confront the discomfort of hunger.
Processed food exists because it solves three problems: how to preserve food, how to transport it, and how to keep it tasty. This is one of the biggest inventions in human history because suddenly we didn’t have to worry about food going bad and dying of hunger. Processed food isn’t the same as junk food. All junk food is processed food, but not all processed food is junk food. Junk food is unhealthy because it has many calories and it’s less fitting.
One of the biggest obstacles that prevents people from losing weight is that they don’t realize how much they eat. The combination of snacking more and moving less means more calories. To lose weight, we should look at lifestyle facts like sleep, stress, activity levels, and portion size. People eat for two reasons: real hunger and reward hunger. Real hunger allows our body to function properly. Reward hunger, on the other hand, serves a psychological need, not a physiological one. While the former is about survival, the latter is about pleasure. When we don’t eat, we feel irritable and when we do eat, our brain rewards us with dopamine. When we eat calorie-dense food, our brain rewards us with even more dopamine. We crave food that’s sweet, fatty, and salty because, to our ancestors, those foods meant the difference between life and death.
Instead of using food to alleviate hunger, we use it to alleviate stress, sadness, and boredom. We experience two kinds of stress: acute and chronic. Acute stress is sudden and unexpected. Chronic stress is less intense, but it lasts longer. Acute stress is no longer a problem in modern society because there aren’t predators chasing us anymore. The real problem is chronic stress. This happens when we compare ourselves to our neighbors, when we complain or gossip, or when we think about the bills we have to pay. As a way to cope with chronic stress, most people turn to eating. The problem is that the stress never goes away and the side effects are terrible: weight gain, heart disease, cancer, type-2 diabetes, depression, fatigue, and the list goes on and on.
According to some experts, no food should be forbidden from your diet. If you can limit yourself to a specific number of calories, you should eat whatever you want. Soon, you’ll realize which items in your diet are working for you and which ones are working against you. To maintain a healthy body weight, eat unprocessed whole grains, tubers, fruits and vegetables, and low-fat animal protein.
Chapter 15: 12 to 16 Hours
A long time ago, humans’ weight varied depending on the season. Now, famine is almost gone yet the problem is that most people either maintain their weight or add weight. Hunger has been almost eradicated and this is one of the signs we’re too comfortable. Our ancestors, on the other hand, experienced hunger regularly. Some people believe that going without food for long periods helps our bodies fight aging, as well as several diseases.
Part Four: Think About Your Death Every Day
Chapter 16: 3 Good Legs
Killing an animal, even if it’s for food makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Anyone with a moral or ethical objection shouldn’t take an animal’s life and everyone should respect that. That said, a lot of people consume animal and animal products but don’t hunt. In a way, they prefer that someone else ends the animal’s life for their benefit.
Chapter 17: 12/31, 11:59:33 P.M.
If we consider all time and space, humans are insignificant. Everyone is going to die soon and we’ll all be forgotten eventually. To make matters worse, we have no control over any of that. Although it’s easy to think about that and feel depressed, being alive is a miracle, and being alive in a time of health and prosperity is even better. We have access to modern medicine, incredible technology, and some of the best inventions. Despite all of this, we still feel uncomfortable about death which is one of the few things we know are going to happen for certain.
Death is so far removed from our daily lives that we tend to forget about living according to our values. To be free, we must embrace death. Death scares us, but contemplating it often leads to a happier and more fulfilled life. Instead of practicing this, we consume. Being materialistic though leads to unhappiness.
On average, people work too much. Our culture praises productivity and entrepreneurship, but we ignore what we lose as a result. Busyness makes us unhappy. The antidote to all of this is mindfulness. Something as simple as focusing on the present moment can destress you. Likewise, you can be mindful of the body or accept that we’re all going to die one day. Accepting death isn’t supposed to be grim or macabre, it’s supposed to make us enjoy life and be more compassionate with those around us.
Chapter 18: 20 Minutes, 11 Seconds
Hunting is a way to express that we belong to this planet. Once you become part of the ecosystem, you carry a burden too. Eating meat is easy nowadays, but when we do it, we don’t feel emotionally connected to the animal because someone killed it for us. In other words, we don’t feel a burden or remorse. With hunting comes a great responsibility, but most people in the modern world never experience it.
Part Five: Carry the Load
Chapter 19: 100+ Pounds
Humans are wired to look for the easiest path. This is a way to avoid burning calories which were precious at some point. In other words, we have an innate call to laziness. The idea of working out is relatively new in human history. Our ancestors didn’t need to work out because their entire lives revolved around being physically active. Our bodies are prepared to walk and run long distances in undomesticated terrain. Humans used to cover 25 miles a day while they were hunting and gathering. On top of that, they would carry weight while doing it, such as tools, weapons, jugs, food, and children. Since there weren’t chairs, the mere act of doing nothing demanded effort.
Nowadays, we live a more sedentary lifestyle. We consume a lot of calories, we don’t exercise, and we spend too much time sitting. To survive, we need to be physically active. If we can’t sustain a physically active lifestyle, we can die early or experience chronic conditions like heart disease or diabetes. When society started changing, people’s lifestyles and physiques changed as well. The first historic change was farming 13,000 years ago. The next big shift happened in 1850 during the Industrial Revolution. Little by little, our lives became more sedentary.
The effects of inactivity ruined our health, so the exercise industry was born as a result. The problem is that most people don’t like the discomfort of exercise, this is why gyms have TVs and temperature-controlled rooms. Also, our ancestors weren’t building muscle for the sake of it, they needed fast and endurance. They also needed cognitive functions like memory, special navigation, and executive functioning.
While exercising at the gym is great, it isn’t the same as exercising outside. Navigating, making decisions, and pacing yourself are important traits of doing physical activity. This is great for our brain, but we ignore it. Whenever possible, we should take time off to explore untamed, uneven ground. The world of comfort we live in is nothing short of amazing, but it lacks the physical challenges we need to stay healthy. Similarly, carrying heavy weight on rough land is a lost art, but we tend to forget that our bodies evolved to do that.
Chapter 20: ≤50 Pounds
Experts believe that humans started walking as a way to carry objects and food. Athletically speaking, humans are pathetic when compared to other animals. We can’t run fast, we can’t climb well, we’re terrible jumpers, and we can’t lift that much weight. Although we can’t go fast or far, we can run for a long time and stay cool while doing it, something that other mammals can’t sustain. We’re built for endurance and this turned our ancestors into hunting machines. We’d run until we killed our prey and then bring the meat back to our camp in different loads of 10 to 20 pounds.
The modern world, on the other hand, is designed in such a way that we don’t have to carry anything. This is why some people “ruck”. This is the act of carrying a heavy backpack which is what a soldier does when they fight a war. Rucking combines cardio and strength in the same activity.
When it comes to medicine, there’s only one thing considered a miracle cure and that’s exercise. When you exercise regularly, you have fewer chances of suffering from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and so on. Interestingly, there isn’t such a thing as too much exercise, since a person can safely exercise 7 to 12 hours a week without problem. Exercise is also beneficial to our mental health.
Chapter 21: 80 Percent
Cardio and strength capacity are important, but so is movement. We’re supposed to put our joints to the test, but we don’t, as if we’re holding our bodies captive. Instead of moving around, we spend a significant part of our days sitting. The human body is designed to carry, walk, run, squat, dig, and more. By not doing this, we’re condemning ourselves to a life of poor movement, pain, and chronic diseases.
Epilogue 81.2 Years
There’s such a thing as a healthy amount of germs, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses. As difficult as it is to comprehend, all of those things keep us alive. Being exposed to germs and bacteria protects us against certain diseases. We live super-sanitized lives and this affects our immunity. Although some germs cause diseases, others are beneficial. Our lack of exposure to germs, as well as a life of stress, sleep deprivation, low activity, and a poor diet compounds and leads to chronic disease. To solve this, we need to improve our diet first. This means eating a variety of foods. Another modern comfort is constant warmth which affects our metabolism. There are numerous benefits to cold exposure, including weight loss.
Discomfort science is progressing rapidly. It’s studying our response to high altitude, extreme cold, and inhospitable places. Discomfort makes you appreciate what the modern world offers us. We tend to take the magic of modern inventions for granted: turning on a faucet, driving a car, eating food, connecting with people around the world from our homes, and so on. Reflecting on these inventions we use regularly makes you appreciate life more. Ultimately, discomfort is about reflection, re-prioritizing, and change.
Further Reading
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