The key ideas

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

Michael Easter, 2021

Journalist Michael Easter spends thirty-three days in Alaska’s Arctic wilderness: a heavy pack, cold, hunger, boredom, and no phone. He returns with a question: could the comfort we work so hard for be making us weaker and unhappier? You will discover why the brain needs boredom, the body needs hunger and weight on its back, and thoughts of death belong in a happy life.

Who it is for

For anyone living warm and well-fed yet still feeling tired, anxious, and empty. And for anyone wanting to understand which small difficulties are worth bringing back into life to become stronger.

When problems become fewer, we do not become more content. We simply lower the threshold for what counts as a problem.

Thirty-three days without an easy button

The small plane flies away, leaving silence. Michael Easter stands in Alaska’s Arctic, more than a hundred and fifty kilometers from the nearest habitation. Ahead are thirty-three days hunting caribou with hunter and filmmaker Donnie Vincent. His pack weighs nearly forty kilograms. Food provides about two thousand calories daily, while he burns twice that. Cold, wind, nights in a tent, and thoughts of grizzly bears by the stream.

Now consider his ordinary life, as he describes it. A soft bed in a temperature-controlled home. A car with a luxury sedan’s comforts. A smartphone extinguishing every moment of boredom. An office chair, a screen all day, effortless filling meals, and evenings watching series on the sofa. Discomfort almost never occurred.

Easter had long written about health, and one question caught him: with such comfort, why were so many people tired, anxious, and ill? He wondered what would happen if life were stripped of at least some conveniences. This book is his answer. We spent so long removing difficulties from life that, along with them, we lost what made us strong, calm, and alive.

Six stories follow. The first explores why, without difficulties, trifles become disasters; the rest examine difficulties worth restoring: an annual challenge, boredom and nature, hunger, a load on your back, and thoughts of death. Many begin in the tundra, and all end in your ordinary days. Let us begin.

Fewer troubles, smaller reasons for anxiety

Easter speaks honestly about himself: alcohol once provided his main comfort. Quitting was among the hardest things he ever did. His body and mind struggled to understand where the familiar blanket he could hide under had gone. Life then became noticeably better. This prompted his suspicion: what soothes us may not always help us.

He finds an explanation in science. In an experiment, psychologists showed people faces and asked them to identify threatening ones. Angry faces gradually became rarer. People began seeing threats in ordinary, calm faces. The brain conserves effort and judges by comparison. When large troubles vanish, small ones replace them. Scientists call this prevalence-induced concept change: the less often something bad appears, the more broadly we interpret “bad.” Solve one problem and the brain immediately seeks another. This produces “first-world problems,” amusing from outside but seriously felt within.

Imagine a thermostat repeatedly turned up one degree. Each change makes things slightly warmer, and a week later each feels normal. Easter calls this creeping comfort. He writes that most of us live at twenty-two degrees Celsius and encounter weather only while crossing a parking lot.

The answer is not abandoning every convenience. Easter suggests choosing difficulties voluntarily, gradually, and wisely. Small discomfort restores perspective: after a cold morning or demanding walk, a small annoyance seems small again.

The next time something strongly irritates you, ask: is this really trouble, or has my threshold simply fallen?

Read in Livria

About the author

Michael Easter is an American journalist and journalism instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He spent many years writing about health for Men’s Health.

All books by this author: Michael Easter

Terms from the book

  • Kentucky
  • Caribou: North American reindeer, living in herds in the tundra of Alaska and Canada.
  • Arctic: Earth’s northernmost region around the North Pole, with long winters and permafrost.
  • Vincent: Donnie Vincent, an American bowhunter and filmmaker who makes wilderness hunting films. He took Easter to Alaska.
  • Tundra: A treeless northern plain covered with moss, lichen, and low shrubs.
  • Grizzly: A large North American brown bear. An adult male may weigh over three hundred kilograms.
  • Creeping comfort: An image from the book, not a scientific term: conveniences increase gradually, and each quickly becomes normal.
  • Elliott: Marcus Elliott, an American doctor, Harvard graduate, and sports scientist. He trains professional athletes and devised annual misogi challenges for them.
  • Misogi: For Elliott and Easter, one extremely difficult annual challenge with roughly fifty-fifty chances of success. The word comes from a Japanese purification ritual.
  • Santa Barbara: The Santa Barbara Channel is a stretch of the Pacific between California’s coast and the islands opposite Santa Barbara.
  • Kashey: Trevor Kashey, an American nutrition specialist working with athletes and ordinary people. He focuses primarily on why someone eats.
  • Hadza: A hunter-gatherer people in northern Tanzania whom scientists study to understand how our ancestors lived and moved.
  • Bhutan: A small Buddhist Himalayan kingdom between India and China, known for prioritizing citizens’ happiness over economic growth.
  • Khenpo Phuntsho Tashi: A Bhutanese Buddhist teacher and author on living and facing death peacefully. Easter spoke to him in Bhutan.

All terms

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