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

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That’s the percent of people who take the stairs when they also have the option to take an escalator. So your job is to catch yourself before this happens, and learn to keep things challenging, even as you upgrade the rest of your life experience. In fact, I’m personally glad that my “new” Tesla is already developing a protective shroud of scratches just like any other MMM vehicle. Otherwise, I’d be afraid to take it anywhere or put anything into it – which would make it the most useless car ever! There are no "ancient aikido" students. Aikido started in 1920, by Morihei Ueshiba. He died in 1969. His first generation students are still around.

Well before the pandemic, I traveled to Jordan and slept in a hut in the desert with no connection to the outside world and maybe 2 minutes of dripping water per day. It was absolutely amazing to see how little I needed to survive during those days! And I was beyond happy! Nature’s beauty does far more to purify us than a posh hotel room, that’s for sure! That said, I’m not above a nice hotel room, but it’s not necessary to enjoy one’s self. 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 author of The Book of Boundaries

We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.”

On another note, I am proud to report I completed today 5 years of the Maximum Mustache, and I look forward to completing it again after the next post, and each after one after that. Reply It helps when you have like-minded people in your circle of friends. I do have three friends who embrace life with less comfort but with a lot of passion and realness. Unfortunately two of them live abroad and I don’t get to be around them as much as I would like to learn from each other and bounce off ideas etc. A lot of people I know (and like) are what we in my native language endearingly (using a diminutive) call: “little luxury horses” (translation from the Dutch word: “luxe-paardje”). It is fine, but it’s not that for-filling a life as the lovely suffering I like to do with the aforementioned like-minded friends.

This creep phenomenon applies directly to how we now relate to comfort, said Levari. Call it comfort creep. When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable.” For thousands of years, everyday life was a challenge – a fight for survival. Our distant ancestors spent almost every waking moment on the move, searching for food and shelter. It wasn’t until relatively recently in human history that the average person began to enjoy the comforts we now take for granted, like a steady food supply. And there’s America’s weakness in a nutshell, and meanwhile our strength comes entirely from the times we choose not to waste our time stooping to this level. 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.” of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

So cool that you just posted this as I had a similar experience last week. Thanks in large part to your blog, I retired over a year ago, and stuff has been pretty chill. But I’ve been struggling with finding a new purpose and fulfillment since leaving my crazy job. Tried the full time stay at home dad thing, and that was definitely not me.We think we know what our physical limits are, but we often underestimate ourselves. Studies have shown that exercise-induced fatigue is generally psychological, not physical. Our bodies are capable of so much more. I often find myself feeling frustrated and miserable while in ‘the throes” of completing an uncomfortable and challenging task. Needing to artificially create challenges for ourselves is necessary, but also a privilege. We all need to be grateful for this privilege and remember it when we are in the dumps over our first-world problems. Reply