465: Michael Easter - Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Healthy, Happy Self (The Comfort Crisis)

Mar 27, 2022

Michael Easter, best-selling author of The Comfort Crisis and a professor at UNLV, dives into the benefits of embracing discomfort for personal growth. He shares how stepping out of our comfort zones can lead to resilience and improved mental well-being. Michael discusses the profound life lessons from his mother’s journey through addiction and recovery. He also highlights the importance of directly seeking information, contemplating mortality, and how novel experiences can enrich our perception of time. Get ready to reclaim your wild, healthy, and happy self!

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ANECDOTE

Lynda Easter's Resilience

Michael Easter shares a story about his mother, Lynda Easter, who overcame addiction and raised him as a single parent.
Despite facing hardship, she prioritized his development and taught him valuable life lessons.

ANECDOTE

Michael Easter's Turning Point

Michael Easter discusses his struggle with alcohol and how it negatively affected his life.
He describes the moment he realized he needed to make a change and sought help from his mother.

INSIGHT

The Comfort Crisis

Modern society faces a "comfort crisis" because we've engineered discomfort out of our lives.
This has negative consequences for our physical and mental health, as we've evolved to prioritize ease, which is now detrimental.

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"We are wired for laziness. It takes conscious thought to do the harder thing."
What Micheal learned from The Pope... If you have a question, go directly to the source.
The science-backed ways to slow down time?
- Learn and do new things. Get off "auto-pilot" mode.
Benefits of thinking about death?
- Michael learned in Bhutan why we should think about death...
  - In the United States, we rarely think about death—especially our own death. And when we do, it tends to make us sad and uncomfortable. But there are powerful benefits to regularly contemplating the fact that our time in this world will eventually come to an end. The shift in perspective can be profound and lead to a kind of deeply felt and enduring appreciation for life.
Michael's love for his mom: "My mom got sober when my dad was in rehab. That's how my favorite story I've ever written starts. It's about my mom, a single parent who taught me everything I need to know about being a man. As I was writing that story five years ago, my mom was battling cancer. She'd just finished chemotherapy and was undergoing radiation. Doctors officially deemed my mom "cured" from cancer. In the story I wrote, "Have you ever played tug-of-war with a pit bull? It’ll pull until you quit or it dies. That’s Lynda Easter."
How Michael dealt with alcohol - “I saw a choice. Option 1, do nothing. Cling to complacency and the numbing lifestyle that would ultimately end badly but allow me to keep drinking. Or option 2. Get uncomfortable. Ditch my liquid comfort blanket. I hadn’t a clue where this second option would take me or if I could even pull it off. And I was terrified.”
Take The Stairs: A mantra I try to live by when traveling – “Take the stairs.” When there is an escalator and stairs, always take the stairs. If you’re fortunate enough to have legs that work, then take the stairs.
- Be a 2 percenter… 98% of people take the escalator at the airport. Take the stairs.
Exercise: Exercise grows the hippocampus in the brain. This is something that is shrunken in people who suffer from depression. We exercise 14 times less than our ancestors.
- "We've engineered movement out of our lives."
Michael traveled 30,000 miles around the world, met with experts ranging from Harvard researchers and Icelandic geneticists to Buddhist Lamas and Special Forces soldiers, and also spent more than a month in the remote Alaskan backcountry.
"Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild."
"If you want to improve your life, you have to go through discomfort."
The benefits of boredom - Michael spent time in the Arctic on a hunt. It's very boring to sit on the hills for hours. But, boredom created ideas. It's evolutionary discomfort. In those boring times, Michael thought about ideas and wrote chapters of his book.
"Your life is a culmination of that which you are aware of." - William James
Go out in nature. Take walks.