The Comfort Crisis
Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
Ratings30
Average rating4
15
Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
Ratings30
Average rating4
“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 New York Times bestselling author Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild. In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more. Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human. The Comfort Crisis is a bold call to break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.
Reviews with the most likes.
The book was packed with useful nuggets of information about exercise and the dangers of our modern, sedentary lifestyle. I particularly enjoyed the point that exercise has now been commodified into disparate gym sessions rather than being part and parcel of our daily lives. The section on rucking read rather like a brand deal, although the author does mention that you do not need fancy equipment to get started. A worthwhile read, kept well-paced and never too dry thanks to the regular cutting back to the author's hunt in the Arctic.
This book affirms my belief of the importance of stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone in building capability to create a better life.
Probably worth the read, but I do have reservations with presenting just being less comfortable/doing ‘hard things' as a sort of cure-all. Near the end of the book Easter says that after coming back from his trip he implicitly understood that his modern “problems” weren't really problems, but not all problems that people in developed countries go away with a little hiking or hunting. I feel like a little appreciation for this would have helped the book seem less annoying in this respect, definitely would have given more credence to all the perspective Easter couldn't stop mentioning he was gaining. An obvious example of what I mean is an example of a Special Forces soldier that does tons of hard things and exercises and is insanely fit, yet suffers from PTSD that more hiking isn't going to wash away.
I am kind of nitpicking though, because I think it introduces a lot of worthwhile ideas that almost everyone in rich countries could use today.
