The Comfort Crisis Quotes

“But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder—after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. And so our imaginations and deep social connections went with it.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“In newness we are forced into presence and focus. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Western laziness.” It consists of “cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues….If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called ‘responsibilities’ accumulate to fill them up….Going on as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself and a pointless distraction.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Ask any SF guy: Doing physically hard things is an enormous life hack. Do hard things and the rest of life gets easier and you appreciate it all the more,”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“But there are a lot of great pleasures you can get out of the experience of being alone with yourself,” said Bowker. In solitude you can find the unfiltered version of you. People often have breakthroughs where they tap into how they truly feel about a topic and come to some new understanding about themselves, said Bowker. Then you can take your realizations out into the social world, he added: “Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.” Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Fear is apparently a mindset often felt prior to experience”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“You act like life is fulfilling a checklist. ‘I need to get a good wife or husband, then I get a good car, then I get a good house, then I get a promotion, then I get a better car and a better house and I make a name for myself and then…’ ” He rattled off more accomplishments that fulfill the American Dream. “But this plan will never materialize perfectly. And even if it does, then what? You don’t settle, you add more items to the checklist. It is the nature of desire to get one thing and immediately want the next thing, and this cycle of accomplishment and acquisitions won’t necessarily make you happy—if you have ten pairs of shoes you want eleven pairs.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“People are then spurred to do something about their boredom. “Tolstoy had this great quote in Anna Karenina that says boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’ ” said Danckert. “So boredom is a motivational state.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“nothing great in life comes with complete assurance of success.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“According to scientists at the University of Oregon, people who exercised in a 100-degree room for ten days, for example, increased their fitness performance markers significantly more than a group who did the exact same workout in an air-conditioned room. The hot exercise caused “inexplicable changes to the heart’s left ventricle.” This can improve the heart’s health and efficiency. Hot exercise also activates “heat shock proteins” and “BDNF.” The former are inflammation fighters linked to living longer, while the latter is a chemical that promotes the survival and growth of neurons. BDNF might be protective against depression and Alzheimer’s, according to the NIH.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“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.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Teddy Roosevelt put it this way: “Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation—these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness;…life is hard and cruel for all the lower creatures, and for man also in what the sentimentalists call a ‘state of nature.’ ” The state humans lived in for all but the most recent fragment of time.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Unfortunately, there’s no pill that can alter our gut microbiomes to be more Hadza-like. “Because they take in microbes from food they pull from the dirt, as well as air and land,” said Schnorr. “You really need continuous exposure to outside microbes.” University of Chicago microbiome scientists have in fact declared that “dirt is good.” The more time a person spends outside getting down and dirty in it, the better.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Roughly three-quarters of jobs are now sedentary, and we’re sitting more every year. Over the last decade, the average American added another hour of daily sitting. Adults now sit for six and a half hours, while kids sit more than eight (the removal of recess hasn’t helped, either).”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“The second great change in human fitness began around 1850. It marked the start of the Industrial Revolution, and today just 13.7 percent of jobs require the same heavy work as our past days of farming.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Most Americans are unaware of how good you have it, and so, many of you are miserable and chasing the wrong things,” he said.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Every other food we eat lies between these two foods. Junk food such as chips, candy bars, desserts, and even energy bars, for example, have about 2,000 calories per pound. Processed grains like breads and crackers have about 1,500, while unprocessed grains like cooked rice and oats have 500. Tubers, fruits, and vegetables have about 400, 300, and 120, respectively.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“The least filling food was croissants, while the most filling was plain white potatoes. The USDA reports that a small croissant and a medium potato both have about 170 calories. This study suggests you’d have to eat about seven croissants, 1,190 calories, to experience the same fullness you’d get from a single potato. The key quality that made a food filling: how heavy its 240-calorie serving size was.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Other research shows antianxiety medication use rises a relative 28 percent for every 10-decibel increase a neighborhood experiences, and people who live near loud roads are 25 percent more likely to be depressed.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“The notion that cities depress us is backed by numbers. People who live in cities are 21 percent more likely to suffer from anxiety and 39 percent more likely to suffer from depression than people who live in rural areas.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“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.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Boredom is indeed dead. And one scientist way up north in Ontario, Canada, is discovering that this is bad. A type of bad that’s infected us all. He believes that our collective lack of boredom is not only burning us out and leading to some ill mental health effects, but also muting what boredom is trying to tell us about our mind, emotions, ideas, wants, and needs.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that dementia significantly dropped in people who dedicated more of their lives to learning.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“the data shows that the majority of us are living a greater proportion of our years in ill health, propped up by medications and machines. Life span might be up. But health span is down.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“But when you understand that nothing is permanent you cannot help but follow a better, happier path,” he said. “It calms your mind. You tend not to get overly excited, angry, or critical. With this principle people interact with others and it improves their relationships. They become more grateful and gratuitous. Because they”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

“But this recalibration, this heightening of our lowest levels of perception, leaves us calmer and less anxious. It scrubs the brain of the stress-inducing noise we live in, according to Orfield. “People go into the chamber and come out saying things like ‘My brain hasn’t felt this good in years,’ ” he said. “We had someone who was on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. He could still hear the planes taking off. He went into the chamber and afterward the noise was gone. It had reset his hearing back to zero.” Orfield’s anechoic chamber has since been named the quietest place on earth by Guinness World Records. Extreme quiet is a promising treatment for people who’ve gone through trauma, particularly vets suffering from PTSD. When he retires, Orfield plans to flip his lab into a nonprofit that will be used for therapy and research. It’s probably not feasible to lounge in Orfield’s lab.”
― Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self