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Author and UNLV professor Michael Easter sends readers out of their comfort zones

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Michael Easter camping in Alaska.
Photo: Sicmanta / Courtesy

Humans have it easier now than ever before. Rather than foraging for food, we order delivery. Instead of living in caves or tents, we relax behind stuccoed walls and climate control. We have self-parking cars, shopping apps and smart lights.

A the same time, however, we’re often not doing so well. Many humans are depressed, anxious, isolated and unhealthily overweight. So what gives? Journalist and UNLV professor Michael Easter thinks the problem is that we’re simply too comfortable.

Easter gets to explore mountains and interview sports experts while writing about health for publications like Men’s Health, Outside, Vice, Cosmopolitan and Scientific American. Throughout his career, one pattern kept emerging. “I noticed early on that anything that improves health usually comes with some form of discomfort,” Easter says. “For example, exercise is one that’s easy to grasp. But also even weight loss … you kind of have to be hungry.”

The problem, according to Easter, is that technology has advanced faster than our genes can keep up, creating a sort of evolutionary mismatch. “We’re wired to avoid activity, he says. “We’re wired to eat more than we need. We’re wired to avoid risk. We’re wired to have all these different things that don’t necessarily serve us now that the world is totally comfortable and safe.”

It’s a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon, one Easter explores it in his new book, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. The story alternates between scientific insight and adventure travelogue, in which Easter practices what he preaches by hunting caribou on foot for a month in the frozen Alaskan wilderness.

One of the insights in Comfort Crisis is that once a year we should all do a physical challenge, ideally out in nature. Inspired by the Japanese ritual of misogi, the feat should be hard enough that the odds for success are even at best. Easter’s misogi is the Alaskan hunting trip. Yours could be anything, as long as it’s challenging.

Easter says modern technology keeps us from ever significantly failing, which ironically creates an outsize fear of failure and prevents us from living our best lives. Misogi helps reset the mental balance sheet. “You get put in a position where you’re like, ‘I’m going to quit; there’s no way I can keep going.’ But [you] keep on going. Then [you] can look back and [say], ‘Man, I really sold myself short. What else am I selling myself short on?’”

Comfort Crisis further explores the problems brought on by “comfort creep.” One most powerful insight: Easter’s findings on boredom. “We’ve essentially engineered boredom out of our lives today,” Easter says. Before glass-screened pacifiers, the discomfort of boredom used to guide us to pursue more rewarding activities.

The answer, of course, is to escape the screen. One moment in Comfort Crisis has Easter taking in a dramatic vista as he and his buddies wait days for the wandering herds of caribou. He describes the quiet waiting—with no phone or even a magazine for distraction—as a peaceful, even transcendent form of meditation.

If you’re not ready for the wilderness trek, you can start by reading the book. Or you could go in the opposite direction and follow the lead of Easter’s wife: “It’s funny,” Easter says. “While I was in Alaska, freezing, starving, putting in so much effort, my wife and my mom—I think this is like the ultimate act of trolling in the history of our relationships—went on a freakin’ cruise to the Greek islands.”

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