The Comfort Trap with Michael Easter | Being Well

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Modern life is in many ways astonishingly easy, particularly when you compare it to what our ancestors went through. We get food without hunting, warmth without chopping wood, and entertainment that would have blown the minds of 2 million years of humans just by opening up our phones. That's incredible. But it has come with a strange side effect. As these objective measures of scarcity and difficulty and boredom have gone down, it doesn't seem like people's subjective happiness has gone up that much. If anything, they seem to feel more restless, frustrated, and anxious. So, what's going on here? And could we actually make our lives both easier and more fulfilling by deliberately making them just a little bit more difficult? To help me answer that question, I'm joined by Michael Easter. Michael is a professor, journalist, and the best-selling author of a number of books, including The Comfort Crisis: Scarcity Brain, and his new book, Walk with Weight: The Definitive Guide to Rucking. He's also the author of the extremely popular Substack, 2% with Michael Easter. So, Michael, thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? >> I'm doing well, man. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> Same. I've been really looking forward to this one. I really appreciate your work. I love the perspective in it. And if I had to boil it down to do one sentence and you can definitely correct me here, it would be that being uncomfortable uh within reason and particularly in ways that we choose is generally good for us. And this is a bit of a problem because as most of us have experienced whenever we've tried to do something difficult, our system usually wants to avoid that kind of effort when it's possible. >> Yeah. Well, you nailed it. I mean, our our system is wired to avoid discomfort. The stat I always like to use and the reason because you mentioned my newsletter, it's called the 2% newsletter. Uh, it's called the 2% newsletter because there's this study that I think encapsulate encapsulates so much and it found that only 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available. Now, I would argue that 100% of those people knew that taking the stairs would give them a better long-term return on their physical health, on maybe even their mental health. But 98% of people choose to do the easy, more effortless thing. I'm a I'm a chronic escalator, I got to tell you. Yeah, >> I'm going to try and change that. I'm going to try and change that by the end of this podcast. That's my that's my mission in the next >> personal goal for sure. >> Next 90 minutes. >> What this is though is it's not really about the stairs. Um it's kind of a metaphor for how we have engineered our world for comfort and how that uh backfires. So for all of time, to put this in like grand historical perspective, 2 and a half million years of human history, uh it never made sense to purposefully seek out discomfort and do the hard thing, right? The world gave you plenty of that. And just by living your day-to-day life, you faced all sorts of hardship. You had to walk 20,000 steps a day. You had to go hunt and gather your food. You were exposed to the elements. Blah blah blah blah blah. the person who actively went out and chose to do that kind of stuff, they would have died off. There's never enough food. You would have gotten hit by a storm and died. Like, you're an idiot. Um, but then, especially after the industrial revolution, we engineered the world to be comfortable. And we still have those ancient genes screaming at us to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. And that really backfires. So, that's kind of like the big thesis behind a lot of my work. And I think it explains a lot of the issues that we face personally and society around health, around mental health, around all these different topics. >> Yeah, I think that you're totally right. And like I said in the introduction, by any objective measure, we have more stuff and more ease than at any other point in human history. uh whether you want to look at the number of objects that a person has in their house, how long we're living, infant mortality rate, whatever metric, you know, life has become more comfortable and there's clearly this kind of disease of more in people in general. Like most people would not actually be happier if they had that extra object that the Tik Tok ad is trying to sell to them. But nonetheless, businesses make a lot of money by selling those objects. So clearly they're doing it because people are buying them, right? But part of the problem, I think, is that that's not people's lived experience. Many people feel like their lives are quite difficult in part because they are difficult. You know, they've got bills and debts and kids and tough jobs. And for the person who's living that experience, um, you know, I I'm not I'm not sure what their immediate visceral reaction is to like actually your life is too comfortable and you should think about like throwing some weights in a bag and carrying it up a hill and that would actually be really helpful for you. Uh, you approach this topic in a really great way I think including in how you answer that question. Uh, but it's a natural thing that somebody might be thinking right now. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm not saying that um bills and societal issues aren't there. What I am saying is that on one hand, we need to recognize how far we've come. On the other hand, I'm not saying stop progressing, right? It's like I think we need to fix these kind of bigger societal issues. I mean, something that that I sort of like joke about that's probably mildly inappropriate, maybe makes me come off as an is that um in my day-to-day life, I might have those same things where like a bill stresses me the hell out, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But I also do a lot of outdoor stuff. Like a lot of my writing, I'll I go places. I'm in the outdoors. I'm going to Sometimes I'll go to war zones. Sometimes I'll spend time with hunter gatherer tribes. And the happiest I am is when I'm in those places. And it's like, >> sure, >> you're living out of >> objectively stressful situations. Yeah. >> Yeah. You're living out of a backpack, dude. So, all right. So, what happens if all of a sudden like, I don't know, Substack dies, which is one of my main pieces of income. What if it dies the next day? Oh, well, you're happy living on a backpack right now. Like, what's the worst that could happen? So, I think a lot of times what happens is that we catastrophize. And even in modern life when things go bad, I think they're still um comparatively objectively better than they would have been had things gone bad 600 years ago because back then bad was like oh you died. >> Sure. Yeah. And also there there's a kind of category difference here between some kind of like chronic involuntary stressor like you know socioeconomic conditions or whatever's going on and a a chosen thing that you are selecting deliberately. It's time bound. It's it's attached to your effort. You get to make a lot of choices around it. It's actually kind of an expression of agency. Um I think that for me a lot of it comes down to that like you're choosing to put yourself in into those kinds of situations. And the things that people experience as chronically stressful are often not like choices that they're making for themsel with the big exception that I think you highlighted there which is just the classic line like I make myself rich by making my wants few. um there is this kind of sprawl and and some of the writing that you've done that I've really gravitated toward is how um you know everything is gambling now. >> Yeah, definitely. And I I do think that um a lot of the sort of things people can do to help themselves are can't be found for free. Going for a walk is free. It'll improve your physical health. It'll it tends to improve stress levels, those sorts of things. Um, a lot of times when you compare, you know, eating whole foods, assuming you're not actually going to Whole Foods and paying, you know, whatever, $20 for a for an apple, you know, I do think you're seeing like sort of a spread of access to more people. And so it's just kind of, you know, asking these big questions of um if you can't change these big societal circumstances, which are definitely hard, how can you change your individual circumstances in a way that help you better manage those and help you be more successful in that condition? >> I think this also gets to something that I bumped into through your work. It's a term that I really like. Uh prevalence induced concept change. Basically, the idea is that as humans experienced fewer problems, we didn't actually become that much more satisfied. we just changed the definition of what a problem was. So the bar for a problem got lower and lower and lower. >> Yeah. So that that came from this uh these two psychologists at Harvard. Um I talked to one of them, wrote about it in my book, The Comfort Crisis. >> And basically these two dudes are in line for TSA and they notice that the TSA is really good at finding problems. It's like you put your bag through the scanner and the thing goes off and they rip that thing apart because they think, you know, your banana is a freaking gun or whatever. >> Um, but then they wondered, they go, if all of a sudden like everyone started following the rules going through the TSA, scanners never go off, the buzzers never buzz, but the TSA just let everyone go through like, yeah, have a good flight, everyone. Um, these two didn't think so. They thought what would happen is that the TSA would just broaden what they considered a problem and problematic and were ripping your part your bag apart for um because their job is to find problems, right? And so then they wonder, I wonder if this is like a larger thing with humans. And I'll save you the boring academic details of the study, but um long story short, they found that as humans experience fewer and fewer problems, we do not become more satisfied. we simply lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. So as the world has improved over time, we don't end up with fewer problems. We just point them at things that are probably objectively less problematic than we would have considered in the past. And you see this in research. So when Gallup does these giant polls and they ask the average American, "Do you think the world is improving?" We don't think back to like, "Well, 10,000 years ago, yeah, hell yeah. I got clean running water. Like tainted water used to kill millions of people every year. Oh, like none of my kids died before age five. Well, anywhere from about average 33% of kids used to die before age five. Um, we don't think to that. We go, you know what? Politics is pissing me off right now. The world is not improving. Only 6% of Americans think the world is improving when that question gets asked. And so I think it kind of highlights how that that effect which is called prevalence induced concept change which is what happens when you let nerds name phenomenons. I just think about it as problem creep. It's basically problem. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean do you see scope creep in anything? And this is it's a big question in the field of psychology. I'm I'm not a psychologist but I talk to therapists and psychologists all the time. this idea of like are we shifting standards of diagnosis for for different terms like ADHD? Are people getting diagnosed with ADHD more frequently? Why is that? If they are, is it because we're kind of lowering our standards or is it because we're actually catching people who were falling through the net before? Whatever it is. So, when you start to like shrink the populations in that way, there's just this natural tendency to change what you're putting into that bucket. >> Yeah, totally. One of the uh phrases that I like to use on the podcast a lot is research is research. And people normally have a personal relationship with whatever it is that they're getting into. And I'm wondering what drew you to all of this. >> I would say the main thing is that um about 11 years ago now, I got sober and so I had known that I had a drinking problem for a long time. And I'm not like, and I don't mean like, oh, I used to drink sometimes and I listened to like a Huberman episode that told me I should drink less and I I mean like I'm parking my car on the front lawn type of thing, you know? Like not going to end well. And I had always tried to solve this issue by finding like what's the easy, effortless, comfortable way that I can handle my drinking and stop drinking. never worked. And you know, then for whatever reason, one morning I woke up and it was just very clear to me that if I continued that behavior, I was probably going to die early. And it also occurred to me, wait a minute, do you think this is supposed to be easy? Like, no, this is probably going to be really, really hard to get sober. And um I leaned into that. And by going through that short-term discomfort, and it was absolute hell, uh my life started to improve across the board. like everything in my life improved. Now, at the same time, this all happened when I was an editor at Men's Health magazine. And I sort of noticed that every single thing that we wrote about in that magazine, it had the same trajectory that you had to embrace short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. So, improving health, exercise is the best thing you can do for your health. Exercise is hard when you do it. when you're if you wanted to lose weight, you probably have to overhaul a lot of habits around food and that's really challenging. Um even improving your mental health, probably have to ask yourself hard questions, have hard conversations, but on the other side of that, people tend to improve. So, it was this like noticing that trend in all these forms of human improvement. And then I started just looking into it. And I've always been interested in how the past shapes today, like around evolutionary work and how it can sort of tell us things about why humans do the things they do. And yeah, that just sort of set me off on the path of the book. >> So, one of the things I've heard heard you say is how these kinds of behaviors, particularly excessive behaviors like pulling the lever of a slot machine over and over again, you know, scrolling on your phone, drinking when you're already, you know, you've already had two drinks. Why do you want the third drink? is a kind of reaction to a feeling of scarcity or like a feeling of lack of something in your life. Um, was that your experience personally with your drinking? >> Yeah, I would say for mine it was like, you know, my favorite drink was always the next one. It's like if this one's good, what's the next one going to be like and then next one after that? And um, you know, that works until it doesn't. Um, yeah, my book, Scarcity Brain, I really cover how sort of how we're wired to avoid discomfort. We're also kind of wired to try and get more of these things that helped us survive. So, more food, more stuff, more influence over other people, more, more, more, more. And um that served us for all the time cuz the environments we lived in things were scarce. There's hardly ever enough food. You didn't really have that much stuff. Like even up to I think it was the 1700s, the average person might have even been the 1800s only had one outfit, right? And so if you could get more stuff when you had the opportunity, that would help you survive. But now we've shifted to this world where we have an abundance of all these things that we're really built to crave. and that used to keep us alive and we almost don't have a governor for the stopping. So now the average person has more than 100 outfits. Um you mentioned how much stuff is in people's house. The figure is anything anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 items and in the past you like had you had like one of everything and not many things and they would get passed down. >> Family heirlooms, that kind of thing. And that was sort of most of it. Yeah. >> Totally. Yeah. Yeah, it get really gets put on steroids after the industrial revolution. And I think that the availability of tech now with like entertainment and opportunities to gamble and watch the next 10-second reel, it's like, you know, we want we want to be entertained and this stuff comes at us so fast. And it's also on a random reward schedule, which I read about a lot in uh scarcity brain and how that captures human attention. So, if we know something is predictable, we can kind of zone out because it's like, why would I focus on that if I know it's coming in? If it's going to happen or not going to happen, don't pay attention. But if it might happen, >> oo, that grabs us. >> If you lose 10 cents every time you play the slots, there's >> no upside for it, dude. Yeah. >> Even if you win a dollar every time you play the slots, there's no upside. That's that's literally an hour what hourly jobs are, >> paid hourly jobs. I mean, it literally is. you pull a handle and you get x amount of, you know, dollars per hour. >> Yeah. >> Well, that's like what people do on assembly lines. Um, it's not that it's not that fun. Uh, but when it becomes random, >> it sucks inhuman attention and I think, um, so I live in Vegas and I think slot machines are just the perfect metaphor for this. >> For sure. Yeah. Variable reinforcement, all of that. >> Yeah. and they didn't um slot machines used to not be very popular and then in like no one played them and then in the 80s this guy came in and he digitized them so you could have you could tweak the schedule of rewards. It used to be like maybe one out of every 10 or 20 games you would play you would you would win but it wouldn't be that much money. Um so it was really boring. It was like play lose play lose play lose play lose play lose. Who's going to play that, right? Um but this guy came in and he tweaked it. So about 45% of games something would happen. Meaning you could say you bet a dollar, you could win another dollar. You win $2. Great. But he also did this really brilliant thing called a loss disguised as a win. And that's when let's say you bet a dollar and you quote unquote win 50. Well, that seems stupid, but the machine still started dinging. The number went up. Could you give an example of of how that works? Just kind of like mechanic. This is just really interesting to me. Yeah. >> Yeah. So, what what he and it kind of gets in the weeds of slot machines. Um the old games used to have like a single line that you would be betting on. So, it was like you'd have the three, you know, the three reels, the old school ones, and you'd have to line them all up. You get the three cherries. Great. >> Yeah, for sure. >> So, what this guy does is um he makes it so you could put say it's behind a video screen by the way. Now, so you could put um five reels, but they're screenbased and you could start to win in different directions. So, yes, you could win in a straight line, you could also win in the line above. You could win in the line above that. You could win diagonal. You could win. I mean, like 40 different lines you could bet on. And so, as you're able to bet on 40 lines, one of them might hit. Now, when it did hit though, you might just win 40 cents on your dollar bet. bet on eight other lines that didn't win. And so, you know, in total you lost, but the machine's going off. Yeah. >> But the machine's going off. And so, it's still exciting. And so, there's research that show, and I think you see this in Vegas. Like, this is one of those things where it's kind of like, why the hell do we need to study this? Cuz I can, why the hell are these casinos billions of dollars down the street from my house? Clearly, something's working, right? you see that slot machine gambling just takes off and slot machines go from being like these things relegated to the corner that by the way didn't even have seats cuz people wouldn't play them long enough to really being the epicenter of casino floors. >> So they started to uh take up they were the main cash cows. They their money that slot machines brought in rose like 10fold in very short amount of time. And people now spend more money on slot machines than they do books, which makes me sad. Music and movies combined. It's just this mega industry. And I think what becomes important though is this gets figured out in the 80s and you start to see other industries kind of go, what the hell is going on in Vegas? Because like we got people sitting at slot machines for hours and hours and hours. Everyone knows the house always wins, but somehow they're getting people to sit and play and play and play. And so then you see that um behavior loop, which in the book I call it the scarcity loop. It gets put into all sorts of different technologies. It's what makes social media work, random reward schedule. It's put into finance apps, obviously sports betting. It's what really made dating apps take off. So, dating apps online really took off at Tinder and because it's a random rewards game. Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Oh my god, I matched with someone. It's the exact same structure of a slot machine. And it's I mean, it's all over now. >> When you zoom out and you just start seeing, I don't know, society broadly through that kind of lens that you're describing, it really is pretty wild how many of these things we've essentially turned into slot machines. >> Oh, totally. Yeah. so much of I mean I would >> most social media most apps. >> Yeah. If you I would say you know if you're listening to this show pull out your phone right now and look at your mostus apps. >> I can guarantee they work on random reward schedule whether it's email. You don't know when the email is going to come in. When it comes in you're like oh what is it? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it really good? And you got to check immediately. uh social media, even news apps to an extent. I mean, you see the rise of the term breaking news and news alerts started to be >> breaking news scroller on the bottom of the screen just never never goes away. There's always breaking news somewhere. Yeah, totally. >> Yeah, dude. How old are you? >> I am 38. >> Oh, okay. We're we're the same age. Um I'm 39. So, like think about when we were kids. How often did you see the term breaking news? It was like >> rarely. Yeah. >> Yeah. And now it's everything is breaking news. I mean like literally you turn on CNN today and it's like breaking news. >> Something that I think could help people out with this like what's the scarcity that that loop is built on? >> I think humans need a mission and for most of the time to pull back on why do we get captured by this loop in the first place and random rewards? Um, it's because for all of time, survival was a random rewards game and it in the form of finding food. You know, you would go to one spot hoping for food. Maybe it doesn't have it. So, you go to the next spot, doesn't have food either. Third spot, bam, jackpot, right? The slot machine lights up. There's tons of food here. We're going to survive. This is awesome. So if we hadn't evolved to like fall into be captured by random wards in the sense that they drive persistent behavior, we would have all died off. And you also see this in every single other other animal. A good anecdote I like um because you said you like psychology is um uh there's this guy Thomas Zenal and he will take pigeons and put them in a cage and he'll give them the choice between two games. uh the first game it's predictable so it gives them food every other pack every time they peck a light. So every other pack they get say like 10 pellets of food. Then they have the choice of the other game and it's more of a random rewards game. So sometime over say 5 to 10 packs uh they'll get food but it'll be a slightly higher amount. It'll be like 15 pellets or 20 pellets. Now, if you do the math, it makes way more sense to play the predictable game because you're like, "Oh, every other time I'm going to get 10." This one, I don't know when I'm going to get it, but sometime over 5 to 10 packs, I'll get 15. Yeah, it's higher, but like overall I'm not going to get as much food. Um, 97.5% of pigeons play the random rewards game, >> even though it doesn't get them as much food. >> So, the pigeons get addicted, too, is what I'm hearing. the pigeons get addicted to. But here's the interesting thing though. >> So when it when he does those experiments on pigeons, they're um they typically live in a cage, you know, it's like their life seems good. They're in a cage, they're pigeons, who cares? Um but when they will take the pigeons and they will build this giant cage for them that simulates the real world where they have to do stuff to survive. They have to like find their food. They're able to build roosts. They're able to be communal. They're basically able to live a life that is very similar to how a pigeon lives in the wild, puts them back in the game. Every single pigeon starts choosing the game that is predictable, that gets him more food. >> Oh, that's really interesting. >> And I think that's a metaphor for why do people fall into these patterns of like, I'm checking social media a million times a day. I'm online gambling all the time. I'm into drugs, alcohol, whatever it might be. I think it's like you lose a mission and you're not doing what our species evolved to do, which is like struggle, work for things, be outside, be in a tight community where you got to like your buddy isn't just your buddy, he's your lifeline as well. And I don't necessarily think we can come back from that. I'm not saying we necessarily should because it is great to like not have to actually worry, am I going to find food? >> Totally. Yeah. But I do think that there's, you know, some inherent lessons in that as well. >> Yeah. There are things we've lost along the way, which I think is fair to say. And um I mean, there's just so much in this that's that's really interesting because that pigeon experience, I think, is also part of the answer to the question, why do this in a life that can already feel difficult for people? It's like, well, yeah, a lot of the things that are making the life feel difficult exist inside the cage, you know, and so can we add some of those things that are outside of the cage that that we've lost along the way, whatever that looks like for you like as a person. Different different lives are going to have different thresholds or different capacities for this kind of additional voluntary productive discomfort to put it a certain kind of way. Um, but most people can do something and in that something most people can find something meaningful. >> Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Do you feel like just being aware of this addictive processes that we're dealing with, this variable reinforcement scheme, like looking at the apps and just seeing all the problems with them, is is awareness enough to help people make a different choice or do something differently, or there are particular things that people can do to get a little more resilient to this? >> I think it's the absolute first step. >> Yeah. >> And then from there, it kind of depends on the behavior that you're falling into. Um, interestingly enough, I do think with cell phones and technology, um, technology can actually help. So, there's these kids that reached out to me. I call them kids, they're like 27 or something. Um, they created this app that's called Clear Space. And what you do is you like choose an app that you want to use less of. And what it does is when you go to, let's say you choose Instagram. I use Instagram too much. You go to open it and it asks you, do you want to use the app? It's like that's a good question because how many times do you just pull out Instagram mindlessly and then you find yourself sucked in and so then you go okay yeah I think I do want to use it. Uh it makes you pause for 10 seconds. So that slows down the loop and then you choose how much time do I actually want to spend in this app because I'm sure everyone has experienced I opened the app to you know say respond to my friend but I got sucked in for an hour and I didn't even respond to my friend. So that sort of like keeps you in that period of like okay I know I can use this for five minutes. So that way you can like use it in a way that helps you rather than hurts you. And there's a lot of different way. I think to get back to what I said about clear space though, the reason there's that pause is because speed becomes really important in determining how compulsive a behavior will be. >> So generally generally the faster you can do a behavior if it's rewarding the more likely you are to do it. And I'll give you the I'll give you an example from Las Vegas. It's that uh when slot machines took away the handles, which are clunky, takes a little bit to pull them down, they got to go all the way back up, reels start spinning. Um when those handles were on, people were playing an average about 400 games an hour. When they replace those handles with spin buttons, which is just doot doot, gaming went up to 900 games an hour on average. >> And we see this in social media, too. It's like infinite scroll. There's no lag time. You don't have to load another page. There's it's just like everything is fast and sort of friction frictionless. So, if you can find ways to slow a behavior down that you don't want to do, that'll usually help. >> I'm thinking how different the Tik Tok experience would be if it took 10 seconds for the next video to load each time that you swiped. Like, how much less addictive would that be for your brain if that was going on? >> Oh, yeah. Their use would totally plummet. >> Yeah. I mean, so like with online shopping, I think one of the reasons people generally buy more stuff now is just it's so fast and easy to buy stuff. >> So easy. Yeah. >> I mean, when we were kids, it's like if I want a new I don't know, let's say basketball shoes. It's like I got to go down to the foot locker. I got to look around. I got to find them into the building. >> Yeah, dude. I gotta like find the guy in the referee shirt and be like, "Hey, could you give me a size 10 or you know?" Um, and now it's just like bam, hop online, put it in your cart, go. >> Totally. >> So, I even will tell people if you want to buy some, if like you think you want to buy something online, set a rule to leave it in your cart for 72 hours. >> Mhm. Do you still want it tomorrow? Yeah. >> The vast majority of cases, people come back and go, I don't really need that. Or even like the even taking off autopop populate on your credit card. So, you have to go find the credit card and type in the >> number. Like that moment of pause is enough that people will go, I don't really need this. >> As we're talking through it, there are these incredibly powerful, wealthy forces that are spending huge amounts of money to do everything they can to exploit the ways that our brains work. You know, we're talking about them. Social media, gambling, food companies, whatever. At the same time, when I read your Substack or when I read your books, it's so about what you can do as a person kind of even so even so even inside of this environment that is so not conducive to the ways that our brains work or maybe even more so is like built to exploit the ways that our brains work. How do you think about that balance as you go through this? Like on the one hand powerful forces, on the other hand, personal agency. What can I do? Anyways, >> I will say I personally would not in general. There are some cases that I think we should put some limitations on, but I personally would rather have that what we have now than too many regulations on things, you know, like I want to be able to leave my house right now if I want to and go sit at a slot machine and enjoy myself for an hour, you know? It's just like a it's like a form of entertainment. So I think a lot of it is personal responsibility. I mean it's even like with you know in in scarcity brain I write about how the food industry really sort of figured out the formula for junk food and um it's value variety velocity. That is a quote from a junk food executive. So they realize you got to make it cheap. You got to have a you can't just have one flavor of Dorito. You got to have 10 flavors of Doritos. And by the way, every 3 months you got to release a limited edition Dorito. Um, and then velocity, meaning the foods have to be quick to eat. Faster you can eat it, the more you'll eat. Now, Doritos are delicious, though. I don't want to live in a world where we're like, "Hey, you can't make a delicious Dorito." >> Sure. I I love a Snickers bar from time to time. Yeah, absolutely. >> It's the best. Um, so I do I do think it's like we need to appreciate like how amazing the world is objectively. Kind of like you said at the beginning, if you plop a person from 2 million years ago and today they'd be like, "Oh my god, this is unbelievable." Um, but it also means like you have to build some sort of personal frameworks to navigate it because if you're always doing the next easiest thing, leaning into like, "Oh, I want that. I'm going to get that." I mean, you're going to drive yourself nuts. I mean, this is kind of above my pay grade, but just my own thinking about it. It very case by case. Um, in general, I think that people should be able to mostly do things that they want to do within reason if they're not hurting other people. Big fan of that. On the other hand, man, there's just so much money involved in some of this stuff. And they've gotten so good at exploiting the brain. Like social media in particular is the one where like my eyebrows just go up, particularly for kids, like >> 14year-olds on Instagram. I'm I don't know. Um, it just it's it's thorny territory pretty quick. I think about how I would have been if I had been a teenager exposed to all the content on on Instagram that's out there for like a teenage boy. Oh man, that could go to a dark place pretty quickly. And I I don't know if I would have had that kind of um, you know, call it what you will, responsibility or whatever else. >> Yeah, I do think social media is one area we should put some restrictions on for younger people. >> Sure. >> I mean, I have I got I don't know what the age is now. Maybe it's 21. Um, when I was growing up, you had to be 18 to smoke. You had to be 21 to buy alcohol. And it's like, well, why is that? And the reason is because the human brain is developing in such a way from puberty to about 25 that we start to like figure out where do we find comfort, where do we soo ourselves, blah blah blah. And so when you inject those sorts of stimulating things in, it raises the probability of addiction. So for example, if a person starts drinking, I believe the number the age is 16, it could be 15, it's somewhere in there. They start drinking at age 15 or 16, they have a 50% chance of being an alcoholic. If they wait till 20, 25 to drink, their odds of being an alcoholic drop to 10%. >> Big difference. >> Huge difference. And so I do think we should put limits for kids on social media. I do think that this whole mobile sports betting experiment is not a not a good one. I think you should have to walk into the casino and place the bet. >> All this prediction market stuff that's happening right now with like Koshi and whatever else, all the Super Bowl ads that just happened, man, that was painting a dark future. I mean, maybe that's just me, but there was something about it that was very disturbing. And like I've um I do public speaking and I'll I've done a couple talks for um like all boys boarding schools, you know, like the kind you see in movies where it's these, you know, their parents are the masters of the universe and they're like, "Yeah, come tell our kids some stuff." Um >> a lot of the headmasters have asked me to talk about gambling, sports betting on phones in particular, because they're just seeing it as a huge problem. And like yeah, theoretically there's supposed to be these restrictions where you have to be a certain age, but it's like kids figure out a way around that so easy. Like we really got to I don't know about that experiment. >> You might not know this about me, but the YouTube videos that I watch most frequently aren't about psychology or mental health. They're about cooking. I love cooking and I do a lot of it. So, I'm pretty picky about cookware. When you're touching an object every day, you want it to feel nice and perform well. Carowway sent us their 12piece ceramic nonstick set in the marold color and Elizabeth and I have loved them. The color is great. I think they're really beautiful and I've used this uh 10 and 1/2 in ceramic coated fry pan literally every day since I got it. It heats up really nicely. The surface is very slick and this has made it great to use with sticky ingredients like eggs and fish. And it's also very easy to clean. Unlike most other non-stick cookware, Careway's nonstick products have a mineral-based coating that won't leech toxic materials into your food. They also sell durable stainless steel and enameled cast iron products that are made to the same high standard. Over a 100,000 people have given their Careway kitchen products a fivestar rating, and Careway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus, if you visit carawayhome.com/beingwell, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners. So, visit carowwayhome.com/beingwell or use code beingwell at checkout. Caraway non-toxic cookware made modern. Maybe to wander back toward some of the things I was I was planning on talking about today, although I love where we're going with this. you've lived this pretty wild life as a journalist and which has involved some extreme experiences like you were just talking about at the beginning you know back being living in the Arctic for a while traveling to Iraq to investigate the spread of this street drug that I think was called Captagon I hope I'm saying that correctly >> you got it >> how do you think those experiences have changed your changed your relationship with this topic like what did you find yourself in those more extreme situations >> I think that there's a difference between intellectual understanding understanding and experiential understanding. >> I think I think they're both important for me. It's like if I want to write about a topic, yes, I am going to read all the studies and I am going to talk to the researchers. U but I also want to go on the ground and see what it's like and see people's kind of lived experience because I feel like that that becomes really important. you know, I've read I've read research and then gone to the place and you're like, this research is totally wrong. >> And so it upends things. And I think it also gives me and frankly just from a writing perspective, it's easier to write a book when you have a narrative when you've gone places. And I think that also leads to a more engaging read. You know, I like to say that if all people wanted was information, we'd all just read textbooks. But nobody does that. So why is that? It's because we need information presented in some sort of narrative that helps us understand it. And so by going to the place and talking to people, meeting characters, I can not only learn more, but also build a better narrative around that. >> One of the things that I've read that you've written about that really stuck with me were these four lost experiences that you talked about. First, physical strain. Second, hunger. Third, mortality salience. So, in other words, the the presence of death in your mind as a reality for all of us. A lot of overlap there with Zen Buddhism and Buddhist practice in general, which we talk about on the podcast pretty regularly. Fourth one, boredom. I actually thought that boredom in a funny way was kind of the most interesting one because if you think about it, we really have engineered boredom outside like just out of our lives. I I remember being a sevenyear-old or something and I have the most visceral memories of just being bored out of my mind. and I was so bored that my legs hurt. I don't know if you can like empathize with that kind of an experience or not. >> And I just look at my my current life and some of that is cuz I'm an adult. I'm a busy guy, you know, whatever it is. But also, it's just the way that we've we've built our lives with social media and everything else that's like constantly vying for our attention. And I I would love to just kind of like go through some of those or just your thoughts about that and particularly that boredom aspect for people. Like can boredom be a good thing? Yeah, I'll tell you why I started to think about this. And this this gets back to your last question about Okay, well, why go do the thing? >> Yeah, >> because I also learn new things while I'm out in the field. So, for the Comfort Crisis, I was up in the Arctic for more than a month and we were on this uh we were hunting caribou. Now, I hadn't hunted before and I thought that hunting was going to be like this action-packed thing. I found out that it was not. So we'd like we'd just be sitting on these hills waiting for caribou to migrate through and like none are coming through. So we just sit there. You don't have a cell phone, television, iPads, books, all this stuff. And so I just bored out of my mind, you know, totally bored. And to deal with our boredom, we would do things like read the labels on our cliff bars. We would read the tags on our gear. We would I was out there with two other guys. We would set up these ridiculous scenarios like what would you do if blah blah blah blah blah, you know? And I just realized that that was so different than how I would have dealt with my boredom were I at home. If I'm at home and I get bored, I have an easy, effortless escape from it in my cell phone that has whatever three social media apps, five news apps, YouTube, whatever I want, and I can just immediately fix that boredom. And if my phone isn't there, I have a giant TV on the wall or a computer or whatever. So, we've really like made it so we don't have to sit with boredom and see where it takes us. And I think we've lost something with that. So, big picture, boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically tells us whatever we're doing with our time right now, the return on our time invested has worn thin. So, go do something else. So, in the case of say it's a million years ago and you and I need food to survive and we're hunting, not seeing any animals, boredom would kick in and say, "Hey, go do something else." And that something else would often be productive. We would go, "All right, we got to go get food somewhere else. Let's go like see if there's still berries at that patch we saw a week ago, whatever." Right? It would like push us into something that was often more productive. Um, but now I'd argue it's not as productive because it's for most people it's Tik Tok, it's the latest rage on X, it's, you know, Instagram watching my hundth dog reel of the day. Um, and in this context, I do think it is useful to weave boredom back into your life um, for a variety of reasons. And one is that it tends to reduce stress. So with the amount of time that we focus on the outside world, it's actually like a lot of work for the brain. And there's some research suggesting that, you know, when you get bored, a lot of times the first thing that happens is you start to mind wander. And that's more of this like rest think. >> I think this is a huge point by the way, Michael. Yeah. >> Yeah. And that's that's often where good ideas come up. It's in that time where you're just like kind of letting things float around. And yeah, sometimes it's weird. You're like, you know, I wonder what my uh my aunt Sean is doing right now. I wonder how my life would have changed had the Utah Jazz won the 1997 NBA Championships. You know, >> we also wonder about that one. What if Michael didn't push off? You know, whatever it is. >> I was at that game and I don't want to talk about it. Um I'm still scarred. Grew up in Utah. Um >> and now I'm thinking about the Jazz. I've been got off. I'm sorry. I don't mean to do that to anybody. That's That's cruel right there. >> I have a cousin that I've uh I'm talking into getting the tattoo Jordan pushed off. >> So, yes, you mind wander into some weird places. >> Yeah. >> But a lot of times you end up finding something like a solution to a problem or an idea pops in your head and it's actually quite interesting and it and it moves things forward. And so I think a great example of this is that like people often have really great thoughts in the shower, right? It's like well it's because you're not you're just letting your mind wander. You're just your mind's going places. You're like oh that's the solution to that problem. And there is some research where they will take um it's kind of a weird study. They uh take these two groups of people. They put one in a room say we'll be back in 20 minutes. You can do whatever you want. Everyone pulls out their phone immediately. Uh, and then the other group, they bore the hell out of these people. And then they give them a creativity test. And the board group consistently produced uh more and more creative answers than the non-board group. It's because they had this time to rest and kind of reflect and let their minds like revive and wander. And then bam, you give them that test and they're ready for it. And then I think like just big picture philosophically there's this William James quote I love where he says he basically said at the end of your life your life is a collection of what you paid attention to. And now the average person spends more than 12 hours a day engaged with digital media. And that is all new. None of it is more than 100 years old. And so this stuff like really has become our lives. And I think a lot of it is great. But I am asking does 12 hours seem like a lot? >> Yeah, exercise a little discretion about it for sure. And one of the really interesting things you bump into if you look at some of the research here particularly on uh groups of people that have not modernized for whatever reason like so small indigenous tribes or things like that. When we go in and study behavior, when anthropologists go um to talk to these people and interview them about like daily habits and that kind of stuff, one of the largest amounts of time is actually not spent going to get food or sleeping or whatever it is. Those are big categories. The largest category is time spent doing nothing. >> Yeah. >> And this is deliberate actual doing nothing. This isn't taking a nap. This isn't like chitchatting with a friend. they are just like sitting staring off into space for extended periods of time. So there's there's something in that that's very natural and very human and we've just totally built it out of our lives. Um the smallest smallest smallest possible example of this I've tried to it's funny saying this as I run a podcast I've been listening to podcasts less in my spare time because what I was finding was I just always had somebody talking to me. >> Mhm. you know, I always had a podcast running in the background when I was in the shower or I had like music playing when I was making making lunch. And it's great to have music playing when you're making lunch. You know, I'm not saying that that's a bad thing or something, but I was getting um my like baseline anxiety was going up because something was always happening and my brain just didn't have that time to like relax. And then when I would lay down at night, all of these like thoughts would rush in, you know, all these things about the future or all of these like weird thoughts in the way that you were describing. I mean, I wasn't so preoccupied with whether or not Jordan pushed off because I'm not Jaz fan, but you know, things like that, whatever it was for me, just cuz you didn't have that like baseline time where your brain's dumping to a certain extent and relaxing in the course of the day. And it was it was actually a big deal for me. It really helped. >> Totally. I believe it. I mean, I've heard that from a lot of people. And I mean, for me, I'll usually take a walk every day and I'll just leave my phone at home or I'll just put it on. I won't have my headphones in. And I will say like the best ideas I've had in my books, whether it's just like how I turned a phrase or whatever, and obviously this is my own judgment. Um, I think they've all come from those walks where I'm just like letting things kind of fly. Like I said, sometimes you're thinking about something random and then you go, "Oh, yeah, that one sentence you were working on earlier today." And it's just like, "Oh, that's it." You know? >> Yeah. I even proximity to phone. When I do a a walk around my neighborhood, I've started leaving the phone at home. Now, of course, it's a very safe neighborhood. You want to be thoughtful about these things, all that kind of obvious, you know, caveats. But if you can do it, man, it just feel there's something about it that is weirdly freeing to like not have the tether of thinking about your phone. >> Yeah, totally. And to your point about the hunter gatherers just kind of hanging out doing nothing. I mean, some of my favorite memories I have with my friends in high school and today when we go on these backpacking trips, >> it's like you don't have cell service and you're just kind of hanging out in Cam. You're like, what are we going to do? I know. Let's see who can skip a rock the farthest across this lake. And it turns into this like just awesome game. And like that is what you remember. That is what you remember. It's like you all had to unite and were we, you know, had we had cell service, we'd probably be sitting around everyone kind of like occasionally checking their phone. Yeah, we talk, but like that wouldn't have spontaneously arisen. >> I think it's really helpful for people to just appreciate the value of some of these things. Um, and the ways in which these different kinds of like the right amount of discomfort can actually bring a lot into your life that feels deeply meaningful, very valuable. Big example of that is the most recent book walk with weight. You know, adding more physical discomfort in a sense. Uh physical strain in particular is one of those lost experiences that you talked about. So let's say that somebody wanted to get into doing this more regularly. They're like, "Okay, >> sure, life's hard. Things are tough. A lot of uh hills we're climbing in terms of the environment that we're living in, but this is something that I always feel better after I do it." I know speaking personally, I always feel better. I was just talking to Elizabeth the other day. That's my fiance. >> Mhm. >> One of the things that has been huge for me in my life is the feeling that worst case scenario, my head hits the pillow at life at night. And even if the day went totally sideways on me, I can still say, "Ah, at least I went to the gym." And there's something about that that's been just like such a great psychological resource for me. >> Totally. Yeah. I mean, and just mental health-wise, like a lot of the research shows that exercise is as effective as a lot of psychiatric medications. And sometimes better than or not better than, but equal to therapy. And so there there are some news reports that say it's better than that's not right. That it's can be equal to. >> Yeah. It's more nuanced than that. And it depends person to person. Different people have different responses to different things. So >> totally >> take it with a grain of salt. >> Yeah. And it and it also Yeah. It depends on like what are we talking about here? Are we talking about like an extreme case? Like of course telling a person, you know, who's like in this extreme state of biological depression, hey, just go for a walk, buddy. Like that's not helpful. >> Um but I think with a lot of this kind of like everyday stuff, just moving more can do so much good. To your point, I mean, it's impacting your physical health in a good way. probably the best thing you can do to ward off a lot of diseases um but also improving your mental health. And so the case that I make in walk with weight is and that really came out of a chapter in the comfort crisis where I looked at physical activity and how we've engineered it out of our lives and some of the consequences in that. And in that chapter I talk about how one of the main physical acts that humans evolved to do is to carry weight for distance. So, we're the only mammal that can do that, like just pick up a weight, carry it a long distance across the earth. And that totally shaped our species. It allowed us, I mean, our hands freed up. We could start to manipulate the world. We could go explore new areas. We could take tools into the unknown. And we really exploded from there. But we've totally engineered carrying as a form of physical activity out of our lives. Like we have shopping carts that we push when we have our food. We have, you know, babies in strollers. You used to have to carry the kid all the time, whether it was like in your arms or in some sort of sash. And I think that that has definitely impacted um our physicality because carrying is interesting in the sense that it almost combines cardio and strength training because you're moving across the earth. You're getting an endurance effect. Um, but because you're having to carry something, your muscles are also having to work harder. So, it kind of pairs um cardio and weight training in one. It's kind of like um it's like cardio for people who hate cardio and like to lift almost. >> That's that's me right there. So, this was a this was a great fit for me personally. I'm I'm cardio averse generally. So, yeah. No, it was a good one. >> Yeah. So, I think um yeah, the book just kind of looks at it looks at kind of the theory behind it, history, our history of caring. Um, it looks at why all the health benefits it has. Um, lower injury rate, tends to result in more fat loss, tends to burn more calories per mile compared to walking or running, bone density improvements, all these different improvements. And then it gets into sort of the tactics of, okay, how do I actually do this thing and add it to my life? >> So, for for people who might not be familiar with this term, that's just what you mean by rucking, right? It's just putting something in a bag and carrying it with you as you walk. >> Yeah. And I think a lot of people probably see this um people wearing weight vests around. >> Sure. >> That's like that's a form of it. Yeah. It's just like figuring out throw some weight in a backpack. That's the other thing I like is you don't have to get too um >> it doesn't take much. It's like everyone has a backpack. Everyone has something that weighs something. Just put something that weighs something in a backpack and just go for a walk. It's like so much of fitness is like, "Oh, I got to get the gym membership. I got to buy the special clothes or I got to invest >> $2,000 >> technique videos from people on YouTube about how to do this thing. Yeah, totally. >> Yeah. And so it's really accessible um for anyone. Like if you can't run because of prior injuries or you're aging um if you can walk, you can do it with a little bit of weight and you'll get more out of every step. So I love I love that about it too and that it's just very it just meets people where they're at. One of the things I also appreciated when you were talking about it in the book is um for many people wrecking is going to have associations with the military. It this is to some extent where the term came from and because of that it can feel a bit inaccessible for people. Uh that kind of like hardcore boot camp mentality is not what everybody's looking for from their exercise regimen. And framing it that way is actually a bit of a bummer because like you were saying this is the most human activity. You know, this is ancient mothers inventing like how to carry their children in slightly more efficient ways so they could perform other tasks while they were doing it. >> Yeah, totally. And the reason so in the comfort crisis I was using the term rocking mostly to talk with to talk about walking with weight in the pack. In this new book, >> the reason I called it walk with weight and have used that language more is because when I mention to my 76y old mom, hey, you should try rocking. and she Googles rocking, she gets these like jacked soldiers and she's like that is not for me. >> Sure. >> Um, but to what you mentioned, these like carrying devices that have morphed into backpacks over time, they were invented by mothers who wanted to carry their kids while also freeing their hands so they could do other things. And the rocking terminology just eventually got adopted by the military. and the military continued to do this act of like marching with heavy weight or gear in a backpack. And so it just kind of stuck and it became this military thing, but it's like no, this is a human thing. Humans have been doing this for millions of years. And so let's remember that and try and make it more accessible. Hey there, thanks for watching and sorry for the brief interruption, but it turns out that over 60% of the people watching this right now are not subscribed to the channel. So, if you could just take a moment to hit the subscribe button, it would really help me out. I'd appreciate it a lot. All right, back to the show. So, I love you mentioning your your 76-year-old mom here and recommending this style of exercise to her. I have a 70 some odd year old mom as well. Uh, one of the the things that people are often the most interested in when they hear about something like this is risk of injury. Uh, that's one of the big concerns particularly for older people, like am I going to get hurt doing this thing? Are there particular studies on this or you know is there uh is this generally a good form of exercise for people when it comes to injury risk? >> Yeah, it's much the injury risk is much lower compared to running. So running the injury rate is anywhere from 20 I think 3 to 79% of runners get injured >> on your body like unus unusually tough on your body. Yeah, >> it is. I think there's a lot of different reasons for that which we don't have to get into. But long story short, when you compare, and the military has studied this extensively, when you compare injuries from running to those from rucking, rucking is way, way lower. It's um more in line with the injury rate of walking, which is like 1%. Like, no one really gets injured walking, you know, and especially if you're using lighter weights. So, yes, the injury risk rises if you use really heavy weights, but the average person can start with like 10% of their body weight and you'll be fine. It'll be a little more a little more challenging than your normal walk, but you'll get all these extra benefits and then you can start to add weight over time if you want. And so, for me, like my average is probably 20% of my body weight. I feel like that's a weight that like the walk doesn't feel like a death march. Yeah, it's still harder. Um, but I'm still enjoying it. And, um, I mean, I've never gotten injured from rocking and I don't know many people who have, so long as they weren't in the military and being forced to carry, you know, 120 pounds in a backpack up a mountain. >> Really pushing the limits here. Yeah. >> Yeah. Totally. >> Another one of the things I bumped into that I just appreciated and how you talked about it was the idea of the super medium body type. Uh there is so much pressure on people socially often based on gender socialization and like how we want men to look versus how we want women to look. You know, big and muscular for men, you know, slender and petite for women, whatever it is that's that's kind of being pushed to you these days. And that can be an idealized image, but from an actual athleticism or functionality standpoint, those bodies have weaknesses associated with them there. I don't know if you ever bumped into it. Uh, one of the people I really love watching on YouTube is Dr. Mike, Renaissance Periodization. Really, really big channel. >> Yeah, love his content in general. Very, very funny guy. There was a video that went viral where he was training with, I forget, I think it might have been like ex-Navy Seals or something like that. And, uh, they had him do this like jumping exercise where he was supposed to do like a standing jump as far as he could and he could jump like a foot, you know, he like barely moves on this jump because he's got this big bodybuilder body, you know, he's not built to do that. and and and I just love there was something in like pushing the idea of a super medium body type that I just really appreciated. >> The long story short of it is you don't want to be too small because then when life inevitably throws things at you where you have to have some muscle and move your body swiftly you're going to suffer. But you also don't want to be too big. Even if it's muscle, the more you have, the more it's going to slow you down. The more you're just carrying unnecessary weight for the sake of carrying weight. Um, and I think this becomes important for both men and women for different reasons. Um, when you look at research on women, even if their BMI is considered healthy, women who had the least amount of muscle yet a healthy BMI had a significantly higher risk of death than women who were overweight or obese, which is crazy. They didn't have enough muscle. Men have the opposite problem, though, to your point. It's like, just bulk up, bulk up, bulk up. Well, even if it's muscle, the weight is still taxing your system and it's slowing you down. And so, I argue, you know, rocking is a good way to sort of find a happy medium because if you're too skinny, well, the weight is going to like build help you build some strength. If you're too big, that cardio is probably going to help lean you out. And so, I think for most people thinking, all right, I don't want to be too small. I don't want to be too big. um finding that sort of sweet spot and we just call it super medium >> and it's I don't know it's a good response to the psychological pressure I think also that people can be under to be really a certain kind of way um reclaiming a feeling of doing something for your own desire to develop strength or athleticism or I mean to some extent a certain kind of look but one that's just less driven by like Instagram pressures and more driven by functionality or values or you know sense of personal accomplishment whatever it I just think it's really psychologically healthy for people. >> Yeah. I have this great quote. It's from uh I can't remember what philosopher it was about Romans and he talked about how they would have these soldiers that like just tried to get as big and strong as possible. And he's like the he basically said he said it much more eloquently in an older language than me, but he's like they're useless. They can't they can't withstand the toil not eating enough. They're finicky. They can't move fast. They're just useless. I'm just like, I love that so much. >> Yeah. Very different moment in time for sure. So, doing this in kind of any setting, I again going back to my 70 some odd year-year-old mom, she's made a real commitment recently to getting enough steps every day. I forget what her current number is. I don't remember if it's actually 10,000 or not. I know that's the one that gets tossed around a lot. And the way that she does that, she's got various foot issues. She lives on a slope. She does a lot of walking around her house. She does laps around the home because that's what she can do. That's what she's got access to. Uh but one of the things that is a real throughine in your work is exposure to nature and the benefits of finding an activity that you can actively participate with outdoors. Uh walking with weight is a great example of that and I'm wondering if there are just any aspects of that that you want to kind of highlight or speak to here. >> Yeah, I in the comfort crisis I talk about this idea called the nature pyramid. It's it's like the food pyramid. Um but instead of telling you, you know, eat this many servings of grain and this many of vegetables, it basically tells us how much time we should spend in different types of nature. And this is based on I learned about this from a woman who was at um I think she was at BEu. I'm going to forget this. It was one of the Boston schools. There's like a hundred schools in Boston. Um she's a neuroscientist there. And um so long story short is at the bottom of the pyramid uh 20 minutes outdoors in the type of nature that you can find in like a city park or really treeline street three times a week. Uh that resulted in increased productivity and focus and decreased stress. Next up the pyramid is 5 hours a month in a little bit wilder nature, but not like crazy wild. I'm talking about like, you know, you go on a trail by your house. Um, you maybe park in a parking lot, walks and trails, there's a bathroom nearby. That was associated with increases in happiness and decreases in depression. And then at the very top is 3 days a year in the back country. That seems to be like this hard almost psychological reset for people. Um, it's this phenomenon called the three-day effect. people really calm down, stress levels go down, um they begin to get more creative, they kind of get more in touch with themsel. It's just this like awesome reset for people. And so now there is um there's researchers who are taking uh vets out into nature for extended periods to look at it as a treatment for PTSD. But I think sort of big picture is that, you know, humans evolved in nature. We were outdoorsy in the sense that we spent every single moment outdoors. >> Yeah. >> And now the average person uh spends 93% of their time inside. And that's fundamentally changed us. And I think that when you take a person who's spent most of their life inside and you put them outdoors, yes, it's going to be uncomfortable at first, but the more time you get in it, the more people calm down, stress levels go down, creativity goes up. It just sort of like resets perspective. And like in my own work, I can tell you like nature has always been the greatest teacher for me in terms of mindset because in the built environment, we can control everything. You got into nature. Nature doesn't give a right? It's like you got to figure things out. Like you're trying, oh, you want to get up to that mountain? Great. You're going to get lost on the trail. A storm's going to come in. You have to you have to like go into the well and figure things out. And that in that process you learn that you can do things, you can figure things out. And then you can take that back into daily life and all of a sudden, you know, the email coming in that would have annoyed you. It just kind of puts things in perspective and it kind of becomes this teacher and this metaphor, I think, for for living. >> Yeah. I've been thinking so much about self-concept recently. It's a big topic on the podcast as well. And for me, that's that's the real opportunity of a lot of this. Of course, the the physical benefits are great. The health benefits are great. Um, what you're really doing underneath it all is you're changing how you think about yourself and the view that you have of who you are, >> including the kinds of experiences that you can deal with. Like, you know, you start looking at the mountain and going, I can get up that. >> You know, maybe I don't want to get up it right this second for whatever reason, but I can do that. And just that feeling of like self-efficacy that's associated with that, such a big deal for people. And so psychologically healthy. >> Totally. And it's, you know, I realize some people live in cities and it's hard to get out into actual nature, >> places that have awful weather, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. >> Yeah. But I mean, even if you can find a park, like spending more time out there is is helpful. And I do think Yeah. finding more time to get outside. It's generally free, you know, and so it's just it can be a great teacher for people. >> If you don't mind me asking this a bit of a personal question, and you can duck this one if you want to. How has all of this like changed your relationship with how you think about yourself in that way? >> Oh, that's yeah, that's a good question. Um, big things would be, you know, after I go on trips, whether it's like I just I just uh in the spring last year, I did this like 850 mile hike across southern Utah. >> Wow. And >> it's like not there's no trail. You just got to like figure it out and find your way. And um took like 45 days. Once you get done with that, you're just like the it just puts your normal everyday problems in perspective. You know, before I leave for that hike, I'm like annoyed by emails and things like that. You just like you just have like these legitimate problems that are thrust in your path and you got to figure them out and that teaches excuse me, I can figure them out. And so then I get back into normal life and it's like it's not stressful and it's like you just have a better perspective on it. you're just like, "Yeah, we'll figure it out. Not a big deal." You know, things the world is going to keep on spinning. Um, and so, yeah, I think it's just made me generally more resilient in the sense that like if things don't go as I had hoped or planned, I'm just like, "Whatever, we'll figure it out. You're not going to die." You know, >> and it resets that comfort creep that you were talking about. You know, a shower all of a sudden seems like a pretty amazing in invention after you've gone through all of that. >> Oh, dude. It's un chair with a cushion is like, "Oh my god, >> it's unbelievable." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Like after I got back from the Arctic, the first time hot running water hit my hands, it was like a religious experience, dude. >> And it's like, how how often do you think of hot running? I'd never thought of how amazing hot running water is. It just shows up and it you just take it for granted. So I think you start to it helps you not take these like everyday wonders for granted. I mean if you just look at it in the grand scheme of time and space it's like if you being born at all you've hit the cosmic lottery. Being born today is like doubling down on the lottery. You know for most of time you're just outside and every you're cold everything sucks. you don't know if you're going to get food and now it's like we don't have that and I think it's easy to just like miss that and so sometimes it takes exiting the bounds of the ordinary to sort of learn to learn that for me anyways it's worked for me >> um my message is go try something and see what happens you tell me maybe I'm wrong for you and that's fine I can't be correct for everyone but I will say most people who have read my work and then go you what I'm going to go like do something. >> They usually get something out of it. Teaches them something about themselves and and their life. And I think that's a good thing. >> Well, we could easily just end there because I think that's a great period on the end of the sentence. I do want to ask you one more kind of practical question here about specifically walking with weight. >> Is there a particular way to get into it that you recommend to people? >> Yeah, I would say just make it easy. Find a there's there's gear out there. Um, I'm part of a company that's making gear specifically designed for women. We're called uh Walkfully. But I would say first things first is like just find a pack at your house. Fill it with something that weighs something. It could be books. It could be like a bag of rice, bag of sand. You could like wrap up a dumbbell and a towel so it's not jamming you in the back. Keep it light and just go for your normal walk. I mean, that's that simple. It's like there's, you know, I think sometimes people get paralysis by analysis and I would >> for sure >> one of my readers um I did this big poll on my Substack as I was before I was writing the book and was like, you know, what what's helped you the most? And a couple people said like I just didn't overthink it. I just got the backpack and put some weight in and started walking and like I got hooked. And then once I had done that, I was like, "Okay, I might buy some gear or I might not, you know, but I just kept doing it." And yeah, I will say weight wise though, don't go too heavy at first. That's tends to be more of a problem I've noticed for men where they're like, "Oh, I I got to put how much should I put in here? 80 lbs. Yeah, 80 pounds." Like, no, don't put 80 pounds in your pack. Um, start with like 10 percent of your 10 to 15% of your body weight. >> As we get to the end here, is there anything else you want to let people know about about your work? Where to find you? Anything you got coming up? >> No, probably I'm probably most active on Substack. Um, yeah, not super active on social media, but my Substack is 2%. Uh, you can find it there. >> And yeah, and the book is called Walk with Weight. It's my newest one. The other two are The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain. >> Thanks for doing this, Michael. I really appreciate it. >> Thanks, man. This was a lot of fun. >> Really enjoyed talking today with Michael Easter. He's the author of The Comfort Crisis, Scarcity Brain, and his new book, Walk with Weight. And we focus today on how we can get more out of life by embracing productive discomfort. Forms of difficulty that actually make our life better instead of making them worse. And that can be a tough cell for people. It can be a tough cell when somebody already experiences their life as being plenty challenging. when they have bills and debt and kids and a thousand other things clamoring for their attention. Stress about the state of the world, you know, whatever it is that's going on for you. But there's a big difference between those chronic involuntary stressors and the kinds of productive discomfort that Michael was talking about. When we choose our discomfort, when it's time bounded, when we're the one who's being agentic about it, it actually can increase capacity. As he talked about a lot during the conversation, we start to develop this different sense of who we are. uh we get a different relationship with our bodies. We experience some boredom and that boredom creates the space for creativity. We become less attached to all of these different mechanisms that have become built into our society whether it's social media or gambling being everywhere or you know whatever it else it is that that we're talking about uh apps and food and all of the things that have been engineered to take advantage of the machinery of the mind. we develop the capacity to take a little bit of a step back from them and get increasingly at choice about them. And in his work in general, Michael leans on findings that show that people who have experienced some adversity and particularly some chosen adversity, and this is not zero adversity and it's not extreme adversity. It's in that happy middle place. They show better stress responses. They have more resilience. So yes, adding difficulty to a life that is already hard can still be beneficial, but that's when you're the one who's choosing the difficulty. There are a million examples out there of people who have very challenging lives who still rely on something like exercise as a way to manage psychological stress. And this can be really challenging because we've done all of this content around the new year that's about uh new resolutions or habits or ideas or things that could be useful for somebody. But man, we evolved to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing. And this drive kept us alive when our environments were harsh and uncomfortable and unrelenting. But these days, in a world of relative prosperity, it's actually something that we need to be really attentive to. The whole idea of exercise, let alone a diet, would have been ridiculous for 2 1/2 million years of human history. everything except about the last hundred years. So we've to some extent needed to invent solutions for a problem that we've created ourselves. And that's where Michael's work comes in. We talked about a lot during this conversation. We mentioned prevalence induced concept change a couple of times. This is the idea that as we experience fewer problems, we don't become more satisfied. We just change the definition of what a problem is. So the bar for a problem gets lower and lower and lower. And Michael contrasted this with some of his experiences in wilderness. You know, going into the Arctic for a month, it doesn't need to be that extreme, obviously, to get this kind of benefit, but in his case, going into the Arctic for a month and then coming back and being like, "Wow, hot running water is amazing." The problem here is that we don't really experience the more comfortable part of that equation. The comfortable parts of life just become normal. We stop seeing them. They blend into the background of our experience. And that's one of the reasons that different forms of productive discomfort can be really helpful for people because they can reset that equation. We talked a lot about scarcity brain and the scarcity loop uh particularly slot machines and gambling as a great example of something that takes advantage of the scarcity machinery of the brain. And these days you can see that kind of variable reinforcement, this principle that comes from gambling applied everywhere. When you post something on social media and you're not sure how many, you know, likes or comments or whatever it's going to get, that's a kind of variable reinforcement. Endless scroll, constantly feeding that machinery of the brain that just wants things a little bit sooner, a little bit more. Michael talked about how just seeing this machinery is often the first step intervention for people in being able to do something about it. And then we can do little things to add friction to our lives that make it just a little bit more inconvenient for the brain to uh fall into some familiar patterns. I love the example he gave of just removing the autofill on credit card information on websites where you could buy something where you actually need to type it out. You know, adding that layer of inconvenience. I gave the example of, you know, if Tik Tok uh videos took 10 seconds to load in between each video, how much of how much Tik Tok would you use? These little frictions really do make a difference for people. And you know, putting the shoe on the other foot, we can think about ways to reduce the friction that's associated with some of the behaviors that we stand to benefit from. Uh maybe focusing on walking with weight. This is like having your pack by the door or easily accessible or putting your exercise equipment out if you want to work out in the morning the night before. These are not novel ideas. People talk about this kind of stuff all the time. But what I really want to reinforce here is that it actually does matter. It actually does really make a difference for people. These small changes can have big results when they add up over time. And there's this balance. Something that I really wrestle with this topic that we talked about a little bit during the conversation is the the kind of balance between personal agency on the one hand and appreciating the extent to which social forces really are against us on the other hand. It really does suck that we've set up society in a way where the wealthiest, most powerful companies are pretty universally the ones that are built to exploit people. There's an enormous amount of money that's spent on trying to figure out essentially how to get people addicted to stuff. That seems to put it simply deeply up to me. And it's true. We really are walking uphill here. There really is a lot that we do not control. we really are fighting big powerful forces as we try to do these these little things that do add up over time and then for me it becomes about even so what am I going to do anyways what am I going to do to make my life a little bit better tomorrow than it was yesterday that's what I have the most control over that's what I can really influence my own behavior my own effort that's the lever that I've got to pull so I appreciate all of the context we We accept the way that things are and then after doing that we turn toward the agency side of the spectrum. What can I do? Anyways, I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I really liked having Michael on the podcast. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the show yet, if you could take a moment to subscribe, maybe leave a rating and a positive review. That really helps us out. If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a comment about the episode. Ask us a question about it. That really pleases the algorithm, so we appreciate it. And if you'd like to support the show in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. That's patreon.com/beingwellodcast. And for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a couple of benefits in return, like transcripts and adree versions of episodes. Until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.

I’m joined by journalist and author Michael Easter to discuss how we can make our lives better by making them (the right kind of) harder. We start with one of modern life’s paradoxes: things have gotten much easier, but this hasn’t led to much more happiness or fulfillment. Michael talks about how our biological wiring backfires in today’s world of abundance, why humans need a mission, and the vital experiences we’ve lost. Other topics include problem creep, how everything has become a slot machine, rucking, and the “super medium” body. About our Guest: Michael Easter is a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, journalist, and best-selling author of The Comfort Crisis, Scarcity Brain, and Walk with Weight. Michael is also the author of the #1 Substack in the Health & Wellness category, Two Percent. Key Topics: 0:00 Intro 2:10 How our world became engineered for comfort 7:39 Problem creep 10:49 Michael’s experience with sobriety 15:00 Abundance in today’s world: the industrial revolution, social media, and slot machines 21:17 Why we need a mission 25:31 Building resilience in a world of comfort and abundance 29:30 Personal agency vs systemic forces 34:52 [Sponsor] Caraway 36:24 The lost experience of boredom 48:19 Walking with weight 1:00:46 Getting back into nature 1:10:41 Recap Sponsors Visit https://carawayhome.com/BEINGWELL to take an additional 10% off your next purchase of non-toxic cookware made modern. I'm not a clinician, and what I say on this channel should not be taken as medical advice. Subscribe to Being Well on: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5d87ZU1XY0fpdYNSEwXLVQ Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (https://amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (https://apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth. Subscribe to Rick on YouTube: http://youtube.com/@RickHanson?sub_confirmation=1 Get Rick's Free Newsletters: https://rickhanson.com/writings/newsletters-from-dr-rick-hanson/ Follow Rick Here: 🌍 https://rickhanson.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd You can follow me here: 🎤 https://apple.co/38ufGG0 🌍 https://www.forresthanson.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/f.hanson