Michael Easter

Stories

By Michael Easter

In order to improve your life, you have to do things that are hard while you’re doing them, but lead to long-term improvements.

While working as a journalist at a health magazine, I profiled a backcountry bowhunter and spent a week hunting in the mountains of Nevada. Every single thing we did took effort—getting water required hiking four miles down a mountain; it was freezing cold because we were at 11,000 feet; we were hungry because you have to pack in food... It was a litany of discomforts and I wanted to get out of there after day one, but my perspective immediately shifted when I got home.

The simple act of turning on a faucet made me feel so grateful and brought into focus how different the two environments were—specifically the level of comfort and ease in our built environment.

For 2.5 million years of human history, everything took effort and was uncomfortable. That led me down a path of questioning how that shaped us, and how living in an environment where things are easier has changed us.

There’s a big difference between intellectual understanding and experiential understanding.

Understanding research and science is important, but it’s rarely enough to change your mind. You often have to be put in a situation where things happen that change your behavior thereafter. The big, overarching idea of my work explores the mismatch between how we’ve evolved to live and the new world, which is built around comfort.

There’s this concept I explore in my book The Comfort Crisis called prevalence-induced concept change, which is basically problem creep. Researchers found that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t actually become more satisfied; we simply lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.

The world today is way better than it was 500 years ago. You’re less likely to die of disease, your kids are less likely to die before age five, you’re more likely to have basic freedoms, you’re less likely to be starving, and so on. But only 6% of people think the world is improving. That’s because we’re always looking for problems. As things get easier and safer and better, we don’t calm down; we start looking for problems.

My series with Waking Up, Embracing Discomfort, blends intellectual and experiential understanding.

I pulled concepts from my book The Comfort Crisis to offer explanations while also encouraging listeners to take action and challenge themselves to experience discomfort to better understand what it is that we’re talking about.

Meditation, for example, can be really uncomfortable. Sitting with your thoughts and paying attention to them isn’t fun, but you walk away from the experience with a better perspective.

My meditation practice today is mostly experiential. It takes the form of long walks, and I really see it as more mental than physical. Being outdoors pulls you into the present. Your mind is active, but you’re not thinking about tasks and to-do lists. You’re tuning into the landscape and to where you’re going.

For most of human history, presence was found on the move, where paying attention to the present moment improves safety. We evolved to move outside and pay attention while doing it, and there’s a lot to be gained from tapping into that.

Big picture, discomfort is how people learn and grow. We typically grow because there’s a problem we need to solve.

Working through a problem trains our brain to find similar challenges more accessible in the future. Understanding your capabilities in this way shapes the way you approach situations in the future, whether that means facing challenges with confidence or trusting in your own abilities.

My newsletter, Two Percent, is rooted in a study that found that 2% of people take the stairs when there’s also an escalator available. To me, that’s a metaphor for our modern environment and what traps us. We are wired to do the next easiest, most comfortable thing, even when it doesn’t help us. 100% of people know that taking the stairs is better for their health, but 98% of people choose the easier option.

Those small swaps add up. If your job requires you to take phone calls all day, can you take some of them while walking? When you’re taking a break, can you go for a stroll or open the Waking Up app instead of scrolling on TikTok? Can you read a full article instead of asking ChatGPT for the answer?

Taking the stairs once won’t change your life, but taking the stairs every time will do some good. The more you do things that are slightly uncomfortable, the less uncomfortable they become, and the more automatic the less-easy choice can become.

Michael Easter