The Comfrot Crisisi By Michael Easter-2024 Flashcards
10-2024
33 DAYS (5-10-2024)
How does the author describe the current state of people’s lives compared to those of early ancestors?
What evidence is presented about the benefits of discomfort on physical and mental health?
What are some examples of less committed ways to incorporate discomfort into daily life?
How does the author feel about nature and its unpredictability?
What is the significance of stepping outside one’s comfort zone, according to the text?
In what ways does the text suggest discomfort can improve personal performance?
What risks are associated with living a life devoid of challenges and discomfort?
How does nature contribute to a person’s overall experience during challenges?
None of this sounds anything like my safe, comfortable life at home. And that’s the point. Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives. And it’s limiting the degree to which we experience our “one wild and precious life,”But a radical new body of evidence shows that people are at their best—physically harder, mentally tougher, and spiritually sounder— after experiencing the same discomforts our early ancestors were exposed to every day. Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose. There are plenty of, let’s say, less committed ways to gain the benefits of discomfort. Stuff a person could easily fold into their daily life to improve their mind, body, and spirit. But this trip is at the extreme end of a prescription that researchers across disciplines say we should make a part of our lives.
The accompaniment of these guys eases my apprehension. But only sort of. Because the thing about nature is that it’s unpredictable and unforgiving. It doesn’t care about your experience and what happened the last time you visited it. Nature can always throw rougher stuff at you
35, 55, OR 75 (5-10-2024)
How did alcohol serve as a comfort blanket for the author?
What realizations did the author come to after achieving sobriety?
In what ways did the author connect with loved ones differently after getting sober?
How did getting a dog impact the author’s daily routine and mindset?
What were some examples of the author’s comfortable lifestyle before sobriety?
How did the author’s perception of discomfort change after recognizing their previous habits?
What role did technology play in the author’s sense of comfort?
How does the author describe their approach to physical activity before sobriety?
Alcohol was my comfort blanket. It killed the stress around my job. It quickly ended boredom. It numbed me to sadness, anxiety, and fear. It covered me from what was uncomfortable: the insecurities, situations, thoughts, and emotions that are just part of being a human.
Before sobriety, for example, all signs seemed to indicate that I was the absolute center of the universe. But upon drying out I realized that I’m just not that damn important in the grand scheme of things. This is a deeply unnerving recognition. But once I started to act on it—admitting that I don’t know things and that I could use some help—I gained some peace and perspective. I began connecting with the people I love in new, deeper ways. I started to find silence, experience calm, and feel OK with myself. To get out of myself, I got a dog and each morning took him to a nearby river, where I felt a long-forgotten peace and confidence in the 5 a.m. quiet and mist. I became less flustered by everyday problems like work dramas, traffic jams, deadlines, and bills.
I just had to take a look at my everyday life. I was comfortable, quite literally, every single moment. I awoke in a soft bed in a temperature-controlled home. I commuted to work in a pickup with all the conveniences of a luxury sedan. I killed any semblance of boredom with my smartphone. I sat in an ergonomic desk chair staring at a screen all day, working with my mind and not my body. When I arrived home from work, I filled my face with no-effort, highly caloric foods that came from Lord knows where. Then I plopped down on my overstuffed sofa to binge on television streamed down from outer space. I rarely, if ever, felt the sensation of discomfort. The most physically uncomfortable thing I did, exercise, was executed inside an air-conditioned building as I watched cable news channels that are increasingly bent on confirming my worldview rather than challenging it. I wouldn’t run outside unless the conditions were, well, comfortable. Neither too hot, too cold, nor too wet.
0.004 PERCENT (5-10-2024)
What are some examples of comforts humans instinctually seek?
Why was the comfort drive beneficial throughout most of human history?
How has the modern environment changed in comparison to our ancestors’ environments?
What is the issue with modern comforts according to the passage?
How long have modern conveniences like cars, computers, and smartphones been a part of human life?
What were the early shelters like for humans, and what were their limitations?
How did early humans obtain food, and what challenges did they face?
What impact did the introduction of radio, television, and smartphones have on human behavior and social connections?
How does the Hadza’s level of daily activity compare to that of the average American?
What physical adaptations in the human body support long-distance running?
What types of physical and mental stresses did early humans experience?
How did the Covid-19 pandemic remind people of past stresses?
What are the health implications of modern comfort, according to the passage?
What are some ways people numb themselves in the modern world?
How does the passage suggest our detachment from natural challenges affects our happiness and health?
What unintended consequences of modern comforts does the author highlight?
How has modern life potentially changed the human experience for the worse?
What does the passage suggest humans were meant to experience that is missing from modern life?
HUMANS EVOLVED TO seek comfort. We instinctually default to safety, shelter, warmth, extra food, and minimal effort. And that drive through nearly all of human history was beneficial because it pushed us to survive. Discomfort is both physical and emotional. It’s hunger, cold, pain, exhaustion, stress, and any other trying sensations and emotions. Our comfort drive led us to find food. To build and take shelter. To flee from predators. To avoid overly risky decisions. To do anything and everything that would help us live on and spread our DNA. So it’s really no surprise that today we should still default to that which is most comfortable. Except that our original comforts were negligible and short-lived, at best. In an uncomfortable world, consistently seeking a sliver of comfort helped us stay alive. Our common problem today is that our environment has changed, but our wiring hasn’t. And this wiring is deeply ingrained.
Which brings us to us. Our species, called Homo sapiens, has been walking this earth for 200,000 to 300,000 years, depending on which anthropologist you ask. And we are highly evolved, despite what you may see on reality TV like Cops or any of the Housewives franchises. Early Homo sapiens developed complex tools, languages, cities, currency, farming, transportation systems, and much more. And that was before all of the human history we have written down, which is only about 5,000 years’ worth of time. The modern comforts and conveniences that now most influence our daily experience—cars, computers, television, climate control, smartphones, ultraprocessed food, and more—have been used by our species for about 100 years or less. That’s around 0.03 percent of the time we’ve walked the earth. Include all the Homos—habilis, erectus, heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, and us—and open the time scale to 2.5 million years and the figure drops to 0.004 percent. Constant comfort is a radically new thing for us humans. Over these 2.5 million years, our ancestors’ lives were intimately intertwined with discomfort. These people were constantly exposed to the elements. It was either too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, or too snowy out. The only escape from the weather was a rudimentary shelter, like a cold, damp cave filled with bats and rats, or a hole dug in the ground and roofed with twigs or an animal skin. Or some other crude structure that provided enough shelter to keep a person alive but little else. Today most of us live at 72 degrees, experiencing weather only during the two minutes it takes us to walk across a parking lot or from the subway station to our offices.
Early humans surely did not have constant, effortless access to calorie-dense food. They either had to walk miles to find the right place to dig it deep out of the ground or pick it high off a tree. Or they had to face off with animals both tiny and toweringEarly humans surely did not have constant, effortless access to calorie-dense food. They either had to walk miles to find the right place to dig it deep out of the ground or pick it high off a tree. Or they had to face off with animals both tiny and towering.
When our ancestors weren’t searching for food or getting pummeled by mastodons, they had long moments of downtime, lounging around for hours a day. They had to make something out of their boredom. These people allowed their minds to wander and had to get creative and rely on one another for entertainment. As my beautifully blunt then-girlfriend, now-wife put it when we went camping early in our relationship: “We ran out of things to talk about in three hours and had a whole day left.” It wasn’t until the 1920s, when radio was broadcast to the masses, that there was a full-time, brainless escape from boredom. Then came Big TV in the 1950s. Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. And so our imaginations and deep social connections went with it. When they weren’t sitting and doing nothing, our ancestors were working very, very hard. The Hadza exercise 14 times more than the average American. They move fast and hard about 2 hours and 20 minutes a day. (Although, to be clear, what they’re doing is just called “life” instead of “exercise.”) Early humans would walk or run miles and miles for water and food. In fact, the reason the human body is built the way it is—with arched feet, long leg tendons, sweat glands, and more—is because we evolved to run down prey. We’d chase and track the animal for miles and miles until it toppled over from heat exhaustion. Then we’d kill it, butcher it, and carry it all the way back to camp. When prey was too heavy to haul, our ancestors would pick up camp and move to the downed food. They faced stress. Lots of it.
don’t suffer from the type of acute stresses humans fretted over for millions of years. Most of us don’t experience physical stresses like feeling intense hunger, exhaustion from running down food, carrying heavy loads, or exposing ourselves to freak germs and wild temperature swings. Nor do we suffer from mental stresses like wondering where our next meal is coming from, fearing fanged predators, or dreading that a little nick could get infected and kill us off in a week. The Covid-19 pandemic, in fact, was likely the first time that many of us felt our forgotten stresses and realized that humans can still be powerless against the natural world.
Thanks to modern medicine the average person is, yes, living longer than ever. But the data shows that the majority of us are living a greater proportion of our years in ill health, propped up by medications and machines. Life span might be up. But health span is down.
So, yes, we don’t have to deal with discomforts like working for our food, moving hard and heavy each day, feeling deep hunger, and being exposed to the elements. But we do have to deal with the side effects of our comfort: long-term physical and mental health problems. We lack physical struggles, like having to work hard for our livelihoods. We have too many ways to numb out, like comfort food, cigarettes, alcohol, pills, smartphones, and TV. We’re detached from the things that make us feel happy and alive, like connection, being in the natural world, effort, and perseverance.
Comforts and conveniences are great. But they haven’t always moved the ball downfield in our most important metric: happy, healthful years. Perhaps existing only in our increasingly overly comfortable, overbuilt environment and always obeying our comfort drives has had unintended consequences and caused us to miss profound human experiences. There are conditions that humans evolved to live in and experiences we were meant to have that are no longer germane to our lives. This has undoubtedly changed us, often not for the best
800 FACES (5-10-2024)
What was the purpose of Levari’s studies?
How do humans perceive problems when they become infrequent or nonexistent?
What is “prevalence-induced concept change”?
Why can humans not see situations in black-and-white?
What happened when threatening faces became rare in Levari’s study?
How did participants respond to neutral faces as the frequency of threatening faces decreased?
What effect did the decrease of unethical research proposals have on participants’ perceptions?
What does “problem creep” mean in the context of Levari’s findings?
Why don’t people become more satisfied when there are fewer problems?
What is the relationship between “problem creep” and satisfaction levels?
What does Levari mean by saying “humans are always moving the goalpost”?
What is the scientific basis for “first-world problems” according to Levari?
How does the brain mechanism of making relative comparisons help early humans?
What negative effect does making relative comparisons have on people today?
What is “comfort creep” and how does it relate to Levari’s findings?
How does the introduction of new comforts change our perception of old comforts?
What impact does “comfort creep” have on our comfort zones?
Why are we often unaware of how comfort creep is affecting us?
What might happen if we became aware of “comfort creep”?
How does “comfort creep” influence our expectations and satisfaction with life?
With that in mind, Levari recently conducted a series of studies to find out if the human brain searches for problems even when problems become infrequent or don’t exist
These two scenarios should be rather black-and-white, right? A person is either threatening or not. A proposal either does or does not cross a moral line. Because if we can’t see these situations as black-and-white, then it calls into question whether we can really trust our judgment in much bigger issues. Like, it turns out, just how comfortable we’ve become and how that’s affecting us.
When he looked at all the data, Levari discovered that humans can’t see black or white. We see gray. And the shade of gray we see depends on all of the other shades that came before it. We adjust expectations
. As the threatening faces became rare, the study participants began to perceive neutral faces as threatening. When the unethical research proposals became less frequent, people began deeming ambiguous research proposals unethical. He called this “prevalence-induced concept change.” Essentially “problem creep.” It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our new problems are progressively more hollow.
So Levari got to the heart of why many people can find an issue in nearly any situation, no matter how good we can have it relative to the grand sweep of humanity. We are always moving the goalpost. There is, quite literally, a scientific basis for first-world problems.
“[I] think this is a low-level feature of human psychology,” Levari said. The human brain likely evolved to make these relative comparisons, because doing so uses far less brainpower than remembering every instance of a situation you’ve seen or been in. This brain mechanism in early humans allowed us to make quick decisions and safely navigate our environments. But applied to today’s world? “As people make all these relative judgments,” Levari said, “they become less and less satisfied than they used to be with the same thing.”
This creep phenomenon applies directly to how we now relate to comfort, said Levari. Call it comfort creep. When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable.
What’s more, new comforts have moved the goalpost further away from what we consider an acceptable level of discomfort. Each advancement shrinks our comfort zones. The critical point, Levari told me, is that this all occurs unconsciously. We are terrible at noticing that comfort creep is consuming us, and what it’s doing to us. So what would happen if we could dissolve our surrounding shades of gray and become aware of comfort creep?
20 YARDS (5-10-2024)
What does the phrase “the process is the reward” imply in the context of the author’s experiences?
How did the author’s approach to filmmaking differ from typical hunting shows?
What ethical code does the author mention regarding hunting, and why is it important?
In what ways does the author believe modern society has distanced itself from primal instincts such as hunting and gathering?
What is the significance of focusing on older members of a species when hunting?
How does the author connect his experiences in nature to personal fulfillment and happiness?
What does the author mean by saying that “if you want to have amazing experiences, you have to put yourself in amazing places”?
How does the author view the predator-prey relationship in the context of modern society?
What are some ways the author suggests we can reconnect with nature?
Reflecting on the author’s experiences, what lessons can be learned about life cycles and the interconnectedness of life?
The process is the reward. But a successful outcome makes the process that much more rewarding.
He eventually began filming his adventures. Partly to add evidence to his Jack London-esque stories, and partly to show people what they’re missing. He first shot with a cheap handheld camera. Then he met William, who’d been filming his own hunts in the Northeast. They created a hunting documentary, which they called The River’s Divide. It’s nothing like the stuff you might see on the Outdoors Channel. “So many hunting films and shows celebrate death. ‘Whack ’em and stack ’em,’ they say. It’s gross, just gross,” said Donnie. His films are more like Planet Earth, but with hunting. Long, quiet shots of, say, a misty fall morning at a pond, or extended footage of a fox who wandered into camp.
I think, because they show the value of breaking out of the modern rat race and being present in and a part of nature.”
f you want to have amazing experiences,”“you have to put yourself in amazing places.”
agreed with me about trophy hunting. Then he explained to me the strict ethical code that he’d developed during his work as a wildlife biology researcher. For example, he only hunts older members of a species, because removing an old animal often improves the health of the herd as a whole, while taking a young animal does the opposite. It also allows youngsters to live out a full life.
Most of us still partake in some level of predator-prey relationship. Hunting and gathering. Because most of us still eat meat, and all of us still eat vegetables,” he said. “But we now have the luxury of having all of our hunting and gathering done for us at an industrial scale. If we didn’t have that, I guarantee we’d all still be doing our own hunting and gathering. I think I’m just closer to our original form compared to most people.”
I had never been so close to death, the moment where the life cycle ends for one living thing so that it may continue for another
50/50 (6-10-2024)
What is the concept of misogi, and how does it relate to ancient practices in aikido?
How does Dr. Marcus Elliott describe the challenges faced by early humans compared to those in modern society?
What are the two rules of misogi that Elliott outlines, and why are they significant?
Explain the importance of the “flow state” as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. How is it connected to personal growth?
What are the three key elements of a misogi as explained in the passage?
How does Elliott view the role of fear in the context of engaging in difficult challenges?
Discuss the significance of the “rite of passage” tradition among the Inuit as described in the text.
What are the softer rules or guidelines for misogi that Elliott mentions, and how do they contribute to the practice?
How does the passage illustrate the idea of personal challenges being unique to each individual?
In what ways does the passage suggest that undergoing tough experiences can be beneficial for mental and emotional well-being?
The state of sumikiri provided by misogi is why ancient students of aikido would immerse themselves in natural bodies of cold water. Waterfalls, streams, or the ocean would wash away their defilements and reconnect them with the universe. More recently, the idea of misogi has been applied to other forms of using epic challenges in nature to cleanse the defilements of the modern world. These modern misogis offer a hard brain, body, and spirit reboot. They help their practitioners smash previous limits and deliver the mindful, centering confidence and competence the Japanese aikido followers were also seeking. Dr. Marcus Elliott pioneered this new brand of misogi. And he’s convinced it works.
“Over our species’ hundreds of thousands of years of evolution,” Elliott said, “it was essential for our survival to do hard shit all the time. To be challenged. And this was without safety nets. These challenges could be from hunts, getting resources for the tribe, moving from summering to wintering grounds, and so on. Each time we took on one of these challenges we’d learn what our potential is.”
“In modern society, however,” Elliott said, “it’s suddenly possible to survive without being challenged. You’ll still have plenty of food. You’ll have a comfortable home. A good job to show up to, and some people who love you. And that seems like an OK life, right? “But,” he said, sweeping his arm to create a big imaginary circle that encompassed the trail and foliage flanking it. “Let’s say your potential is this big circle.” Then he pulled his hands into his chest and made a dinner-platesize circle in the exact middle of the much larger circle. “Well, most of us live in this small space right here. We have no idea what exists on the edges of our potential. And by not having any idea what it’s like out on the edge…man, we really miss something vital.”
“I believe people have innate evolutionary machinery that gets triggered when they go out and do really fucking hard things. When they explore those edges of their comfort zone.”
In misogi we’re using the artificial, contrived concept of going out and doing a hard task to mimic these challenges that humans used to face all the time. These challenges that our environment used to naturally show us that we’re so removed from now,” he said. “Then when we return to the Wild West of our everyday lives we are better for it. We have the right tools for the job.”
The practice has cranked the dial of his physical, mental, and spiritual health and potential, he said. And done the same for the other seekers who’ve joined him
“Misogi is not about physical accomplishment,” said Parrish. “It asks, ‘What are you mentally and spiritually willing to put yourself through to be a better human?’ Misogis have allowed me to let go of fear and anxiousness, and you can see that in my work.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noticed something fascinating about artists. They could become completely present and engrossed in their work. In these instances their action and awareness would merge. Random thoughts, bodily sensations like pain or hunger, and even their sense of ego and self would all fade. It was a sort of prolonged Zen in the art of…art. So he began studying the state, which he eventually named “flow state.
Lapsing into flow requires two conditions: The task must stretch a person’s limits and it must have a clear goal. The flow state, Csikszentmihalyi and the other researchers now believe, is a key driver of happiness and growth. It is the opposite of apathy. Csikszentmihalyi wrote that flow has the “potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strengths and complexity of the self.”
If I ended the day fitter or smarter, then it was a good day.”
“Endurance sports gave me some understanding of what it was to push to deeper levels and find new layers within myself,” he told me. “When I stopped doing triathlons, I still had this sense of adventure. This need to explore those edges where I’d find a new, better part of myself.”
“It was all just to see if I could. I’d get to what I thought was my edge, but I’d keep going. Then eventually I’d realize I was way past my old edge and still going. And so that edge was now in a different place than when I started. And that was so satisfying, so satisfying.”
The misogis have continued—one a year—and Elliott credits them with his ability to affect things in his personal and professional life. “Misogis can show you that you had this latent potential you didn’t realize, and that you can go further than you ever believed. When you put yourself in a challenging environment where you have a good chance of failing, lots of fears fade and things start moving.”
“In our model of misogi, there are only two rules,” said Elliott. “Rule number one is that it has to be really fucking hard. Rule number two is that you can’t die.” I understood the not-dying part, but asked him how he determines if something is hard enough. “We’re generally guided by the idea that you should have a fifty percent chance of success—if you do everything right,” he said. “So if you decided you wanted to run a twenty-five-mile trail, and you’re preparing by working up to a twenty-mile training run and doing thirty-five or forty miles a week of running…that’s not a misogi. Your chance of failure is too low. But if you’ve never run more than ten miles, think you could probably run fifteen, but are iffy on whether you could run twenty…then that twenty-five miles is probably a misogi.”
“So this evolutionary machinery we have doesn’t serve us anymore,” Elliott said. “Because I can tell you that nothing great in life comes with complete assurance of success. Engaging in an environment where there’s a high probability of failure, even if you execute perfectly, has huge ramifications for helping you lose a fear of failing. Huge ramifications for showing you what your potential is.
Variations of the misogi myth exist through time and space. Greek, Mesopotamian, Buddhist, Norse, Christian, Hindu, and ancient Egyptian mythology all have some version of what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey.” The hero exits the comfort of home for adventure. He’s hit with a challenge. It tests his physical, psychological, and spiritual fortitude. He struggles. Yet he manages to prevail. He returns with heightened knowledge, skills, confidence, and experience, and a clearer sense of his or her place in the world. And research going back to the late 1800s proves that mere mortals benefit from epic physical trials.
The Inuit have a similar tradition. It’s not quite as long or lonely, but it’s a lot colder. When Inuit children appear strong enough, usually around age 12, elders lead them out into the Arctic for their first hunt. They bring tents, spears, and other necessities, and eat what they kill. The journey takes place across miles and weeks, and the young person must down a narwhal, caribou, or bearded seal. The kids pick up valuable survival skills and evolve as people. The journey also hammers them with the harsh weather of the Arctic. This toughens them while also teaching them skills they need to thrive.
“The idea of a rite of passage is that the elders are seeing in you the potential to rise up and achieve this really important, challenging thing that is going to benefit you and everyone around you on many levels,” said Elliott. “They’re saying, ‘We think you’re ready, but you’re really going to have to dig deep and find your shit.’ ”
a misogi—all have three key elements. The first is separation. The person exits the society in which they live and ventures into the wild. The second is transition. The person enters a challenging middle ground, where they battle with nature and their mind telling them to quit. The third is incorporation. The person completes the challenge and reenters their normal life an improved person. It’s an exploration and expansion of the edge of a person’s comfort zone. Misogi, Elliott said, is the same. “Misogis are an emotional, spiritual, and psychological challenge that masquerades as a physical challenge.”
Toward the end of the evening, Elliott mentioned to me that he has a couple of softer rules for misogis. He described them as guidelines more than hard rules. One was that the misogi should be “quirky. Creative. Far out. Something uncommon.”
He smiled. “Yes. And the reason for this is because the more quirky the misogi, the less chance you can compare it to anything else,” he said. “It’s important to take on challenges that are your challenges. Misogi is you against you. It’s against this phenomenon of ‘Oh, that guy did this thing in this amount of time and I’m going to try to do it faster.’ Because that’s comparison shopping. And that’s just such a shitty way to go through life.
Parrish talked at length about this guideline. He summed it up like this: “When you remove superficial metrics you can accomplish way more.” Which brought Elliott to guideline two: Don’t advertise misogi. It’s OK to talk about misogi with friends and family. But you don’t Tweet, Instagram, Facebook, or boast about misogi. “Everyone today has such outward-facing lives,” said Elliott. “They do stuff so they can post on social media about some badass thing they did to get a bunch of likes.
“Misogis are inward facing,” he said. “A big part of the value proposition is that I’m going to do something that’s really uncomfortable. I’m going to want to quit. And it’s going to be hard not to quit because no one is watching. But I’m not going to quit because I’m watching. And then I can reflect back on how I was the only person watching myself and I still rose to the occasion in a big way. There’s some deep satisfaction in that. Did you really do what you think is the right thing when you were the only person watching? Or do you need an audience or a big pat on the back for that? Are you not important enough to do it for you? We had this guideline before social media, and it seems more relevant today.”
“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Little quips like that always seem to have a nugget of truth to them. But the data didn’t back the saying.
But one day Seery came upon some research on a concept called “toughening.” He explained, “It was this theoretical idea that being completely overwhelmed by negative, stressful things wasn’t good. But it also theorized being totally sheltered shouldn’t be optimal, either. There should be some amount of stress that gives you optimum psychological and physical well-being.”
there’s a small but growing body of research that suggests people see the same effect by engineering big challenges. This new research looks at taking on epic outdoor tasks as a way to find the “physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual” tools that Elliott wants to impart.
He told me that when you undergo a new, stressful experience like misogi, you’re transferring short-term memories into long-term memories—what just happened to you and what it led to, and what you should do next time you face a similar situation. “In general, this is because memory is about the future,” said Fields. “We retain experiences that may be of survival value at another time.”
- OR 90. (6-10-2024)
- What is the concept of “misogi” as described in the text, and how should it be approached?
- Why is it important to understand the specific animal and environment when preparing for a hunt?
- What are the potential dangers of using the wrong gear during outdoor activities, as highlighted in the text?
- How does the author suggest that new experiences can impact our perception of time?
- In what ways can stepping outside of our comfort zones contribute to personal growth and brain development?
- What is the significance of preparation in the context of the hunting experience described?
- How does the author relate the concept of focus during “misogi” to the perception of time?
- What benefits are associated with learning new skills that involve both mind and body?
- Why does the author mention that “new situations kill the mental clutter”?
- What is the main takeaway regarding the impact of routine versus nonroutine activities on our memory of time?
“In a perfectly designed misogi, you give it everything you have and you just finish it. Or maybe you just barely fail,” Elliott told me. “To finish it with a lot left is not really doing it right. You want to explore what your potential is out on the edges.”
“It’s all about preparing for a specific animal in a specific place at a specific time.” Sure, he explained, you have to know how to draw a bow or fire a rifle. But you also need to learn the local hunting regulations, weather and land patterns, and everything about the animal’s biology. How it leverages its strongest senses, travels across the land, and behaves under stress. Its sleep cycles, diet, and drives.
“You’ll also have to build out the right gear system and calculate your food needs,” said Donnie. The final step is the hunt, which won’t be a walk in the woods. “Even seasoned hunters have about a twenty-five percent success rate,” he tells me. “Think of how you’d move through the forest and behave if you knew a human was hunting you. That’s how most big game have evolved to behave all day.”
In fact, Donnie says an easy way to die in the wild is packing the wrong gear. First off, cotton will kill you. When wet, cotton becomes cold, and hypothermia sets in before you can say “I’m c-c-cold….Do you think we’re in t-t-trouble?”
“Wool and synthetics stay warm when wet, so you definitely want those for base layers,” Donnie said. “Then you maybe want a wool sweater and socks. Definitely down pants and a down jacket with a hood. Also gloves and a hat. Then you want waterproof outer layers. We’re going to wear the same shit every day. Bring an extra base layer and socks, in case those get wet. Otherwise, just one of everything.”
But for this trip I’d require the skills humans had needed for millions of years in order to survive. The ability to climb steep mountain faces. Swiftly move in on an animal or escape a dangerous situation. Jump across a creek. Resist falls and rough ground. Persist while carrying heavy loads across long distances.
My months of preparation changed much of that. New situations kill the mental clutter. In newness we’re forced into presence and focus. This is because we can’t anticipate what to expect and how to respond, breaking the trance that leads to life in fast forward. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids. Everything was new then and we were constantly learning
“The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older….In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.
found that…people remember duration as being shorter on a routine activity than on a nonroutine activity.” This slowing down of time is something Parrish told me happens in misogi. “I become incredibly focused on the task at hand,” he said. “When I look back on a misogi that was a few hours it will seem like days, because I remember every detail.”
Additionally, stepping outside our comfort zone to learn useful skills that require both mind and body alters our brain’s wiring on a deep level. This can increase our productivity and resilience against some diseases.
suggests that dedicating ourselves to learning new things could help offset some of our poor habits.
150 PEOPLE (7-10-2024)
وضح أن البشر يمكنهم الحفاظ على عدد محدود من العلاقات الوثيقة (حوالي 150)
- What is the significance of “Dunbar’s number” in understanding human social behavior?
- How does the author describe modern environments in relation to mental health?
- Explain the concept of “landscapes of despair” as mentioned in the text. What do you think this term implies?
- Why might larger groups (over 150 people) lead to complications in social interactions?
- How does the Savanna Theory of Happiness relate to population density and individual happiness?
- In what ways does the text suggest that our evolutionary history influences our preferences for community size?
- Discuss the potential benefits of living in smaller communities compared to larger urban settings, according to the excerpt.
- How might the challenges of managing relationships in larger groups affect individuals’ mental health?
- What role does resource sharing play in the dynamics of a community of fewer than 150 people?
- How can understanding the concept of community size and structure inform our approach to mental well-being in modern society?
Escaping from an environment of comfort to one of discomfort is often a multistage process. This is because the average person is now vastly removed from the true wild.
Some mental health researchers today call our concrete, sprawling environments “landscapes of despair.”
A group of roughly 150 people or fewer seems to be an ideal community. It even has a name, Dunbar’s number, after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who discovered it. As we evolved, groups of fewer than 150 people gave us enough resources to hunt, raise kids, share, and thrive. When our groups exceed the limit, things tend to get weird. Managing more than 150 names and faces and all of the social narratives among them is a lot for our brains to process. Bigger societies are complicated and time-consuming (we have to develop government and laws), and that can burn us out. This preference for a 150ish-person group size is likely wired into our brain from millions of years of evolution, and it still appears today.
He believes that we still prefer our original group sizes. Life in rural and small towns more closely mimics the environments we evolved in.
Kanazawa calls his idea the Savanna Theory of Happiness, and the general rule of thumb is, the higher the population density wherever a person is, the less happy they’ll likely be
101 MILES(7-10-2024)
تطوير القدرة على الاستمتاع بالعزلة والتواجد مع النفس دون الشعور بعدم الارتياح أو الحاجة إلى الإلهاء يمكن أن يكون بنفس أهمية بناء العلاقات الجيدة.
What is the main difference between being alone and feeling lonely according to the chapter?
How does society typically frame solitude, and why might this be problematic?
What are some of the potential health risks associated with loneliness, as discussed in the chapter?
What impact does social media have on people’s ability to experience solitude?
According to the research mentioned, why are good relationships considered more important than wealth and fame for a fulfilling life?
Why does the author believe that developing the capacity to be alone is as important as building good relationships?
How does solitude contribute to self-discovery and personal growth? Provide examples from the text.
What are some of the benefits of solitude mentioned in the chapter, and how can these benefits be applied in daily life?
Do you think society’s current emphasis on constant connectivity affects our mental health? Why or why not?
Can solitude truly replace social connections in terms of providing fulfillment? Discuss with reference to the chapter’s points.
Fear is apparently a mindset often felt prior to experience.
There is alone like “I need to be alone. I’m going to my room.” And then there is the alone that I’m now experiencing, standing in the Arctic tundra with no human around me. I am surely the only person in this 6 square miles—or 12 or even 18. I’ve never experienced alone like this. I could scream and shout and hoot and holler and no one would hear. I could shoot up a flare or waft smoke signals into the great unknown and no one would see. I could get ass naked and do rain dances while singing Buck Owens at the top of my lungs and no one—not a one—would ever have a clue. This is the farthest away I’ve ever been from other people in my entire life.
It’s an interesting paradox. Despite the fact that people today are rarely alone, we are increasingly lonely. The world is closing in on 8 billion people, a big bowl of human soup. People surround us at work, in the grocery store, during our commute, in our neighborhood. Even when we are by ourselves, we are often “with” the people who speak to us through our televisions, podcasts, or text messages. Yet nearly half of Americans say they’re lonely, leading the US government to declare that we’re facing a “loneliness epidemic.”
The physical and mental health effects of this epidemic are substantial. Scientists at Brigham Young University found that it doesn’t matter how old you are or how much money you have, being lonely increases your risk of dying in the next 7 years by 26 percent. Overall, it can shorten life by 15 years. That’s equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Good relationships are also, according to another study conducted over 80 years by researchers at Harvard, a key ingredient to happiness across your life span. Good relationships beat fortune and fame.
I can’t help but think that in today’s increasingly hyperconnected and tribal society—where we define ourselves by the group or movement we belong to—it’s not a bad idea to occasionally be alone. Removed from anyone. I’m talking about time with yourself, unidentified with anything. The Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Moses, Milton, Emerson, and many more have spoken highly of the benefits of solitude. A growing field of scientists today think that these solitudeseekers were onto something. Building “the capacity to be alone” may be just as important for you as forging good relationships. “The capacity to be alone is essentially the ability to be alone with yourself and not feel uncomfortable or like you have to distract yourself,”
They’d recruited a class of 24 college grads. Each had signed on to spend six months alone at a remote camp on the Yukon River delta collecting data. “Nineteen from that group had dropped out and gone home in the first week,” Donnie told me. “They’d get up there and just sort of freak out. You learn a lot about yourself over the six months that you’re alone out there.” Scientists at Miami University, Ohio, say that social media is making it even harder for people today to be alone. FOMO is spiking.
Our general discomfort with solitude may be due to how society frames it. Consider how we discipline children: time-out. Or how we punish prisoners: solitary confinement. This tradition, Bowker thinks, may have cued us to believe that normalcy is found through others and that solitude is punishment.
I think about how I behave around others. I’m often wary of being unconnected for too long and my default behavior is to shape my personality to suit what other people will positively respond to. Sometimes it’s like I live my life as a reaction to someone else. “But there are a lot of great pleasures you can get out of the experience of being alone with yourself,” said Bowker. In solitude you can find the unfiltered version of you. People often have breakthroughs where they tap into how they truly feel about a topic and come to some new understanding about themselves, said Bowker. Then you can take your realizations out into the social world, he added: “Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.”
Research backs solitude’s healthy properties. It’s been shown to improve productivity, creativity, empathy, and happiness, and decrease self-consciousness. “Social connection is obviously critical,” said Bowker. “But it can be dangerous if your social connections ever go away and you don’t have yourself to fall back on. If you develop that capacity to be alone, then instead of feeling lonely, you could see solitude as an opportunity to have a meaningful and enjoyable time to get to know yourself a little better. To essentially build a relationship with yourself. I know this sounds cheesy, but it’s critical. I think a goal we should all have is to try to transform feelings of loneliness into feelings of rich solitude.
<70 MILES AN HOUR (8-10-2024)
What are the basic rules for surviving in the wild?
What are the downsides of higher campsites when camping?
What law prohibits hunting in Alaska on the same day as flying, and what is its purpose?
How does Donnie describe the quality of water in the small stream they found?
What happens to the soil in the Arctic, and how does it affect the water?
Why is the Noatak River system considered unique in the United States?
What does Donnie say about the winds in the area, and how does he describe their intensity?
What does Donnie warn about more: bears or the weather?
According to Donnie, how do difficult moments affect our overall experience in life?
What can you infer about Donnie’s experience with camping and survival in the wild?
“The rules for surviving in the wild are shelter first, water second, food last,”
“The downside of a higher campsite is that we’ll be more exposed to the wind and a hike away from water and firewood,”
Alaska law stipulates that you can’t hunt on the same day you fly. It’s a perfect piece of legislation designed to prevent hunters from searching for animals while buzzing above the land in a Super Cub plane. “That isn’t hunting,” Donnie says. “That’s shopping.” The law considers the act poaching. Particularly egregious poaching cases have been smacked with sixfigure fines and a year in jail.
Then Donnie begins telling me that this pellet-flanked, hoofed-over water is likely cleaner than what comes out of the faucet at home. This tiny stream is one of the millions upon millions that boil up from the hillsides of the Arctic. The ground is in a constant state of thawing and freezing. This expands and contracts the land and forces water from it, filtering it. The Noatak River system, which we’re smack in the middle of, is believed to be America’s last remaining river system unaltered by humans.
There is, indeed, a reason why many old cultures lived in teepees instead of tentlike structures.
“These are hurricane-force winds now,” he yells. “Gusts more than seventy miles an hour.
“Everyone worries about bears. But weather is the shit that’ll kill you.”
“Yes, this morning could have been bad,” he says. “But moments like that…you might find that they make everything else more colorful and more manageable.”
11 HOURS, 6 MINUTES(8-10-2024)
What activity is the author engaged in for 10 hours?
What did the author use as reading material during the 10 hours?
What routine do the hunters follow each day?
Why do the hunters sit on the hillside?
What percentage of the earth’s land remains unaltered by humans, according to the study in the journal Global Change Biology?
Where can untouched places still be found on Earth?
What is the ideal ratio of male to female caribou for the health of the ecosystem according to Alaskan law?
Which characteristic of caribou antlers makes them unique compared to other animals in the Cervidae family?
How long can caribou antlers grow?
Why is wind important in hunting caribou?
How do caribou use scent as a warning system?
What role do ravens play in relation to humans, bears, and wolves?
These are some of the things I learned while sitting on a hillside with nothing to do for 10 hours straight—no Internet, my only reading material the wrappers of energy bars and tags on outdoor gear.
Our days since the windy spectacle of day one have been routine. We wake, drink instant coffee, pack our stuff, and then hike to said hillside. Then we sit waiting for caribou herds to move into focus. Except the animals don’t want to show. So we mostly just sit. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we don’t. This extended time in one spot, talking and not talking, staring at the same caribou-less landscape, has me wavering in and out of states of boredom I haven’t experienced since, well, come to think of it, the last time I hunted with Donnie in Nevada.
That reminded me of a study in the journal Global Change Biology, which discovered that only 5 percent of all of the earth’s land is unaltered by humans. The untouched places exist in the boreal forests, taigas, and tundras of the northernmost latitudes. These very patches of northern ground where we’ve been sitting, walking, and sleeping have likely never been sat, walked, or slept on by humans.
“This game is never easy,” says Donnie. “We just have to be patient and positive.” And really good at dealing with boredom, apparently. I’m thinking about what I can do to manage today’s forthcoming mental malaise.
Alaskan law states that we can only hunt antlered males. Maintaining about 40 males for every 100 females is ideal for the health of the ecosystem. The law does not, however, say anything about how old that antlered male must be. We’ll only harvest caribou that are on the last of their 8 to 12 years of life.
Of all the animals in the North American Cervidae family, caribou have the largest antlers in relation to their body size—bigger than moose, deer, or elk.
Caribou antlers can grow longer than four feet. This is amazing in itself. But it’s even more incredible when you consider that caribou, like all Cervidae, shed their antlers each year and regrow them in a few months. Antler is, in fact, one of the fastest-growing tissues on earth.
Antlers are such a feat of engineering that scientists today are researching how they can mimic antler construction to create stronger, lighter products
Wind is either a hunter’s asset or liability. For any success, we must be downwind of the animal, its scent being pushed to us and not the other way around. Caribou can not only sniff out predators from hundreds and hundreds of feet away but also use scent as a warning. Their ankles have scent glands. When one senses danger, he’ll rear up on his hind legs and pepper-spray the herd with a special smell that sends a DEFCON warning. The alert will send them all sprinting for higher ground
The constant companionship of ravens hadn’t struck me as odd. But Donnie is correct. “They follow humans, bears, and wolves,” he said. “They know we mean food. They’ll pick our kill clean and even help us hunt.They’re some of the smartest creatures on earth.
11 HOURS, 6 MINUTES(8-10-2024)
Why does the author believe smartphones are making people more distracted and impatient?
According to the author, how does boredom affect creativity and productivity?
What is Danckert’s view on the role of boredom in our lives?
What experiment did Danckert conduct to study boredom, and what were the findings?
How does the “Default Mode Network” in the brain function when someone is bored?
What comparison does the author make between “focused mode” and “unfocused mode”?
How did Torrance’s Test of Creative Thinking challenge traditional views on intelligence?
What does the author suggest about the long-term effects of too much screen time on mental health?
What analogy does the author use to explain the negative impact of smartphones on our brains?
How did the author calculate the time he would spend on his phone over 60 years, and what was his reaction?
Why does the author think that boredom is essential for our psychological well-being?
How does Brewer’s explanation of addiction relate to modern smartphone usage?
What impact did Danckert’s brother’s car accident have on his research?
What was Steve Jobs’ opinion on boredom, and how does it support the author’s argument?
What does the author mean when he describes using digital devices as “junk food for the mind”?
Thanks to technology, I rarely let my mind wander. I always have a phone, TV, computer, or other digital device to attend to. The average American each day touches his phone 2,617 times and spends 2 hours and 30 minutes staring at the small screen. If that seems gross, the study also identified a large group of “heavy users” who spent more than 4 hours a day on their phones. In a course I teach as a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), I have students check their phone’s screen-time data. One student averaged 7 hours and 44 minutes a day. Another racked up 8 hours and 32 minutes daily.
Let’s say I live 60 more years and keep up that pace. I’ll have spent seven and a half years of the rest of my life looking at my phone. And let’s face it: I’m not using the device to read literary classics, learn a new language, or wire money to widows and orphans. I’m using my phone to google the answer to any half-baked question that leaks out of my gray matter or watch the social media mobs decry whatever they’ve deemed the “microaggression” of the day. Or, you know, “ ’Cuz YouTube.”*
Smartphones are not only stealing our boredom, they are also shoving society dangerously close to, as screenwriter and satirist Mike Judge calls it, “idiocracy” status. For 2.5 million years, or about 100,000 generations, we had nothing digital in our lives. Now the average person spends 11 hours and 6 minutes a day using digital media. That’s from cellphones, TV, audio, and computers. Smartphones only stand out because they’re newer, actively steal our attention with notifications, and are accessible at anytime. But the average person still spends double the time watching TV than they do on their smartphone.
Boredom is indeed dead. And one scientist way up north in Ontario, Canada, is discovering that this is bad. A type of bad that’s infected us all. He believes that our collective lack of boredom is not only burning us out and leading to some ill mental health effects, but also muting what boredom is trying to tell us about our mind, emotions, ideas, wants, and needs.
Danckert was 19 when his older brother suffered a serious brain injury in a car accident. “During my brother’s recovery and the years that followed, it was evident that he had changed,” said Danckert. “He would tell me that he got bored a lot, and he was getting bored doing things that he used to really enjoy prior to his car accident.” So Danckert, then a university student, became obsessed with the brain and the state of boredom. “I didn’t have any notions of fixing my brother. But I became fascinated by the notion that boredom is not a social or cultural thing. It’s something within the brain that processes pleasure, reward, engagement, whatever you want to call it.”
And he had the realization that boredom can be pretty damn uncomfortable no matter how healthy you are. “I hated being bored,” he said. “I never liked the feeling of experiencing it.”
said Danckert. Sure, it doesn’t feel great. “But boredom is neither good nor bad,” he said. “How you respond to it is what can make it good or bad.” The man knows this because he’s been inside the human mind, searching for what areas of the brain are at work when a person is feeling the discomfort of boredom.
He recruited some volunteers and put them into a neuroimaging scanner. “Then we induced those people into a mood of being bored,” he said. “We had them watch two guys hanging laundry for eight minutes. And…yeah, it succeeds in making people bored shitless.” When Danckert looked at the neuroimages of the bored people, he found that their insular cortex had deactivated. “That part of the brain is important for processing information that you think is relevant for your goals right now,” said Danckert. “So it’s downregulated because there is nothing in that video that is important to your goals.” People are then spurred to do something about their boredom. “Tolstoy had this great quote in Anna Karenina that says boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’ ” said Danckert. “So boredom is a motivational state.”
In the study, Danckert also showed in what direction the brain goes when you’re doing a whole lot of nothing. When the participants were bored, a part of their brains called the “default mode network” fired on. It’s a network of brain regions that activates when we’re unfocused, when our mind is off and wandering. “Default mode network” is an annoyingly dense term. For simplicity’s sake I’ll call it “unfocused mode.” Our brains essentially have two modes, focused and unfocused. Focused mode is a mind at attention. It’s on when we’re processing outside information, completing a task, checking our cellphone, watching TV, listening to a podcast, having a conversation, or anything else that requires us to attend to the outside world. Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.
The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we’re handing over to digital media isn’t free. It’s all spent in focused mode. Think of this focused state like lifting a weight, and the unfocused state like resting. When we kill boredom by burying our minds in a phone, TV, or computer, our brain is putting forth a shocking amount of effort. Like trying to do rep after rep after rep of an exercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life overworks the hell out of our brains.
Our collective lack of boredom may be causing us to reach nearcrisis levels of mental fatigue. Research shows that the onslaught of screen-based media has created Americans who are “increasingly picky, impatient, distracted, and demanding,” as one media analyst put it. These terms fall under the umbrella of “insufferable.” And overworked, undermaintained minds are linked to depression, life dissatisfaction, the perception that life goes by quicker, and increasingly missing the beauty of life that only presents itself when we allow our mind to wander and be aware of something other than a screen.
The way we dealt with boredom before we began surrounding ourselves in constant comfort delivered benefits that are essential for our brain health, productivity, personal sanity, and sense of meaning. But there’s been a cosmic shift in boredom. The way we now deal with it is “like junk food for your mind,” said Danckert.
More than half of adults said they were under “high stress” in 2017. Anxiety grew by 39 percent in a recent one-year period. Attention spans fell by 33 percent from 2000 to 2015. Depression diagnoses are up 33 percent since 2013.
Dr. Judson Brewer, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University Medical School, studies addiction, deals with many addicts, and develops methods to get them better. He’s particularly interested in the tie between screen time and our growing mental health issues. “I wouldn’t pin this on mobile technology one hundred percent,” said Brewer. “But I’d say it’s ninety percent due to it.”
“Three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt,” wrote Stanford psychologist B. J. Fogg. It’s a formula leveraged by smartphone apps.
A rule: If you’re not paying for a digital service, YOU are what the company sells. The corporation games the system to take as much of your attention as it can in order to sell it to the highest advertorial bidder.
There’s this famous line in recovery: “Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try it more than once.” OK, try to ignore the beeping cellphone. Try it more than once. “I like the simple definition of addiction being ‘continued use despite adverse consequences,’ ”
There’s this evolutionary survival process we developed to help us remember where food is, so we wouldn’t starve,” Brewer told me. We’d see food, eat it, and then our stomach would signal to our brain to release a shot of dopamine, a feel-good brain chemical, he said. It’s the same chemical that spurts out when people do drugs like cocaine or ecstasy, eat a gluttonous meal, have sex, gamble, or do anything else pleasurable. It’s also a three-stepper.
“There’s a trigger, a behavior, and a reward,” said Brewer. “But this brain process can get hijacked in the modern day. The trigger instead of food is boredom. And the behavior is going on YouTube or checking our news feed or Instagram. And that distracts us from the boredom. We become excited and get a hit of dopamine, which is a reward.
“The paradox is that these mechanisms that helped keep us alive are now hurting our health,” he explained. “We have less tolerance for distress. If we feel something unpleasant, like boredom, typically we would have to just be with that unpleasantness, and then we’d find a productive outlet. But we don’t have to do that anymore. We can use our phone to distract ourselves.” Or, as Danckert put it, we simply consume more “junk food for the mind.” Each time we reflexively take out our phone or turn on a computer or TV to kill boredom, it attaches another tiny anchor to our stress tolerance, dragging it lower. Scientists at Oregon State University found that daily stressors like lines and waits can improve our resistance to some brain diseases if we simply suffer through them and shrug them off. More of these everyday stressors are actually better for our brain.
Sorkin’s takeaway is that we should learn to deal with boredom, and then discover ways to overcome it that are more productive and creative than watching a YouTube video or scrolling through Instagram.
There’s another massive benefit to boredom beyond making us more psychologically robust and resilient. Finding a different outlet for boredom also lets us tap into creativity.
“But now people want to say that boredom makes you more creative,” said Danckert. “I call bullshit on that. Boredom doesn’t make you more creative. It just tells you ‘do something!’ ” And when that “something” is letting our mind revive unfocused mode—or sitting down to write a screenplay—rather than blanketing it with the exact same media that everyone else is consuming, we begin to think, quite literally, on a different wavelength. That’s what creativity requires.
Ellis Paul Torrance was an American psychologist. In the 1950s he noticed something off-target about American classrooms. Teachers tended to prefer the subdued, book-smart kids. They didn’t much care for the kids who had tons of energy and big ideas; kids who’d think up odd interpretations of readings, invent excuses for why they didn’t do their homework, and morph into mad scientists every lab day. The system deemed these kids “bad.” But Torrance felt they were misunderstood. Because if a problem comes up in the real world, all the book-smart kids look for an answer in…a book. But what if the answer isn’t in a book? Then a person needs to get creative. So he devoted his life to studying creativity and what it’s good for. In 1958 he developed the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, and it’s since become the gold standard for gauging creativity. Torrance had a large group of children in the Minnesota public school system take the exam. It includes exercises like showing a kid a toy and asking her, “How would you improve this toy to make it more fun?” Torrance analyzed all the kids’ scores. He then tracked every accomplishment the kids earned across their lives, until he died in 2003, when his colleagues took on the job. If one of the kids wrote a book, he’d mark it. Kid founded a business? Mark it. Kid submitted a patent? Mark it. Every achievement was logged. What he found raises big questions about how we judge intelligence.
he kids who came up with more, better ideas in the initial test were the ones who became the most accomplished adults. They were successful inventors and architects, CEOs and college presidents, authors and diplomats, and so on. Torrance testing, in fact, smokes IQ testing. A recent study of the kids in Torrance’s study found that creativity was a threefold better predictor of much of the students’ accomplishments compared to their IQ scores.
And so, despite what productivity gurus will have us believe, the key to improving productivity and performance might be to occasionally do nothing at all. Or, at least, not dive into a screen. It prompts us to think distinctly, in a way that delivers more original ideas. Even the god of Silicon Valley bought in. Steve Jobs once said, “I’m a big believer in boredom….All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
It is wonderful. And wonderfully rare. Boredom is now infrequent enough that the sight of someone doing nothing can be jarring. A friend of mine described a recent evening while he was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking. Just thinking. “My wife walked into the room, saw me, and asked if I was OK,” he said. “She thought I’d had a stroke or something. It was too weird for her to see me just lying there not on my phone or laptop, with the TV turned off.”
I believe all these feelings have something to do with allowing my mind a moment of rest. Maybe when I get home, instead of thinking the oft-repeated “less phone,” it might be more productive to think “more boredom.”
20 MINUTES, 5 HOURS, 3 DAYS 22-10-2024
BEFORE I ARRIVED in Alaska I came upon new research showing that, yeah, all our screen time is bad. But there’s something else at play.
Animals naturally take the path of least resistance to burn fewer calories. Which means that this trail is also an energy saver for us human animals.
If we were subsistence hunters, we would happily take the closest animal. Male or female, young or old. We’d just want dinner. The modern world has turned hunting, even the more morally conscious kind,
Caribou move in herds because it’s safer, not because they feel a particularly intimate bond with one another. They graze in open spaces. Their advantage is their speed, endurance, and eyesight. Having 30 pairs of eyes covering 360 degrees of land at different depths is safer than just one pair that covers a single direction.
Donnie and I are silent for a moment. Then I look at him. “Unbelievable, just unbelievable,” he says. “Moments like that are why I come up here. Only by coming out here can you put yourself in a position to have wild moments and experiences like the one we just had.” I’m also thinking it’s unbelievable we didn’t get trampled to death. Those caribou shaking that patch of earth shook my soul. It was transcendent. Wild as a religious experience. It’s an experience we all should have. But probably not all at once in the same spot. Most of us today rarely experience the natural world. More than half of Americans don’t go outside for any type of recreation at all. That includes the simple stuff like walking and jogging. The time we spend outdoors has declined over the past few decades, and American kids play outside 50 percent less than their parents did. Camping in the woods is down about 30 percent since 2006.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Nature can be uncomfortable and unpredictable.“If given a choice, human brains are going to say, ‘Give me something that I can control or predict,’ ”
Humans evolved, he explained, to look to the future and track information that helped us survive. For example, knowing where our next meal was coming from. But now this fear of uncertainty oversteps its old boundaries, extending to many unknown circumstances. It’s a form of comfort creep that traps us in the safety nets Donnie talks about.
Famed biologist E. O. Wilson developed a theory, called the biophilia hypothesis, which says we have an ingrained call to be in nature that’s in competition with our evolutionary desire to control our environment. The thinking goes like this: We evolved in nature, and therefore have programmed within our genes a need to be in and connect with nature and living things. If we don’t, we go a little haywire, as if we’re missing a necessary nutrient for our body, mind, and sense of self.
Wilson put my feelings this way: “Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction.”
And nearly every civilization since has had parks and gardens, places where humankind gets some sort of joy from spending time and effort toiling in the dirt just for the sake of looking at plants later on.
In the early 1980s, as Japan was becoming more urban and tech focused, the country’s forest agency created a nature-based wellness program. They even coined a marketing term, shinrin-yoku, which translates to “forest bathing.” The program essentially promoted sitting or walking in the woods and “taking in” nature. The Japanese government told its citizens to improve their health by forest bathing. They even created parks across the country to do so.
One of these Japanese studies found that people who spent about 15 minutes sitting in and then walking through nature experienced all kinds of drops in the measurements that doctors care about. Blood pressure readings, heart rates, and stress hormone levels all went down. In another study, people with the highest levels of stress felt a significant drop in anxiety, depression, and hostility after only two hours in the woods.Each group showed improvements. The people with heart disease saw their blood pressure levels drop to those of a person a doctor might pass as healthy. Diabetics had blood sugar levels get close to a normal figure. The people with the weak immune systems started pumping out 150 percent more “natural killer” cells. These are the cells that, naturally, kill off the infections that are trying to kill you.
Across the globe there is now a network of legit nature researchers studying all the ways the biophilia hypothesis might improve humans from head to toe. They’re proving that the outdoors is one potent antidote to the modern human conditions of chronic disease and being overstressed, overstimulated, and overworked. They’re also discovering how real people with jobs, kids, and commitments can easily work nature into their busy lives.
she was telling me about her research. In 2016, she led a study that found something as painless as a 20 minute stroll through a city park, like the one we’re in right now, can cause profound changes in the neurological structure of our brains. This leaves us feeling calmer and with sharper and more productive, creative minds. “But,” she said, “we found that people who used their cellphone on the walk saw none of those benefits.”
There’s a little magic in 20 minutes.They discovered that 20 minutes outside, three times a week, is the dose of nature that most efficiently dropped people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The catch to that study, of course, was that the participants couldn’t take their phones outside with them. In nature your brain enters a mode Hopman called “soft fascination.” It’s similar to unfocused mode—but with one key difference. “Instead of mind-wandering and lightly focusing inwardly, you’re lightly focusing outwardly on the nature around you,” she said. “You’re taking in all these things in the outside world that are nice to look at. But they’re not overwhelming. Your attention network is turned down, but you’re aware of the outside world.” If this brand of present-moment awareness sounds a lot like something yogis chase, that’s because it basically is. Brain scans show that soft fascination is a lot like meditation. Hopman described it as a mindfulness-like state that restores and builds the resources we need to think, create, process information, and execute tasks. It’s mindfulness without the meditation. A short, daily nature walk is a great option for people who aren’t keen on sitting and focusing on their breath. Of course, a walk in the woods only becomes mind medicine so long as the phone is away and also not beaming information into our ears.
“I tell those people it doesn’t have to be complicated. Just passing through a park or by some trees on a walk to a coffee shop has benefits. Almost immediately when people are in nature or even see nature they report feeling better and their behavior changes.”
Having plants in your office can increase your productivity,” she said. One study—conducted across multiple offices with hundreds of workers—found the boost was about 15 percent more work completed. The workers also said they liked their jobs more.
“There’s other research that shows even having a view of nature out of a hospital window helps people recover quicker,” said Hopman. That one, published in Science in 1984, also found that the patients with window views had fewer complications, complained less, and didn’t need to pop as many pain pills.
“Even taking a route to work where you see more green is beneficial,” she said. The study gathered surveys of thousands of workers from cities both minuscule and massive. It found that people who passed the most green space commuting to work had better mental health.
“And people who live near green spaces are less at risk of all kinds of diseases,” she said. A review investigated 143 studies on the topic. It showed those people were less likely to have heart attacks, strokes, asthma, and diabetes, and were also more likely to survive if they had cancer.
Nature is often right outside your window, in your backyard, lining your block, and in that park down the street.
“Any time in nature is beneficial,”“But spending more time in wilder spaces does seem to give you more benefits.”says we should spend a total of about five hours in it a month.Most people in the survey said they felt best on about five hours a month. With that amount of time they were more likely to avoid depression (it’s easy to get depressed in the long, dark winters of Finland) and be happier in their everyday lives.The wilder the nature, the better,So five hours. That’s, like, maybe one or two hikes, picnics, fishing trips, or mountain bike rides a month?”
“This three-day effect she studies basically says that a few days in nature change your mind for the better,”“More time in nature seems to make people calmer. More at peace, more present, more appreciative. Happier. That kind of stuff. And the effect seems to last after you leave.”
“Do you think that’s why you come out here?”
“Hmmm,” he says. “Well, I know the longer you’re here, the better. That’s for sure. More time benefits you more as a human. I’ve seen it in me and I’ve seen it in others. I feel more at peace and start to become part of the land, part of the ecosystem. I love the sunrises and sunsets. I love seeing the animals. What we just saw with those caribou. That fills my mind and soul. I’ll think about those caribou ten, twenty, thirty years from now.”
“I’m always so incredibly inspired when I’m here and when I get back home,”“I agree that the feeling lasts for a while, too.”“I agree that the feeling lasts for a while, too.”
“From decades of river rafting going back to the 1980s, I’ve long been aware of the metamorphosis or transformation that occurs on day three of wilderness trips,”
Strayer gave it a try in 2012. He and his team talked their way onto a handful of Outward Bound backpacking trips. The rule: No cellphones in the wilderness. Half of the Outward Bound students the morning before their trip took the RAT for creativity (the test where three words are thrown out and we have to figure out their common denominator). The other half took the test after their third techless day in the backcountry. The people who were tested after the wilderness trip scored 50 percent better. Strayer thought he might see an improvement by day three. But 50 percent? That’s no fluke. It was enough to establish the three-day effect as a concept worth chasing.
Three or more days in the wild is like a meditation retreat. Except talking is allowed and the experience is free of costs and gurus. The rewilding of our body and brain usually goes something like this: On the first day stress and health markers improve, but we are still adjusting to the discomfort of nature. We’re thinking about how it sucks to be cold, missing our phone, and still focusing on the anxieties we left behind—what’s happening at work and whether we closed the garage door. By day two our mind is settling and awareness is heightening. We’re caring less about what we left behind and are beginning to notice the sights, smells, and sounds around us. Then day three hits. Now our senses are completely dialed in and we can reach a fully meditative mode of feeling connected to nature. The discomfort isn’t so bad. It has, in fact, shifted to a welcome sensation that signals a calmness and feeling of life satisfaction.
“You don’t really see the good alpha and theta waves appear in the short excursions outside,” said Hopman. “That’s why taking a backcountry trip each year is so important.” We in the modern world are riding high, violent beta brain waves more often than any humans in history, and the message is clear: Time in nature is a hell of a way to calm the turbulent sea inside our minds.
12 PLACES (23-10-2024)
I hear only the muted churn of a distant river and my own breathing. I stand there for a long time, listening to the nothing. Eventually I pick up another sound. It’s my heart beating. It begins to thump in my ears. Then I can hear the inner workings of my lungs. This is, undoubtedly, the most quiet I’ve ever experienced
I could stand here all day and this quiet would remain unaltered by commuters, airplanes, construction, the hum of mechanical devices, and all the other noises of the modern world.
