📚The Book in 3 Bullets

• Humans are wired to seek comfort because the early hominids had to fend off predators, walk, and run miles to find food and deal with the elements. Now, just about all our real problems that involve surviving are abolished and our lives have gotten much more comfortable.

• If we want to be happy, at peace, and grow, we need to deliberately practice being uncomfortable. Growth only takes place in the presence of discomfort.

• Humans today are typically overfed, overstimulated, physically unfit, uncomfortable in silence, and underslept. By focusing on the basics—relationships, diet, exercise, meditation—we can dramatically improve the quality of our lives.

👤Who Should Read It?

• Anyone who’s default setting is to be comfortable all the time. Homo sapiens were not built to be comfortable all the time. By seeking discomfort, the significance of everyday problems lessens.

🌎 How the Book Changed Me

• This book has made me actively seek out discomfort every day. Whether it be working out, taking a cold shower, or having a difficult conversation. If I want to continually push myself to get better, I need to find comfort in the uncomfortable.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• 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.

• 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.

• A scientist calculated the numbers and found that a person’s odds of being alive are 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000 power. The scientist explains that these odds are the same as having a group of 2 million people each roll a trillion-sided die and every roll landing on the same number.

📖 Summary & Notes

• 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 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. Our common problem today is that our environment has changed, but our wiring hasn’t. And this wiring is deeply ingrained.

• The modern comforts and conveniences that now most influence our daily experience—cars, computers, television, climate control, smartphones, ultra-processed 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.

• Over the last 2.5 million years, our ancestors’ lives were intimately intertwined with discomfort.

• New comforts have moved the goalpost further away from what we consider an acceptable level of discomfort. Each advancement shrinks our comfort zones. All this occurs unconsciously. We are terrible at noticing that comfort creep is consuming us, and what it’s doing to us.

• If you eat meat, your barrier to entry is likely going into the grocery and swiping a credit card. You don’t know anything about the animal. How it lived, where it came from, or what kind of life it had.

• Misogi is a term used as a contrived concept of going out and doing a hard task to mimic the challenges that humans used to face all the time. The challenges our environment used to naturally show us that we’re so removed from now.

• The only two rules of misogi are that it has to be really hard, and you can’t die.

• Failure a hundred years ago could mean that you die. Now people vastly overestimate the consequences of failure. Failure now is that you mess up a PowerPoint presentation and your boss gives you a look.

• Confronting risk, fear or danger produces optimal stress and discomfort, which in turn promotes outcomes such as improved self-esteem, character building, and psychological resilience.

• The notion that cities depress us is backed by numbers. People who live in cities are 21 percent more likely to suffer from anxiety and 39 percent more likely to suffer from depression than people who live in rural areas.

• As we evolved, groups of fewer than 150 people gave us enough resources to hunt, raise kids, share, and thrive. This is known as Dunbar’s number.

• 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.

• As the population density becomes too high, the human brain feels uneasy and uncomfortable, and such unease and discomfort may translate into reduced subjective well-being.

• The general rule of thumb is, the higher the population density wherever a person is, the less happy they’ll likely be.

• The capacity to be alone may be just as important for you as forging good relationships.

• The average American each day touches his phone 2,617 times and spends 2 hours and 30 minutes staring at the small screen.

• 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 of an exercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it.

• 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.

• Studies have shown that 20 minutes outside, three times a week, is the dose of nature that most efficiently drops people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The catch is that you can’t take your phones with you.

• A walk in the woods only becomes mind medicine so long as the phone is away and also not beaming information into our ears.

• We have become so used to living with noise that most of us now find comfort in constant blare.

• More than half of Americans keep the TV on while we work, cook, and do chores because we feel uncomfortable in silence. Silence-induced discomfort is a new, learned behavior.

• Scientists have seen that people who listen to nature sounds like water and wind reduce their stress levels significantly more than those who listen to artificial noises.

• People conflate ‘processed’ with ‘junk.’

• Processed food is not always junk, but junk is usually processed.

• Our brains evolved to release more dopamine when eating calorie-packed foods. This is why humans crave foods that are sweet, fatty, and/or salty.

• Studies show that real hunger now drives just 20 percent of eating.

• Hunger is necessary for long-term weight loss.

• Death is a psychologically threatening fact, but when people contemplate it, apparently the automatic system begins to search for happy thoughts.

• Being overly materialistic leads to unhappiness.

• When a person realizes death is imminent, their checklist and everyday bullshit becomes irrelevant and their mind begins to center on that which makes it happy.

• Our comfortable, supportive-to-the-extreme chairs, couches, and beds of today do the work that our muscles are meant to. And muscle is use-it-or-lose-it stuff. Just ten days of not using a muscle significantly weakens and shrinks it. Then when chair-weakened people bend over to lift something or move into a new position, their body is brittle.

• People who haven’t lived their lives sanitized are tougher. Maybe that person can sustain a few more hits to their health and not be as susceptible to disease. Or maybe they’re more responsive to therapies and bounce back quicker if they get sick.