I want to distinguish between daily self-induced discomforts and these larger discomforts of like going to the Arctic. I want to get to the the the misogi theme and and this idea of taking on things that are truly hard that you might not finish. But if we were to shrink this down to the the morning, you wake up, you can scroll on your phone or you can hop in the cold plunge, take a cold shower.
These days there's a lot of um discussion around doing the cold shower has numerous benefits. wakes you up. Dopamine, norepinephrine, but also it kind of sucks.
Nobody likes cold water. If you do, send me a note because some, you know, I'll send you a neurologist's phone number. Um, but we all like the feeling of getting out of it.
But what are some things besides cold showers and exercise, which I do believe everyone should do and get sunlight, etc. , that we can do on a daily basis, morning or in the afternoon if we're feeling just kind of low. besides cold showers and exercise and sunlight that are hard like is it if I um like I love eating strawberries and I hate putting like I I leave the hulls in weird places without even realizing it and I'll walk by a hole of a strawberry and I'm thinking and I this morning I thought my Easter is going to laugh at me like I'm like I got to pick this thing up.
I'm not just scattering them around my home by the way but I'm like like what is it? Like we create these barriers to doing the simplest of things. Mhm.
So what are some difficult things that we can introduce to our daily routine that have been shown to make us feel better besides exercise, sunlight, and cold and cold water? Yeah. So sort of my big picture answer here is my Substack is called the 2% newsletter.
And I'll tell you why it's called 2%. So there's this uh study that found that only 2% of people take the stairs when there's an escalator available. 2%.
Now 100% of people know that if they were to take the stairs that would be better for them, right? They get a better long-term return on their health, on their well-being. And yet 90% of pe 98% of people do the easier thing that could actually hurt them in the long run in the context of this environment where we don't move enough.
So this tells me that we're sort of wired to do the next easiest thing. But living better in modern life often requires doing these slightly uncomfortable things that are just so obvious and in front of us. And it's like you have to get to the second floor.
So which route are you going to take? You going to take the one that's a little bit uncomfortable now but improves your life in the long run or are you going to do the easy thing that might actually hurt you in the long run? So that to me is just a metaphor for like how do you improve in daily life, right?
in the trenches of daily life, how do you improve? So, I apply this I try and apply this to as many different areas in my life and I as I can. It's like if I can make something just a little bit more uncomfortable.
I'm not talking about extreme dolightly harder thing that I know will give me a long-term return, I got to take that. So for me it's like okay if I'm in my office, go through some examples and I have a phone call. I could sit here and take the phone call or I could pop in my headphones and I could go for a walk and I could take that call while walking.
I would say for the vast majority of phone calls unless you're like talking to the CEO, your big boss, right? Maybe sit behind the computer for that one. But like you're getting in all these steps that are going to be beneficials and steps are one of like the metric that is most correlated to better health.
Like people just need to generally walk more. And that's an easy way to do it. It's like you got to take the call.
Might as well get some steps in as you do it, right? Things like that. Things like could you even just carry your groceries at the grocery store?
You get the basket, you're carrying stuff. you're getting in this like low load of carrying that's going to really help with back health, strength, all these different things. Even the things as simple as like I'm going to park in the farthest spot away.
Like people go roll their eyes and go that's so obs. It's like okay, but no one actually does it. And if you look at just um non exercise activity thermogenous neat, this is basically a a dorky way of saying all the movement in a person's life that isn't dedicated exercise that often outweighs the benefits of exercise in many studies certainly by calories burned.
Certainly by calories burned also uh some data suggests even health outcomes in the long run. Um there's some Mayo Clinic data that says that, you know, people who just move around a lot more in their daily life, they're burning like 800 calories just from moving around. This incidental movement, it's like running eight miles or something if you do some really rough back of hand math, right?
And so I think looking for those opportunities even beyond exercise, something like um so in the comfort crisis, I write about the value of silence for example. Um we have increased the world's loudness four-fold as human beings. And yet silence is actually pretty good for us in this context of noise.
So you put someone in silence and like yeah it's a little uncomfortable at first. People will generally report being like it's so quiet. This is weird a little weirded out.
But as time goes on, people tend to calm down. It's sort of like a nice reset. And so can you even go, hey, like I go into my office and I just start blasting music immediately.
Like most people keep the TV on who keep the TV on all day. It's not that they're watching it. It's that they just need noise in the background or else they feel weird.
But if you can sort of cut that out, even though it's a little bit hard at first, it's probably going to improve you over the long run. Like how can we apply this to different areas? I did a post, it's called the 2% manifesto on my Substacks.
I'll link to it um in that link I mentioned. Um and it lists a bunch of different ways. But I think it really is it's just like this mindset shift like how can I take this thing I have to do and maybe make it a little bit harder and get a benefit.
And once you start to stack those things up, like things start moving, things start changing. Yeah, I agree. I um you know my trivial example about the strawberry holes which I always put like next to the bowl of strawberries and they'll just sit there.
Um this is actually really beneficial for me because I do that too and my wife my wife goes, "What kind of psychopath does this? " I be like, "Well, there's two of us now. " Uh at least two of us.
Um if you are a Strawberry Hull um a non uh throwawayer, um definitely put put a comment and we'll we'll start a support group. Um it taught me an important lesson though because um it's less about the strawberry holes um than noticing the feeling of resistance. Like what is that?
And and then recognizing how trivial that resistance is, but how um pervasive it is. So like the things that we resist doing like I've got the making the bed first thing in the morning down. I've got the morning sunlight thing down.
I've got got all that stuff down. But it's the little things that we can get away with not doing for a while that I think are the the ones that really erode this whatever this um circuit in our brain is that that you're talking about. And and I I do want to talk about brain circuitry a little bit.
Um but I don't think we have a name for it. And um because it's it's it's a little bit of willpower. It's a little bit of tenacity.
It's a bit of reflection. But what I what I'm getting to here, forgive me because I'm stumbling through this a little bit because it's it's something I'm just arriving to in this conversation, is that there's something about the contrast between prior experience and current experience where we could say level of discomfort from, you know, 1 to 10. Um, the more uncomfortable something is in our prior experience, the better the next phase of life is going to feel.
Whether or not it's hours or days later, as you said, a month. You had go to the Arctic for how long were you there? 33 days.
So, more than a month. And you got a month of zen out bliss. Uh, you know, super Michael to you and to everybody else, right?
And then the crazies start to slowly work their way back in. Work its way back in. And I think that it's a um this is a microcosm for a lot of things about nervous systems.
They adapt and and so forth. So when I think about the examples you gave and I love the one of taking the stairs, I always think when I travel I'm going to sit a lot. I I don't like to sit too much.
I always feel better when I've moved a lot. So I'm farmer carrying my luggage of big supplement bag, you know, hence the secondary screening and uh the you know security and then the stairs are a great opportunity. So we can reframe right as humans we can reframe and tell ourselves that things are good for us.
Um, but it's these areas where we where we experience a lot of resistance to ourselves, I think, that are the most challenging as opposed to resistance to the world. As you point out, the the world isn't um lacking opportunities to to walk on a call or take the stairs. It's all around us, but it's that internal kind of like, you know, shift towards what's more comfortable.
What do you think about the the more psychological things like um like, god forbid, reading a book in paper form as opposed to listening to it? And I love audiobooks, but you know, forcing oneself to read um having the phone out of the room. Um read something difficult like a hard book.
Like if I want a really good hard book, I ask Mark Andre for a book recommendation. Usually I have to go find the book from a like a special book seller because some of these books are hard to find. And then I open up the first page and I go, "Well, I knew he was really smart.
He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. I've met a lot of smart people, but this is really challenging. " And then I have to just start lathing through it and lathing through it.
And it reminds me of being a PhD student and learning about the nervous system for the first time. That stuff feels so good when we like find a nugget of of understanding. Yeah.
But and get through it. And get through it. Yeah.
But um so in the in the cognitive domain, in the emotional domain, like do you intentionally sit down with your wife and go, "Let's have like a really hard conversation so that we can have a really great weekend. " Do you do that? Do you do this in all areas of your life?
Um, well, I'm definitely not perfect. My wife and I actually, we go on very long walks and that's where all the magic happens. There's something about walking as a couple.
We'll do like 12 miles on a Saturday. 8 to 12 miles on a Saturday. Those are long walks.
Yeah. And you got like four hours together. And you know, the first hour you're just kind of this and that.
And you know, how was your work week? It was good. How was yours?
And then like by hour two, you're getting into like the deep and the gritty stuff. And I think there's something about forward ambulation uh with other people that is really um life-giving and there's something even sort of spiritual about it and the amount of connection that you can get from people. So that's something that we definitely do and I don't think those conversations would come if we were like let's sit on the couch.
Okay, we'll turn on this Netflix show. Hey, how are you? Like just wouldn't happen, right?
Yeah, the walk's a little bit harder of course. Um but magic happens there. I would also say there's a there's a section in the comfort crisis and I've written about this a little bit in my other book scarcity brain as well where I talk about the value of boredom.
So boredom is effectively this evolutionary discomfort that tells us go do something else. It's neither good, it's neither bad. Simply tells us whatever you're doing right now the return on your time invested is running thin.
Go do something else. So, in the past, if you think of us, say, um, we're out foraging for food and we're in this one area and we can't find anything, there's nothing, boredom would kick in because we're not getting a return and it would say, "Well, go do something else. " And we'd probably go say, "Okay, well, what if we try fishing this river or something, right?
" And I think what happens in modern life is that when that evolutionary discomfort that tells us to go do something else kicks in, that something else is just like really easy, effortless escape. And it's in the form of a cell phone, it's Instagram, it's whatever, right? It's like this hyper stimulating content.
But I think that sort of sitting with boredom and leveraging it to see where else it might take you beyond a screen can be really valuable. Yes, it's uncomfortable. Um, but I've found I've get my best ideas and I think that there's de centuries of thinkers who would say the same.
Like my best ideas come when I've sort of removed myself from outside stimulation. And yes, like my mind wanders, I'm bored, but then bam, some magic happens. One point of messaging around screens today that I wanted to touch on too is that like there's so much media around cell phones and like you got to use your cell phone less.
Here's a million different ways to use your cell phone yet less. Yes, that's important. Yes, we should all do it.
But I think it misses a big point and that is if we take let's say two hours off our phone screen time, what happens is that people often get bored and they go what am I going to do? And then they turn on Netflix. Not much different, right?
It's not an algorithm. No, but you're still just like taking this information that is being beamed into you rather than seeing what else the world can offer you and sort of coming up with your own ideas and creativity. So, I like to say rather than focusing on um less phone, I like to think more boredom.
Get yourself in a space where like boredom is going to kick on. It's going to be uncomfortable. Your mind's going to wander and you might find some good ideas.
Yeah, you'll have some weird stuff in your brain. Of course, that's what happens when your mind wanders, but I think you can find some interesting things out there. Does boredom include reflection or it's true boredom like uh I think we need to be removed from the hyper stimulating stuff that we often when we get that moment of I've got nothing to do like stand in a grocery line, right?
What do people do? Everyone's on their cell phone. Like we can't just like sit with our thoughts for more than three seconds.
So I think even just having the moment where you go, okay, going to do nothing. Might get a little weird, might get a little uncomfortable, might be a tiny bit bored, but like your mind's going to go some interesting places I think can be productive in the context of today. What I'm chuckling because what were your thoughts on the the brief um appearance of the the raw dog flight experience that showed up last year?
Did you see that where guys were posting online? that did seem to be guys um saying that they quote unquote raw dogged a terrible use of language. Um I didn't pick it.
Uh they would do a 10-hour flight or a six-h hour flight with no media, just sit there as a as a kind of sign of their toughness. I thought it was kind of interesting. Uh here's what here's what came out of that is my wife said, "The hell?
These guys are weak. " She's been doing that ever since I knew her. She literally sits in that seat and she turns on the flight screen map and she just zones into that.
I'm like, "You're a crazy person. " No, it turns out she's just like the original raw dogger. I love it.
That was not the answer I expected. Um, yeah, that that trend kind of came and went. Yeah, came and went.
I think that, you know, and there's the there's a performative element to that, right? And so it was kind of became a performance for the for the algorithms and whatever where it's I think maybe we need to get a little more nuance behind that and put some thought into it. It's like how it's like okay if I'm not on my screen like how am I going to use this time?
Can I use it to go sort of deeper into my thoughts? And you know, I do think people need time, especially when you're deal trying to chew off big ideas. Like I've found that a long walk where I don't take my cell phone, it's like I need that.
And I think a lot of people I think there's a lot of anecdotes historically that um good ideas come from these moments where you're just that's all you're focused on. Maybe you're on a walk. You're just kind of sitting and just peeling away the layers.
Not easy, but worthwhile.
