I don’t like to suffer. Nor do I particularly want to be cold, wet, or hungry. If I had a spirit animal it would probably be a jellyfish floating in an ocean of perpetual comfort. Every now and then I’d snack on some passing phytoplankton, or whatever it is that jellyfish snack on, and I’d use the tidal forces of the ocean to keep me at the optimal depth. If I were lucky enough to have come into the world as a Turritopsis dohrnii, the so-called “immortal jellyfish,” then I wouldn’t even have to worry about death. When my last days approached, I could simply shrivel into a ball of goo and reemerge a few hours later as a freshly minted juvenile version of myself. Yes, it would be awesome to be a jellyfish.
But what is comfort? It’s not really a feeling as much as it is an absence of things that aren’t comfortable. Our species might never have survived necessary but arduous treks across scorching deserts or over frigid mountain peaks if there weren’t the promise of some physical reward at the end of the journey. We sate our thirst, don layers of clothing on cold winter days, and clean our bodies because that yearning for comfort is hardwired into our brains. It’s what Freud called the “pleasure principle.”
The programming that makes us gluttons for the easy life didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Aside from my jellyfish spirit animal, almost every organism struggles against the environment that it inhabits. Every biological adaptation that makes life incrementally easier came through the glacial progress of natural selection, when two animals were able to pass favorable traits onto their descendants. Yet evolution requires more than a biological duty that culminates in a moment of intense passion; it needs the cumulative luck, motivations, and skill of individual creatures to use their biological abilities to the fullest. Every creature, whether it is an amoeba or a great ape, needs motivation to overcome the challenges of the world around it. Comfort and pleasure are the two most powerful and immediate rewards that exist.
Anatomically modern humans have lived on the planet for almost 200,000 years. To get from there to here humans faced countless challenges as we fled predators, froze in snowstorms, sought shelter from the rain, hunted and gathered our food, and continued breathing despite suffocating heat. Until very recently there was never a time when comfort could be taken for granted—there was always a balance between the effort we expended and the downtime we earned. For the bulk of that time we managed these feats without even a shred of what anyone today would consider modern technology. Instead, we had to be strong to survive. If your pasty-skinned officemate had the ability to travel back in time and meet one of his prehistoric ancestors it would be a very bad idea for him to challenge that caveman to a footrace or a wrestling match.
Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years humans invented some things that made life easier—fire, cooking, stone tools, fur skins, and foot bindings—but we were still largely at the mercy of nature. As human culture advanced at least it all was getting incrementally easier. Even so, being a human was not exactly carefree. Each age let us depend more on our ingenuity and less on our basic biology until technological progress was poised to outpace evolution itself. Indoor plumbing, heating systems, grocery stores, cars, and electric lighting now let us control and fine-tune our environment so thoroughly that many of us can live in what amounts to a perpetual state of homeostasis. It doesn’t matter what the weather is like outside—scorching heat, blizzards, thunderstorms, or just fine summer days—a person can wake up long past when the sun rises, eat a breakfast chock-full of fruits flown in from a climate halfway across the globe, head to work in a temperature-controlled car, spend the day in an office, and come home without ever feeling the outside air for more than a few minutes. Modern humans are the very first species since the jellyfish that can almost completely ignore their natural obstacles to survival.
Yet comfort’s golden age has a hidden dark side. While we can imagine what a difficult environment might feel like, very few of us routinely experience the stresses of our forebears. With no challenge to overcome, frontier to press, or threat to flee from, the humans of this millennium are overstuffed, overheated, and understimulated. The struggles of us privileged denizens of the developed world—getting a job, funding a retirement, getting kids into a good school, posting the exactly right social media update—pale in comparison to the daily threats of death or deprivation that our ancestors faced. Despite this apparent victory, success over the natural world hasn’t made our bodies stronger. Quite the opposite, in fact: Effortless comfort has made us fat, lazy, and increasingly in ill health.
The developed world—and, for that matter, much of the developing world—no longer suffers from diseases of deficiency. Instead we get the diseases of excess. This century has seen an explosion of obesity, diabetes, chronic pain, hypertension, and even a resurgence of gout. Countless millions of people suffer from autoimmune ailments—from arthritis to allergies, and from lupus to Crohn’s and Parkinson’s disease—where the body literally attacks itself. It is almost as if there are so few external threats to contend with that all our stored energy instead wreaks havoc on our insides.
There is a growing consensus among many scientists and athletes that humans were not built for eternal and effortless homeostasis. Evolution made us seek comfort because comfort was never the norm. Human biology needs stress—not the sort of stress that damages muscle, gets us eaten by a bear, or degrades our physiques—but the sort of environmental and physical oscillations that invigorates our nervous systems. We’ve been honed over millennia to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Those fluctuations are ingrained in our physiology in countless ways that are, for the most part, unconnected to our conscious minds.
Muscles, organs, nerves, fat tissue, and hormones all respond and change because of input they get from the outside world. Critically, some external signals set off a cascade of physiological responses that skip the conscious parts of our brains and connect to a place that controls a wellspring of hidden physical reactions called collectively fight-or-flight responses. For example, a plunge into ice-cold water not only triggers a number of processes to warm the body, but also tweaks insulin production, tightens the circulatory system, and heightens mental awareness. A person actually has to get uncomfortable and experience that frigid cold if they want to initiate those systems. But who wants to do that? The bulk of us don’t see environmental stress in the same light as we do, say, exercise. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason to leave our shells of environmental bliss.
Maybe that’s not entirely fair. In recent years a counterculture has tried to push back against technological overzealousness to reclaim some of our animal nature. They’ve shucked fancy footwear for flat shoes (and some cases no shoes at all). They’ve turned away from climate-controlled exercise gyms in favor of rough obstacle courses and boot camps that force muscle groups to work in unison. They’re hacking their diets: eating tubers and meat and foregoing grains reminiscent of our Paleolithic ancestors. At least eight million people have bought a product called the Squatty Potty, a device for the toilet to help a person poop in a squatting stance like our pre-toileted forebears did. Millions more sign up for obstacle course races that feature electrified grids, pools of freezing water, and grueling climbs over wooden barriers. They compete until they are so bone tired that their muscles shake. They puke in the mud with tears in their eyes. It’s not exhilaration they’re seeking: it’s suffering. Their pain is so much on the forefront of the experience that the industry of obstacle courses and boot camps are sometimes called “sufferfests.” Think about that for a second: There are companies out there that literally make fortunes by selling suffering. How did pain become a luxury good? Could it be that there is a specific sort of pain that might serve a hidden evolutionary function?
It would be wrong to call this movement a fad. To some degree there have always been people who have straddled the line between biology and technology. In ancient Sparta, soldier-scholars wore only simple red cloaks and no shoes, regardless of the weather. They believed exposure made them fiercer in battle and immune to the ravages of the outside world. For almost a thousand years in China and Tibet, mystics and monks endured months or even years on Himalayan peaks with just their robes and daily meditations to protect them. Before Europeans arrived in North America, the natives of what is today the city of Boston wore little more than loin cloths to protect them during the icy winters. In the 1920s in Russia, a movement born from religious fervor convinced hundreds of thousands of Siberians to pour cold water on themselves every day in order to stave off infections and illnesses.
Advanced technology permeates everything we do, but the people who decide to abandon some of that comfort for the rawness of nature represent an indigenous ethos that has almost been wiped out by a societal desire for comfort. They’re learning that if they embrace the way their bodies respond to the natural world, they can unlock a hidden wellspring of animal strength.
Weak circulatory muscles are a side effect of living in a very narrow band of temperature variation. The vast majority of humanity today—the entire population that spends the bulk of its time indoors and/or whose only experience when it gets too cold or too hot is wearing state-of-the-art outdoor gear—never exercises this critical system of their body. Even people who appear physically fit, with lean muscles and chiseled abs, might be secretly hiding weak circulatory muscles. And the stakes are huge: In the long run, circulatory diseases contribute to almost 30 percent of the world’s mortality.
For most of our evolutionary past, comfort was a rare treat and stress was a constant. The lower parts of our brain formed in environments where there were always physical challenges to overcome, and those challenges were part of what made us human in the first place. Despite all of our technology, our bodies are just not ready for a world so completely tamed by our desire for comfort. Without stimulation, the responses that were designed to fight environmental challenges don’t always lie dormant. Sometimes they turn inward and wreak havoc on our insides. An entire field of medical research on autoimmune diseases suggests they originate from fundamental disconnect between the outside world and an understimulated biology.
This book is largely about what happens when we reexamine our relationship with the environment and see ourselves as a part of something bigger than the comfortable spaces we mostly choose to live in. It explores how changing the environment around the body also fundamentally changes the body itself. More importantly, it shows how it is possible to manipulate our external environment to trigger autonomic responses in predictable ways. Once you realize that you can manipulate deep parts of your physiology by intentionally tweaking identifiable preprogrammed responses, you can begin to cede aspects of that automation to your consciousness.
It’s a strange claim to make for an investigative journalist who has spent much of his career trying to debunk false prophets and medical voodoo. For that matter, it’s an odd statement for a man whose spirit animal is still mostly made of “jelly.” But these findings are grounded in current science and the real lives of people around the globe who have taken control of their bodies to an extraordinary extent.
For me the journey to unlocking my own biology came at a personal low point while I was living in Long Beach, California, back in July 2012. I had been sitting in front of my computer in a desk chair for almost 8 straight hours. Palm trees gently swayed outside my window. Despite my relatively comfortable perch I had a sinking feeling that I was getting past my prime. My legs throbbed from underuse and my back ached. I told myself that as I was now approaching my mid-thirties it was perfectly normal for my stomach to sag over my belt. I thought my days of youthful, vigorous adventure were fading fast, and that this was what middle age was supposed to look like. As an American—hell, as a human—I figured that creature comforts were my best defense against the inevitabilities of growing older. A moderate amount of exercise and an occasional dip into the organic aisle of my grocery store would be sufficient to maintain at least a certain level of decorum.
That was when the internet coughed up a picture of a nearly naked man sitting on a glacier somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. It was as if this bearded gentleman 20 years my senior was thumbing his nose at what had become the defining narrative of my life. His serene blue eyes scanned the landscape and betrayed no fear of freezing to death. It was as if he’d traveled through time from ancient Sparta, when the warriors would pit their bodies against the elements in order to defy the gods themselves. Whatever this guy was into, it wasn’t comfort. And yet I couldn’t deny that he projected something vital that I’d recently noticed was missing from my own life.
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