Why You Always Want More, And How To Fix It | Michael Easter

25:47So that logic and just common sense follows that all the pigeons should be playing the game that gets them the food every other pack. And what he finds is that 97 % of the pigeons play the gambling game. This guy like literally turns pigeons into degenerate gamblers. And so, you know, he's going, they play the gambling game. Like what the hell's up with that? So set that up to tell you this. Told you how the pigeons live in these sort of smaller standard laboratory cages. Well, when he puts pigeons into this really giant cage that is designed to be a lot like their life in the wild, they interact with other pigeons.

26:31They have roosts they can go into. They can go up into cliffs. They've got some plants in there. It's very much like a wild pigeon life that they evolved to live. They hang out in there for a while, and then he pokes them back in the game. He goes, okay, choose between the two games. Every single pigeon picks the game that makes sense. The game where they get a predictable amount of food. So I go, okay, well, why the hell is that? And he said, there's this idea called the optimal stimulation theory. And it basically states that all animals, including humans, need a certain amount of stimulation in their life in order to thrive.

27:16And if we don't get that stimulation, we go searching for it elsewhere. So he's like, so my pigeons, they're in these sort of sterile cages. Their life is very boring. When I put them in the box, they don't care about the food. They just need stimulation, right? And they get it by playing this gambling game. He's like, and then he goes to, you know, the next jump is, and when you think of humans today, I think we live very different lives than we evolved to live, right? We're not living in these natural environments that we lived in that had elements of hardship, where we were outside, where we were active all the time, where we were in tight groups of people that we had to rely on and interact with all the time.

27:57So our lives have just changed so much across the board. And that's removed a lot of the stimulation that we evolved to crave and need. And so he argues, I think this is why you see people searching for stimulation in ways that aren't always productive in the long run, like overdoing social media, like drinking, drugs, whatever it might be. Insert any bad behavior a person can fall into in the year 2024. for. So is the answer that if we want to learn to moderation, we don't want to go right at the issue. What we want to do is essentially like rewire our whole lives so that we are getting more meaning and stimulation, positive kind of stimulation, so that we're not reaching for the addictive, harmful stimulation.

28:47Yeah, I think so. I mean, I can tell you when a person starts to do a behavior that is more meaningful to them and life-giving, a lot of times bad habits just fall off. I think this relates this anecdote. For many years, I've worked with this. I guess she trained as a dietician, but she came up with her name is Evelyn Triboli, and she came up with something called intuitive eating. And it's kind of like an anti diet. And you're nodding your head, you've heard of it. And I imagine people listening to this, some of them might have heard of it, especially if you listen to the show with any regularity, because I've droned on about Evelyn and her magical powers many times.

29:21But it's basically about getting you to listen to your body so that you're not following somebody else's food rules. You're listening to your body so that you eat when you're hungry and stop eating when you're full. That's an oversimplification, but it's directionally correct. And I would come back to her. I still see her. I've been working with her for four years and I still talk to her every month or two. Early on, I would come back a lot and I still do this and complain about, oh, X or Y evening, I completely overdid it on cookies or something like that. And she would sometimes come back with this, what struck me as counterintuitive and maybe even irrelevant line of questioning around what my hobbies were and whether I was engaging with them with any regularity.

30:06And a lot of this was during the deaths of the pandemic. So I couldn't do a lot of the things I normally did, but she was really pushing me to, she would send me pictures of her with her ping pong coach or video of her surfing and stuff like that. And, you know, eventually to make a long story even longer, I, my son and I ended up getting a drum set. I've played since I was 10 and he just started taking lessons. He's, he's nine now. And that really made a big difference for me because I wasn't looking at meals as the only quote unquote fun time of the day. I had other shit to do. That was also fun.

30:43Yeah. I mean, I think that tracks. And when you look at, I'm sure she has better stats than me, but one stat that has stuck with me is from a, this one's in the comfort crisis, I believe is that 80 % of eating is driven by reasons other than real physiological hunger. So a lot of it is because it's a certain time on the clock or someone just brought food into the office and like, Hey, you just, you just eat the food because it's there. And a lot of it is boredom too. And I think that that's kind of what we're talking about here, where it's like, you don't have anything to do. Food is delicious.

31:20Like food will always be rewarding, right? Food is always better than no food. And so I think that that tracks not only for eating, but for, I think a lot of other different behaviors. And I can tell But your example is funny because I still do a little bit of magazine work from time to time. And I had to write this profile yesterday. And I mean, my favorite part of my job is being able to write. And I get really into it. It's the most fun I could ever have. And yesterday I sat down and it was just like one of the most fun stories I'd written in a long time. And I started at maybe nine, maybe eight or something.

32:03and I looked up and it was like five. And it was like, I don't think I've eaten. I don't even know if I've had any water. Like what just happened, right? And so I think there is something to that. Okay, so I could imagine people listening to this thinking, all right, well, I have trouble with moderation in various aspects of my life, various areas of my life. But it doesn't seem so easy to get a new pigeon cage. I mean, that's a big move. I'm rethinking everything about my life. Is there something a little bit more tactical and easier to plug in that might be maybe less holistic but somewhat effective approach?

32:43Yeah. I mean, I think if you identify a behavior that is holding you back, and I do think that a lot of times nixing your worst habits is a lot more powerful than adding good new habits, right? Bad habits are like a foot on the brake. And so it doesn't matter how much gas you're giving the good new ones, you're still not going to go anywhere. I think if you can identify what your bad habits are, when I think about it in the lens of the scarcity loop, and I do think a lot of bad behaviors fall into that now, if you can say, okay, do these fall into the loop that I mentioned with the three parts?

33:20And then you can start to change any of the three parts of the loop will usually reduce the frequency of the behavior in question. So if you can change the opportunity to do the behavior, that'll usually reduce its frequency. So for example, like with food, it's like if you got an Oreo eating problem, guess what probably shouldn't be in your house? Oreos, right? You're just taking away the opportunity. Also, I think one of the most powerful ones is reducing the speed at which you can do a behavior. So I'll give you a good example for slot machines and then apply it over to phones. So with slot machines, they used to have those big clunky handles, right?

34:05When casinos moved over to buttons that said spin, it increased how fast people could play games. And people went from playing 400 games an hour to 900 games an hour. So the faster you can repeat a behavior, the more likely you are to repeat it. This is why social media has infinite scroll. And so if you can put pause in there, I think that helps a lot. There's some apps that help people do this. There's one I like called ClearSpace. And it basically just when you go to open the app that you mindlessly open all the time, whatever it is, right? And then it shows you a nice motivating quote. And then it asks you, how long do you want to spend in this thing?

34:43And you can pick five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is. But then you have to get intentional, right? And just that simple act of the pause, usually we'll just, you realize, I don't even know why I opened this thing in the first place. And you can apply that to all sorts of different behaviors like that. Like shopping, for example, is a big one. People buying stuff online because it's so much easier to buy stuff now that you can do it with one click. Putting up rules like, you know what, I'm only going to buy things in person. And if I can't get the item in person, I'm going to put it in my online cart and I'm going to wait 72 hours.

35:17And usually after 72 two hours, you either forgot it was in your cart, or you decided you didn't want it. And if you did want it, great, because now you're at least it's not this like compulsive, quick ability to run through the system and buy the item. And there's all sorts, I mean, all these different behaviors, you can just play with those three parts. And I have a lot on, I have a website called 2%, which is at twopct.com, that has kind of a guide that gives people a bunch of examples. And the book has a bunch of examples too. So the basic formula is understand the scarcity loop, how it hooks us, and then understand how you can unhook using that same loop.

35:55Correct. Yep. Is there an area of your life that has changed in this regard since writing the book? There's a lot of stuff I used to do more of that I'm more conscious of doing it. I think one of the big things for me is once I understood this scarcity loop, you start to go, oh, that's it. So the big picture of like, I mentioned before that psychologist and how I asked him, why do people fall into it in the first place? It evolved to help us find food. So if you think of hunter gatherers in the past, you know, it's a million years ago and you need to find food or else you're going to starve, right?

36:38I mentioned we had three jobs and one of them was to find food. You would go to one place looking for food. Maybe you didn't find it, right? You go to the next place. You didn't find it, nothing. So you go to the next place. Ding, ding, ding, jackpot. You just found the food. Yay, you survive, right? That's the exact same architecture of a slot machine in the scarcity loop. You got an opportunity to find food. You don't know where it is. So you're going to have to repeat the searching behavior over and over and over and over. So it's almost like if our brains weren't naturally compelled to fall into this behavior loop, we wouldn't have survived.

37:13We wouldn't have been persistent in searching for food and lived on. And now it just gets applied in a lot of different strange ways. So in my life, just knowing that that's why I do a lot of the dumb stuff I do, like scrolling Twitter way too much at night or scrolling Instagram or news apps, buying dumb stuff I don't need. It's helped me put up some basic rails that make me more able to use my time better and my attention better and just make better decisions overall. So the way I'm thinking about this, and this is just me computing what you're talking about here, I'm thinking about like sort of tactical changes we can make in our life that are us wisely and strategically deploying the scarcity loop to our own benefit.

38:10And then there's what I'm thinking of as the bigger pigeon cage part of it, which is really rethinking your whole life so that moderation just becomes easier because you're getting stimulation and meaning in other areas. I'm curious on that latter part, the pigeon cage, once you learned about that study, Have you done some re-engineering of your life writ large? More time outside, more face-to-face, in-person time with people that I care about. Making sure I get enough physical activity. I think that humans evolved to get a certain amount of physical activity. And it's a pretty high level compared to what we get today.

38:53And I do think that that just tends to make me feel better, more calm, more at ease. I don't feel as wired to like, you know, I'm just not as wired and crazy. Despite your, despite the observations you're probably making right now. Not true. And so I do think it is like, how can I, how can I mimic a lot of the things that human that have always made humans happy and healthy, right? Eat natural food, probably go for a walk every day. If it's outside, it's even better. Maybe go on a trail sometime, right? Oh, and by the way, if you bring people that you love and you love to spend time with, man, that's even better.

39:34I mean, it's rather basic stuff that keeps people happy and healthy, but we've sort of engineered our world in a way that that becomes challenging unless you actively seek that out. That makes a ton of sense. And actually, I find it quite helpful because it doesn't, it's not, the way you describe it, it's not super intimidating. In your book, you also spend some time taking a look at St. Benedict. Can you talk about who that historical figure is and why it's so important in terms of this discussion we're having? Yeah. So like I said, it's like the bigger picture of the book. It's set up in a way where I kind of introduced this scarcity loop by going into the Las Vegas lab.

40:15And then I look at, you know, what are these things that humans are built to crave? And how does this impact us now? You know, what was it like in the past? Why we crave it? And then what's it like now where we have an abundance of it and how has that affected us? Now, one of the things that I think we all want as well, this is the last chapter of the book where I kind of try and land the plane on the whole thing, is happiness. So there's a lot of thinkers who argue everything that we do is just a pursuit of happiness, really. and today we kind of live in a world where there's a lot of different advice and all these things that we should be doing to be happy to increase our happiness and i came upon this really interesting research about benedicting monks so they're from the lineage of saint benedict who was he was a kid in rome basically and he decided he didn't like how the romans were living and so he goes out into a, you know, he's much like a Buddhist monk.

41:14He goes out into the cave for three years or something like that and sort of comes to enlightenment about what makes people happy. And he starts founding all these monasteries where monks could live together and work together and pray together and blah, blah, blah, all these things. Right. And I had come upon this research that found And Benedictine monks are significantly happier than the general public. Now, to understand why that's surprising, you're like, oh, yeah, they're monks. All monks are happy. It's like, look, these monks, they don't exactly live the high life. So Benedictine monks, they have to work at least four hours of manual labor a day.

41:57They live mostly in silence with only brief periods where they can talk. They're told to not eat that much. They can't get married. They don't see that much of the outside world. Because they can't necessarily talk to each other, they're not super social. So they're doing all these things, long way of saying, and by the way, they can't buy all the stuff that we do, right? They can't eat all the food, all these different things. They're doing all these things that we would look at and go, wow, that sounds like the most depressing life ever. And yet here they are with higher than average happiness scores.

42:29And so I went and I actually lived at a Benedictine monastery for about a week. And I think my takeaway was that happiness is a very murky construct. And what ultimately I think helps people's happiness is doing things that are challenging, that have a bigger reward in the long run. I think getting out of ourselves and it's not a perfectly cut and dry path to the basket. And what makes one person happy may not make another person happy. And that's okay. so your pigeon cage has to expand in ways that are meaningful to you specifically based on your conditioning and your wiring yeah i think so i mean i think that you see some some very general themes for example let's take as an example physical activity like just has to be something that kind of makes you sweat that moves your body so you burn off steam so all your so your health stays in order, but for these monks, they do a lot of farming.

43:35So for them, it's farming. But for a listener, it could be rock climbing with friends, or it could be mountain biking, or it could be walking the streets of New York City, whatever it might be. But it's just that sort of overarching umbrella is just do something physical, spend time with other people, et cetera, et cetera. Coming up, we're going to switch gears a little bit. Michael's going to talk about his first book, which was called The Comfort Crisis. We're going to talk about how to lean into boredom and discomfort and the importance of really getting comfortable with the shit we don't like.

44:16Let's talk about your first book. And I think the common thread really is you're going back and looking at how we evolved and how modern life is leading us astray in some key ways. And so the first book is called The Comfort Crisis. Can you describe the basic thesis? So the basic thesis of The Comfort Crisis is that as the world has gotten more and more comfortable over time, we have lost a lot of these sort of fundamental evolutionary discomforts that keep us happy and keep us healthy. So for example, you know, the average person, at least in developed countries, we sort of live at the same temperature every day.

45:04We rarely experience hunger. We are far less physically active than we were in the past. We spend 95 % of our time indoors. We don't necessarily encounter the life cycle. There's all these different things that humans in the past used to encounter and that we are sort of woven into our DNA that are not necessarily comfortable, but that kept us well. And as our world gets comfortable, we lose those. And that's not always a good thing. I've heard it argued right here on this show by experts in anxiety that and intolerance for discomfort is one of, if not the major contributors to our unprecedented anxiety epidemic right now.

45:52Would you agree with that? Yes, I would agree with that. I would also say it's a contributor to many problems that are at epidemic proportions right now. For example, if you just think of mental health and anxiety, I mean, I also think the fact that we don't spend hardly any time in nature anymore. So 95 % of our time is indoors. And we know, I mean, there's this massive body of literature that basically shows time in nature is good for mental health. Really good. And even just a dose as short as, you know, a 10 minute walk can be great for reducing stress and all these different things. And we don't necessarily get it because the outdoors is it's cold.

46:32It's not always perfect weather. We can't know what to expect, right? Look, all the problems that I talk about in my book, let me just kind of back up. They're all good problems to have in the grand scheme of time and space. I would rather have a problem with eating too much than not knowing where my food was coming from. But that doesn't mean it's still not a problem. And so when you think of the percent of Americans who are obese, that is one of the main drivers of our very high rates of heart disease and certain cancers and diabetes. I mean, heart disease and diabetes, they weren't really a problem.

47:09They didn't even show up in medical textbooks until about 1900. And it's simply because we've engineered so much food into our lives and we are driven to eat for reasons I talked about earlier. If you even think about our tolerance for boredom, when we get bored now, we have an easy effortless escape from that. And that's in the form of our cell phones or our televisions or our radios, our iPads, our video games, our insert, all these other different things. So the average person now spends 12 to 13 hours a day engaged with digital media. All that is brand new. Boredom is this discomfort that basically says, hey, go do something else.

47:53Because the return on your time invested with what you're doing now, it's a worrying thing. Go do something else. and you would sit with it and you used to go, what am I going to do? And you come up with something. It could be anything. And now it's just kind of this immediate like pulling out the phone. And I wish it was people would pull out the phone and read classics on the Kindle app or whatever it might be, or write the next great American novel in the notes app. But unfortunately, a lot of it is wasted and frankly, kind of dumb stuff. I mean I could go on I mean I just think there's so many ways that the avoidance of discomfort has changed us deeply in a world where things are much more comfortable compared to the past I remember getting my first iPhone I think but probably 2008 I think I'd be wrong about that but that's my memory and using it at an airport I was just waiting for a flight and I remember thinking, I will never be bored again.

48:57And at the moment, I thought it was a good thing. And over time, I've changed my mind. I mean, I still love my iPhone, but I think it's very possible and very common to misuse it. Okay, so this leads to the natural question. If we agree with your thesis that we have a comfort crisis, that we have engineered a world for ourselves, where things are too easy in some counter-evolutionary ways, what do we do about it? That's a good problem to have, right? But we have the opportunity if we decide that we're going to be okay with doing hard things. People can do hard things. And in fact, by doing hard things, your life actually gets better.

49:41So I think today that the world is generally set up that we can choose short term comfort, but that is at the expense of long term growth of health of happiness. And so the solution to that is to simply embrace short term discomfort and get a long term benefit. I'm going to give you a one of my favorite stats to help people understand this. So 2 % that is the percentage of people who take the stairs, when there's also an escalator available. So this tells me a couple things. The first is that it really shows that humans are wired to do the next most comfortable, easiest thing, even when it's against our long term interest.

50:28Because the second point is that 100 % of people know that taking the stairs is going to be better for their health in the long term. But only 2 % of people do it, right? Because we have that wiring that just automatically chooses the easy path. And so I think if you can take that mentality of thinking, okay, I'm going to be a two percenter, a person who takes the stairs. And where else in my life can I apply that to, to get an easy win? Because that is not throwing your day off the rails, right? I'm not telling anyone to go run an ultra marathon or go on some crazy diet or X, Y, Z. I'm literally saying, Hey, the escalators on the right, the stairs are right there on the left.

51:07Why don't you try going up those stairs, right? You're going to get there in the same amount of time. Yeah, it'll be a little bit more uncomfortable. But if you repeat that over time, like the benefits just add up and where else in my life can I apply it to, right? Can I apply it to how I eat? Can I apply it to how much time I spend outdoors? Can I apply it to even conversations I have with loved ones? Because a lot of times people will just let things sit and boil for years because they don't want to have a little bit of a tough conversation, right? And I think that the benefits really can stack up over time.

51:42How have you seen this play out in your own life? I will never take an escalator in my life, Dan. No, I really, you know, it's funny because my background is for years, I worked at Men's Health Magazine. And so it really was about like these grand, you know, the magazines front, everyone knows it's like, you know, six pack abs in 60 days and here's some crazy workout. And I think when you really look at what benefits humans most, it's like, how can we, how can we insert these little hardships throughout the day that amount to some grand changes? So a good example is a study from the Mayo Clinic that found that people who simply move more throughout the day, not exercise, just like move more throughout the day.

52:26They're like, Oh, I'm going to park in the farthest spot away. I'm going to take the stairs. Oh, I got a phone call for work. You know what? I'm going to take this call while pacing and not sitting. They burn an extra 800 calories across the day. I mean, that's an eight mile run. And I think that lesson sort of applies to so many different areas of life. And so I really try and I try and do all those things. I take the stairs. If I have a general work call, I'll try and do it while on a walk. Yeah. I try and resist the pull of my device and lean into boredom. I try and spend as much time as I can outside, try and get outside every day.

53:01What does leaning into boredom look like for you? Yeah, for me, that is being able to... When the feeling of boredom comes on, which everyone knows it, right? It's like your brain kind of starts to just feel like, and you're looking for something to escape. It's kind of sitting with that, not automatically choosing the easy thing, which is the phone, which that's going to be the hyper-stimulating thing. But if I can use it as a time for ideas to just let my mind kind of wander as much as, as much as on this podcast, mind wandering all the time is sometimes frowned upon. I will say it's good for ideas.

53:42So using it for that. And even, I mean, something as simple as taking a walk without your electronic devices, I think could be a great way to sort of just let your mind go places. There's some really interesting research too about how our brains sort of work slightly differently, especially when it comes to creativity when you're outside and moving across the landscape instead of sitting indoors. Just to be clear, I have nothing against mind wandering. I think in meditation, it's gotten a bad rap because you are in meditation trying to focus on something, generally speaking, focus on whatever's happening right now.

54:19And then mind wandering is going to happen. I mean, for the vast majority of us, it's going to happen. And to vilify it, to make it bad, actually just going to make it worse. It's about seeing it, being cool with it, blowing it a kiss, and then gently escorting your attention back to whatever you're trying to focus on. So I just don't want anybody listening to feel like I'm anti-mind wandering, because that would be basically being against the human condition. Yeah. Anyway, having said that, I get it that you take the stairs now and that's a metaphor by just trying to find little ways throughout the day to embrace some discomfort, including boredom.

54:58Are there bigger moves you've made in terms of the structure of your life or your willingness to have hard conversations, et cetera, et cetera, that you now are more embracing of? Yeah, I think being willing to have hard conversations is one and self-introspection as much as, you know, people aren't as good at that as they probably think. At least I'm not. I think it is a worthy effort. I also, I try and spend at least some stint outdoors every year, at least three days. There's this interesting concept I write about in the comfort crisis called the three-day effect. and it basically finds that after a person spends at least three days in sort of backcountry nature, just kind of totally off the grid without a cell phone, they really calm down.

55:51They almost get into a sort of meditative state as described by researchers at the University of Utah. And so this three-day effect, it's almost like you need to be out in the wild for at least three days for this to happen. So day one, you're usually worried about what you left behind at home. Day two, you're still kind of worried about bears. And then by day three, you're kind of this like, I feel much better. Your thoughts are very different. You're much calmer, more collected. And as part of the comfort crisis, so people have context, I spent more than a month in the Arctic on this expedition.

56:27So I had a lot of time outside. And I can tell you that what was fascinating is we're in a pretty dangerous part of the world, right? Like you have to get flown out in this tiny plane that's like the size of a pack of gum and dropped off in the middle of nowhere. And there's grizzly bears and crazy weather and all this stuff. And despite all those stressors, I mean, it was the most calm and collected I've ever felt in my life after, you know, four or five, just my thoughts were like so much more clear and centered on what was important to me. and even creatively, I look back at some of those notebooks and I'm like, man, you need to spend more time deep in the wilderness for stints because this is just more interesting.

57:11It's different and more interesting than you usually come up with at home. So I think trying to mimic that has been useful for me as well with at least three days, usually longer every year. I've mentioned this before, but every year I do at least one, sometimes more long meditation retreat. I've got one coming up. It's 10 days. And a ton of that time is spent outdoors. I'm living in a cabin, so I'm not outdoors the whole time, but I'm in a rural place and I'm out a ton during the day doing walking meditation. And I think the combination of that dosage of nature, plus, of course, the dosage of meditation, I am overwhelmed with ideas.

57:59Now, sometimes I come back and I look at my notebooks and it's like the Unabomber's scrawlings. But a lot of it, a lot of the best, many of the best ideas I've ever had come on retreat. And you're not supposed to be like working and writing or anything like that. But I try to, at a couple of points in the day, just write a bunch of stuff down and get it out of my head. And those ideas are often the highest quality ideas I ever generate. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. I mean, there's research supporting the fact that people come up with better ideas after periods where they're bored, after periods where they're disconnected.

58:38And I think you see a ton of anecdotes about it throughout history. So a lot of great thinkers would spend time alone, spend time removed in order to come up with ideas. I mean, even silence. The crazy thing about my time in the Arctic is before you do a book, you got to do a proposal. There's a lot of things that I can expect I'm going to face while I'm up in the Arctic for a month. A lot of these discomforts I'm covering, right? I know I'm going to be more physically active. I assume I'm going to be more hungry because you can only pack in so much food for a month. And so your calories are limited.

59:12You're moving around. I know it's going to be cold, et cetera. But what wasn't in the proposal and what I didn't expect is just how silent it was up there. So, I mean, at first it totally creeped me out. It's totally uncomfortable, but then you kind of get used to it. And I especially remember this one morning I go out and like the sun is coming up and it's just so silent that I'm standing there and I can hear my heartbeat like loud it's like boom boom boom boom boom boom can even hear like a whooshing like a which is blood running into your brain i mean that is how quiet it is up there and then at some point i just hear this and i'm like thinking there's some military testing exercise going on and we got an Apache helicopter, you know, and I'm spinning around and it's a raven.

1:00:08And it's just that it's so quiet. And it was the raven's wings just moving the wind. And it was just, it was unbelievable. And that sent me down this rabbit hole of going, okay, like, why was it so quiet up there? And I think that most of the world was quiet like that for most of time. So humans have increased the world's loudness, I think by fourfold. And there's a significant number of people today that live at I think it's 75 decibels, which is basically like standing next to a working washing machine. Like, it's so loud in the modern world that we live in. And we don't really realize that it that it kind of drags us down.

1:00:53So after spending time in silence, people generally report being much less stressed. They have better focus. There's some interesting studies in office settings where they put people in the group work, the open office concept, and then like a silent office. And the workers in the silent office always create more and better work. And then they ask both of them after, like, how do you think your work was? And they're both like, oh, it was great. So it's like, we don't even realize like this group that thought their work was great. It actually wasn't. We don't even realize how loudness that we live in affects us.

1:01:25It even affects health to a certain extent, like living in too much noise can affect cardiovascular health just simply because it's a constant stressor. I think what we're both saying here, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that getting more comfortable with discomfort is important. And you don't have to spend a month in the Arctic. You don't have to go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. It's a back to your 2 % model. Become the type of person who's willing in small ways throughout the day that scale up to potentially big change to embrace a certain amount of discomfort because it will improve your health and also gird you, protect you against anxiety.

1:02:05Yeah. Protect people against anxiety and protect you against all sorts of different health problems, heart disease, certain cancers, on and on and on. Yeah. And I do think too, you know, what happens when you kind of get next to an edge of something that feels uncomfortable, the edge usually starts to expand. So it's like you got your comfort zone and let's say it's the size of a quarter. When you walk out to the edge of that quarter, it doesn't just stay that big. It starts to kind of get away from you, right? It's like chasing a magnet with another magnet just keeps moving. And so I think that you start to find that as you take that mindset, things become easier.

1:02:47So you try something else. It's a little more uncomfortable, right? And then you get better at that. And then that's easier. And then over time, you find yourself, you've made these giant changes without it feeling like a stint in the Arctic for a month or a 10-day meditation retreat. Although both of those can be great. are there people out there purveying this message of embracing discomfort in ways that of which you approve like i'm thinking about popular youtubers like yes theory or challenge accepted or the podcast we can do hard things are there people in the culture who are spreading this message in ways that you like i don't know any of those youtube channels unfortunately but if you give them your seal of approval.

1:03:34I assume I probably would too. We seem to think alike. I do like, there's a guy whose name is John Deloney, who has a podcast who I think that he takes a good message around mental health and anxiety. He's a, he's a buddy of mine and he's fun because he kind of, you know, he talks about mental health, but when you look at him, you're like, you look like you just, you know, like you're a roadie for Metallica or something, you know, which I just love, love that about him. rich roll came up i mean i think that's a lot of his message too in a way with the guests that he has on he's doing a great job and yeah the the we can do hard things podcast i've heard great things about i do get a little bit afraid when i hear the you know the people who are shouting at others to do hard things and you know go to this navy seal camp they created and i'm yell at you as you roll in the surf type thing.

1:04:30I don't, I don't know if that's super sustainable or exactly what we're after the sort of nuanced view of why are we doing this in the first place? I think you need to explain, you know, it's okay that you don't want to do the hard thing because that never made sense for humans for all of time doing the next easy thing and avoiding discomfort kept us alive. And now it just doesn't necessarily work like that. Now that the world is easier. So I think kind of the softer 2 % approach tends to work for more people more of the time. Yeah. So it sounds like you want to avoid shame, shaming people for not wanting to do the hard thing because that is how we're wired.

1:05:05You should not feel shame about it. And I suspect you also want to avoid overwhelming people. It's about marginal increases in your comfort zone over time, carefully titrating that. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that it's taking the 2 % mindset day in and day out. And then, you know, I don't think it's bad to occasionally really try something big that might change you. Like for me, it was my Arctic for you. It was your, you know, it's your meditation retreats. I think, you know, once a year, some big epic challenge can really be great for psychic change. You kind of see that embedded in a lot of the ideas and rites of passage, right?

1:05:46When we wanted to get a person from point A to point B to improve kind of what they realized they were capable of, we would usually kind of send them out into nature to do something really challenging for a little bit. And they would have, they would struggle. It'd be really hard. And they would think they couldn't do it. And they would think they had to quit, but they would do it and they would get through it. And that realization that, oh, I went in here thinking one thing about myself and I had to do this other thing that was beyond my capability and I didn't think I could do it, but I did it.

1:06:18That changes people's psyche in a way. And you walk out with a different version of who you are and it changes your behavior forever after. I mean, that's in like all our ancient myths. It's a very human story. It's a great place to leave it. Let me ask you two questions. questions I ask at the end of pretty much every show, which is, was there something you're hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? I don't think so. I think we covered a nice amount of ground. I dabbled on about slot machines, which is always something I enjoy. Talked about 2 % idea, the benefits of discomfort. And actually, one thing I just want to say is that from all my work and looking at a range of research and speaking to experts and talking with a lot of real people is that I think that people are just way more capable than we often think.

1:07:13I think humans evolved to be underconfident yet over capable. And we only realize that we are capable if we're willing to take that hard step and just put our foot forward and realize that like the ground's going to appear under you. You're going to figure it out, but you got it. You got to take the step. And I just, I mean, a lot of people have similar messages, but I've just seen, I've just received incredible emails from people where you're just like, oh my God, like it's people can, people can do a ton. It's amazing. Agreed. Last question. Can you just remind everybody of the names of your books and your website just so that people who want more from you can get it?

1:07:54Yeah. So my two books are Scarcity Brain and The Comfort Crisis. And my website is eastermichael.com. I send out a newsletter three times a week that covers all sorts of different themes and health and wellness. It's actually called the 2 % newsletter, 2 % with Michael Easter. So you can kind of get a sense of what we cover there. It's got, yeah, mental health. Occasionally we even touch on meditation, nutrition, fitness, just lots of wellness stuff. Amazing. Michael, thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks a lot. It was super fun. I appreciate you having me on. It's a pleasure.

1:08:33Thanks again to Michael Easter. Awesome to talk to him. Don't forget today's episode, like all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes, it comes with a custom guided meditation. This one's from our teacher of the month, Christiana Wolf. It's all about how to stop resisting what's happening right now. It's a great meditation. You should go check it out over on DanHarris.com. Also, if you sign up at DanHarris.com, you can come to our weekly meditation and Q &A sessions. We do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. The next one is Tuesday, December 2nd. It will be with me and with our December Teacher of the Month, Jeff Warren, fan favorite.

1:09:08Looking forward to that. Finally, thanks so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. wrote our theme.