The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

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He was lucky to catch himself from that fall in time to save his own life, and that story alone makes the book worth reading as someone who has stood by helplessly as loved ones battled with addiction. The sense of accomplishment, pride, and satisfaction I felt at the end of this project was immense and unparalleled. For up to six months, young men roam the Australian outback, coping with temperatures of up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. One day I was sprinting up and down a firearms range while wearing 30 pounds of kit and instructing tactical shooting in 90 degree heat.

I drove three hours deeper into the mountains and up the steep dirt road to arrive at my second friend’s piece of land – a plot of forest in the mountains just outside of Durango. While it’s not easy and I, too, must re-organize my van multiple times per day, calculate distances and drives to new places, locate new areas to set up and sleep each night, identify possible dangerous animals, etc. I thought I’d share, as I have always felt that I have the perfect job for the younger mustachians out there looking for ways to challenge themselves in this vein while building wealth.His writing has appeared in Men’s Health, where he’s a Contributing Editor, and Outside, Men’s Journal, Cosmopolitan, Vice, Esquire, Scientific American, and Women’s Health. He co-founded and co-directs the Public Communications Institute, a think tank at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) . For those of us that are still working and growing our MMs, I would love to see a post from you on how you are thinking about the current economic outlook and whether you are pivoting things around in your portfolio. Michael Easteris a contributing editor atMen’s Healthmagazine, columnist forOutsidemagazine, and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Apparently, even the government and military believe so because challenging our military and police with progressively more stress is how they test their stress management and resiliency as I’ve recently learned through a podcast. There’s going for a walk, and then there’s walkabout – a rite of passage for Aboriginal Australians.

My life is so stable and comfortable that even these two miniature challenges threw me off balance, and I arrived in a slightly bummed and stressed-out state. Well before the pandemic, I traveled to Jordan and slept in a hut in the desert with no connection to the outside world and maybe 2 minutes of dripping water per day. You inspired me to walk up the 22 stories to my former office before my WFH days, on top of biking 12 miles round trip. If you think these lessons deserve to be explored in detail, stick with me, as I’ll take each and every one of them and analyze them! From my personal experience, and I agree with author/blogger Mark Manson on this, living in an attention economy with modern technology makes it hard to focus and requires an “attention diet” to improve mental health (much like people require a nutritional diet to improve physical health).

Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist,whousesan ancient Japanese practice to build championshipathletes;to themystical country of Bhutan,where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s foundthat nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways thatexpand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places onEarth; and more. I can’t stand (no pun intended) to just stand there on an escalator, but I also am bothered by the inefficiency of walking up stationary stairs next to a moving escalator. On another note, I am proud to report I completed today 5 years of the Maximum Mustache, and I look forward to completing it again after the next post, and each after one after that.Deeper discoveries and insights occur when we leave the comfort of our screens and offices to find and experience new ideas from overlooked people and places. One day, my co-builder and I decided to take the afternoon off and head to the wild, remote Lemon Reservoir for some paddleboarding. I wonder what percentage of people would choose to park at the top level of their work parking garage every day just so they can take the stairs up back to their car and the end of the day. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, under-challenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues?