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

Learn about the advantages of living on the edge of your comfort zone and getting back in touch with nature for your mind and body. We are more at ease now than we have ever been. But may many of our most pressing physical and mental health problems really be the direct result of our insulated, climate-controlled, overfed, and unchallenged lives? Award-winning journalist Michael Easter searches for disruptive genius researchers, off-grid dreamers, and pioneers in mind-body training who are discovering the life-improving mysteries of discomfort—a paradoxical solution—in this compelling study. Easter embarks on a journey to understand our innate need for challenge. Along the way, he meets the top exercise scientist in the NBA, who uses an age-old Japanese practise to develop championship athletes; travels to the mysterious nation of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and a Buddhist leader are teaching the world about happiness through death; works in the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who has discovered that nature tests our mental and physical endurance in ways that foster crea Easter discovers a method for harnessing the power of suffering along the way, which might potentially enhance our understanding of what it is to be human and significantly increase our health and happiness. The Comfort Crisis is a fearless exhortation to go outside your comfort zone and discover the wild side of you.