Topics of the book:
- Boredom
- Nature
- Hunger
- Death
- Exercise
Intruduction
For most modern Americans, “stress” is so often “This traffic is going to make me late to my yoga class” stress. Or “Is my neighbor making more money than me?” stress. Or “This spreadsheet is going to take forever” stress. Or “If my child doesn’t get into an Ivy League school we will all live lives of complete and utter nothingness” stress. It’s first-world stress. (Location 251)
Life span might be up. But health span is down. (Location 261)
It explains that as we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. (Location 309)
“Misogi is not about physical accomplishment,” said Parrish. “It asks, ‘What are you mentally and spiritually willing to put yourself through to be a better human?’ Misogis have allowed me to let go of fear and anxiousness, and you can see that in my work.” (Location 518)
The human mind is programmed to overestimate the consequences of something like screwing up a PowerPoint, because past social failures often got us kicked out of the tribe, after which we’d usually die at the hands of nature, according to those Michigan scientists. (Location 617)
Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey.” The hero exits the comfort of home for adventure. He’s hit with a challenge. It tests his physical, psychological, and spiritual fortitude. He struggles. Yet he manages to prevail. He returns with heightened knowledge, skills, confidence, and experience, and a clearer sense of his or her place in the world. (Location 627)
Scientists at New York University identify 1990 as the beginning of helicopter parenting. The researchers say that’s when many parents stopped allowing their children to go outside unsupervised until they were as old as 16, due to unfounded, media-driven fears of kidnapping. (Location 679)
“People report that the pain feels less intense if they have a history of some lifetime adversity. Not a high level, but, critically, not zero. Their mind is also less likely to go to a bad place during the experience. They also have fewer negative thoughts during and after the experience.” (Location 749)
A group of roughly 150 people or fewer seems to be an ideal community. It even has a name, Dunbar’s number, after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who discovered it. As we evolved, groups of fewer than 150 people gave us enough resources to hunt, raise kids, share, and thrive. (Location 1009)
Therefore, “as population density becomes too high,” Kanazawa wrote, “the human brain feels uneasy and uncomfortable, and such unease and discomfort may translate into reduced subjective well-being.” (Location 1030)
The social narrative of how a man at 30-something should look, act, and carry himself just doesn’t hold up when you remove society from the story. (Location 1149)
Boredom
If you develop that capacity to be alone, then instead of feeling lonely, you could see solitude as an opportunity to have a meaningful and enjoyable time to get to know yourself a little better. To essentially build a relationship with yourself. I know this sounds cheesy, but it’s critical. (Location 1175)
Boredom is indeed dead. And one scientist way up north in Ontario, Canada, is discovering that this is bad. A type of bad that’s infected us all. He believes that our collective lack of boredom is not only burning us out and leading to some ill mental health effects, but also muting what boredom is trying to tell us about our mind, emotions, ideas, wants, and needs. (Location 1359)
The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we’re handing over to digital media isn’t free. It’s all spent in focused mode. Think of this focused state like lifting a weight, and the unfocused state like resting. When we kill boredom by burying our minds in a phone, TV, or computer, our brain is putting forth a shocking amount of effort. Like trying to do rep after rep after rep of an exercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life overworks the hell out of our brains. (Location 1394)
A rule: If you’re not paying for a digital service, YOU are what the company sells. (Location 1480)
“There’s a trigger, a behavior, and a reward,” said Brewer. “But this brain process can get hijacked in the modern day. The trigger instead of food is boredom. And the behavior is going on YouTube or checking our news feed or Instagram. And that distracts us from the boredom. We become excited and get a hit of dopamine, which is a reward. (Location 1497)
“But now people want to say that boredom makes you more creative,” said Danckert. “I call bullshit on that. Boredom doesn’t make you more creative. It just tells you ‘do something!’ ” And when that “something” is letting our mind revive unfocused mode—or sitting down to write a screenplay—rather than blanketing it with the exact same media that everyone else is consuming, we begin to think, quite literally, on a different wavelength. That’s what creativity requires. (Location 1521)
I believe all these feelings have something to do with allowing my mind a moment of rest. Maybe when I get home, instead of thinking the oft-repeated “less phone,” it might be more productive to think “more boredom.” (Location 1595)
Nature
Wilson put my feelings this way: “Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction.” (Location 1655)
Perhaps most delightful of all, being treated by nature won’t require you to haggle with some stonewalling health insurance company representative. (Location 1686)
There’s a little magic in 20 minutes. That was confirmed by Hopman’s colleagues at the University of Michigan. They discovered that 20 minutes outside, three times a week, is the dose of nature that most efficiently dropped people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. (Location 1712)
A short, daily nature walk is a great option for people who aren’t keen on sitting and focusing on their breath. (Location 1721)
The study gathered surveys of thousands of workers from cities both minuscule and massive. It found that people who passed the most green space commuting to work had better mental health. (Location 1739)
They felt even more relaxed and restored. The takeaway: The wilder the nature, the better. (Location 1767)
Three or more days in the wild is like a meditation retreat. Except talking is allowed and the experience is free of costs and gurus. (Location 1822)
The students’ day-one brain waves were beta waves. These are frenetic, type-A, go-go-go waves. But by day three they’d be riding what are called alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves found in experienced meditators and people who have lapsed into an effortless flow state. These rare waves reset your thinking, revive your brain, tame burnout, and just make you feel better. (Location 1840)
Silence is worth seeking, even if it’s uncomfortable at first. Where can we find unadulterated natural silence? (Location 1905)
Two hours of the type of quiet we can find at home (perhaps with earplugs in or noise-canceling headphones on, if you live in a city) was shown to lead to the production of more cells in an area of the brain that fights depression. (Location 1948)
Hunger
Hunger, apparently, is the best sauce. (Location 1996)
Eating for reasons beyond hunger combined with effortless access to cheap, calorie-rich ultraprocessed food is creating a country that looks a lot like the passengers on the ship in Wall-E—bloated and lethargic. (Location 2009)
This is why fad diets aren’t solving the nation’s weight problem. It’s not information and advice we lack (after all, fad diets work when followed consistently over the long run). It’s our inability to persist against the discomfort of hunger—a necessary state for weight loss. Just 3 percent of the people who lose weight in a given year manage to keep it off. Their secret isn’t some special food or exercise no one else has. It’s their ability to get comfortable with discomfort. (Location 2041)
“Processing food is literally the cornerstone of human civilization. Hunting, foraging, and farming only go so far. It’s keeping food that’s hard. It used to be that you could only grow food a few months out of the year and then you’d just pray to whatever deities you worship that the food wouldn’t spoil or be eaten by bugs until the next growing season.” (Location 2073)
And being overweight or obese is one of the largest risk factors for disease.” (Location 2083)
“I’ve never believed that people should be doing more or new things. Continuously trying to add more stuff on top of what you’re doing and constantly experimenting with shiny new things is almost never the answer. It just adds another layer of stress and complication. I believe people should be doing less and eliminating limiters to progress. (Location 2110)
Kashey knew that even though weight gain or loss is mainly driven by how much food a person eats, how much food a person eats is driven by everything that is happening in his or her life. (Location 2157)
“This is why I would much rather address the question ‘Why are you eating?’ versus ‘Eat this food at this time,’ ” said Kashey. (Location 2210)
“People who are at a consistently healthy weight don’t have better genetics or a higher metabolism, and they don’t magically burn more calories,” he said. “They’re just more likely to deal with stress by, like, going for a walk instead of eating. (Location 2219)
But our 15-hour daily eating windows disrupt the process, said Panda. They rob our bodies of the 12 to 16 hours we need to fully metabolize food and lapse into autophagy mode. (Location 2474)
We’re told, for example, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day (often in studies funded by, say, cereal companies). Yet little scientific evidence shows that it has any benefit over any other meal, according to research in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. (Location 2496)
Death
Eight out of ten Westerners say they feel uncomfortable with death. Only half of people over 65 have considered how they want to die. (Location 2706)
Martin Heidegger said, “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life—and only then will I be free to become myself.” (Location 2729)
“In the West you often see a reduction of measuring everything with money,” he said as he leaned back, hands clasped over his stomach. “So many things are not, cannot, and should not be substituted by money and economic metrics.” (Location 2773)
The sense of freedom you experience not being tied to debt is significant.” (Location 2803)
In Bhutan we learn that to see yourself as not always a living person, but also a dying person, is a very important pedagogy of life. Death here is part of the culture and communication.” (Location 2812)
You don’t settle, you add more items to the checklist. It is the nature of desire to get one thing and immediately want the next thing, and this cycle of accomplishment and acquisitions won’t necessarily make you happy—if you have ten pairs of shoes you want eleven pairs.” (Location 2860)
issues….If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called ‘responsibilities’ accumulate to fill them up….Going on as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself and a pointless distraction.” (Location 2878)
“Everyone will die. You are not singled out. Do you know this? To not think of death and not prepare for it…this is the root of ignorance.” (Location 2907)
Pretend you are walking along a trail, he explained, and there is a cliff in 500 yards. The catch—the cliff is death, we will all walk off it, and we are, in fact, walking toward it this very moment. (Location 2909)
not leave. My job is to help people prepare for death. I have found that the people who have not thought about death are the ones who have regrets on their deathbeds, because they have not used a necessary tool that could have made them live a fuller life.” (Location 2962)
Exercise
A figure that shows just how predisposed humans are to default to comfort: 2. That’s the percent of people who take the stairs when they also have the option to take an escalator. (Location 3311)
Humans today rarely do one of the most consequential acts of our forefathers: carrying heavy stuff over rough land. But emerging research is showing that it’s an act that made us human. (Location 3356)
But it shaped us. And, in fact, carrying was likely more common than running. (Location 3441)
in the 2000s, three different studies from the US Army, Marines, and Navy all confirmed the finding. Fifty pounds is the heaviest load that allows soldiers to fight like hell, become physically bulletproof, and forge elite strength and endurance. (Location 3500)
A casual ruck burns somewhere between two and three times the calories of walking, according to scientists at the University of South Carolina. (Location 3516)
Doing physically hard things is an enormous life hack. Do hard things and the rest of life gets easier and you appreciate it all the more,” (Location 3556)
Then we have accidents. They take 6.8 percent of us. If a person is in a serious car accident, being in shape drops their chances of dying by 80 percent, (Location 3615)
Research shows that the exact same dish can taste better or worse depending on a variety of factors. Like where a person is eating it, who they’re eating it with, how hungry they are, and, apparently, how hard they worked for it. (Location 3763)
“The human, simply put, was not designed to sit all day.” (Location 3791)
Harvard Medical School stated that a daily shower with antibacterial soap “upsets the balance of microorganisms on the skin and encourages the emergence of hardier, less friendly organisms that are more resistant to antibiotics.” (Location 3995)
Brown fat is a metabolically active tissue. Brown fat in the cold acts like a furnace that burns our white fat (the type we try to lose with diet and exercise) to generate heat. Working brown fat cranks through more calories than working our muscles and brain. Which is exactly why a team of scientists in the Netherlands think that getting comfortable with the cold can be an effective weight-control tactic. (Location 4022)
And that’s what Stefansson is really interested in. He found in the APP gene a variant that offers complete protection against age-related mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease. And a variant in the ASGR1 gene that gives its holders significant protection from heart disease. (Location 4103)
cast-iron pan. Shimmering translucent blood (technically it’s (Location 4166)