Book SummaryThe Comfort Crisis, by Michael Easter

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Comfort Crisis

Are the comforts of modern life keeping you from living to your full potential? In The Comfort Crisis (2021), Michael Easter argues that the abundance of comforts we live with in the modern, Western world counterintuitively hurts our health and happiness. According to him, our easy access to comfort removes many challenges that our ancestors benefitted from, such as exercising to earn our food, enduring hunger, and spending time out in nature with nothing but our thoughts. To combat the negative effects of over-comfort that we’re dealing with today, Easter proposes that we welcome discomfort back into our lives by adopting habits that align with our evolutionary design, such as performing functional exercises, fasting, embracing...

The Comfort Crisis Summary How We Became Too Comfortable Over Time

Easter explains that our drive for comfort began with fulfilling our basic survival needs: quelling our hunger, finding warmth, and so on. But while our ancestors faced incredible challenges in the pursuit of comfort for most of human history (for example, regularly traveling many miles to hunt or forage), our everyday comforts have become increasingly easy to obtain in the last century. We now live and work in climate-controlled buildings, we’re surrounded by an abundance of calorie-dense foods, and we have smartphones that can satisfy many of our desires with a simple call or click.

With so many of our needs easily met, our survival no longer depends on many of the discomforts that have naturally contributed to our health and happiness for the vast majority of human history, such as spending most of our time in nature, taking on physical challenges, enduring hunger, and regularly facing the reality of our mortality. As a result, Easter says we now increasingly suffer from chronic physical and mental health issues. For...

The Comfort Crisis Summary Urban Life Costs Us Nature’s Benefits

Although modern cities offer us many benefits, urban environments have also removed us from the discomforts of the natural world that we belong to, and this has a variety of harmful consequences. To unpack this problem, we’ll explain Easter’s research on the harmful effects of city living and examine the benefits of getting back to nature.

The Negative Effects of Urban Life

According to Easter, our pull to the city is a natural result of our evolutionary instincts to live in an environment that’s rich with survival resources and mating opportunities. However, urban comforts remove us from the natural environment we evolved in. This causes numerous health issues and deprives us of many psychological and physical benefits. Easter references research showing that people living in cities are 21% more likely to suffer from anxiety and 39% more likely to have depression than people living in rural areas.

(Shortform note: Another drive to the city is the human instinct to immerse ourselves in new environments and learn. If you live in the city for these reasons, you may be what experts call an urban...

The Comfort Crisis Summary Fear Squashes Our Call to Adventure

Another way comfort holds us back is by making us hesitant to challenge ourselves and discover our full potential. Because of this, many of us don’t feel tested, which is linked to psychological issues such as anxiety and depression. On top of that, when we don’t push our limits, we never discover our full potential. We’ll break down this issue by explaining why we rarely dare to step out of our comfort zones and the negative effects this has. To remedy this problem, we’ll explain how embracing challenges helps you feel happy, confident, and more resilient.

Why We’re Hesitant to Push Our Limits

Easter explains that we limit ourselves with restrictive comfort zones because we evolved to have a disproportionate fear of failure. For most of human history, failure often meant death. For example, if you failed to successfully run down prey, you might starve. However, today’s failures rarely have serious consequences. For example, if you fail to complete the marathon you’re running, you’re unlikely to lose your partner, shelter, or food to survive. Therefore, Easter argues that our fear of failure isn’t as applicable to our modern circumstances, and it instead limits us from...

The Comfort Crisis Summary Sedentary Lifestyles Lead to Physical Weakness and Injury

In this section, we’ll discuss the negative effects of sedentary lifestyles and how to get your body moving the way it’s meant to. We’ll explain how low-activity lifestyles cause problems such as back pain. After that, we'll examine the benefits of exercising and provide some context about the types of movement humans evolved to perform.

Modern Life Doesn’t Get Us Moving Enough

Our exercise levels have progressively decreased as innovations such as farming, industrialization, and digital technology have made movement increasingly obsolete for our survival. Easter says that three-quarters of American jobs today involve sitting for most of the day. Further, only 20% of Americans meet the national guidelines for exercise (150 minutes per week) and 27% percent of Americans don’t get any exercise. When we don’t use our muscles, they become weaker and more susceptible to injury.

According to Easter, one of the most significant consequences of our sedentary lifestyles is back pain. 80% of Americans suffer from back pain at some point in their life. This is the most common type of pain that people visit doctors for and it’s the number one reason people miss work. Back pain...

The Comfort Crisis Summary Comfortable Diets Are Deadly

Another consequence of our modern lifestyles is obesity. In this section, we’ll focus on the harmful effects that comfortable diets have on our health and how enduring the discomfort of hunger can help us counteract modern eating habits.

The Obesity Epidemic

Obesity is an epidemic in the United States. Easter says 38% of the US population is obese and 32% is overweight. This is a big problem because obesity is a major risk factor for conditions like heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In fact, obesity decreases your lifespan by an average of 5 to 20 years.

(Shortform note: Research shows that obesity is also one of the most common comorbidities for Covid-19. In some studies, obesity was found to be the leading comorbidity. This is because obesity weakens your immune system and compresses your lungs, which exacerbates the respiratory symptoms of Covid.)

Easter explains that **our evolutionary instincts make us dangerously susceptible to obesity in modern...

The Comfort Crisis Summary Internal Comforts Distract Us From What Matters Most

The comforts we live with today don’t just impact our bodies, they influence our minds as well. With so many distractions, it’s easy to numb our minds and avoid thinking about things that are uncomfortable to confront. However, Easter says letting your mind go to uncomfortable places is important for creativity, productivity, and happiness. In this section, we’ll discuss how materialism distracts us from boredom and thinking about death as well as the benefits these internal discomforts can offer.

The Comforts of Materialism Eliminate the Benefits of Boredom

Modern technology impedes boredom by tempting our attention whenever our mind starts to drift to uncomfortable territory. On average, we spend 11.6 hours with digital media each day. This includes time on our phones, in front of TVs, and on our computers. When we’re focused on social media and entertainment, we don’t have time for boredom.

Easter defines boredom as a state of unfocused mental rest and openness. Boredom is important for our mental health because it allows our minds to decompress. However, because the constant stream of virtual stimulation available today has our attention in a stranglehold, we...

Shortform Exercise: Embark on a Challenging Adventure

To overcome limiting comforts in your life and discover more of your potential, Easter says it’s valuable to challenge yourself with an adventure that tests your mental and physical capabilities. To do this effectively, he says it’s important to make your challenge truly difficult and to ensure your goal is to improve yourself rather than to seek attention or to compete with someone else.

Describe a time you intentionally challenged yourself and came away from the experience disappointed or unsatisfied. Was the challenge too difficult or too easy, or were the results different than you expected?