Michael Easter

Because of this, I’ve developed a motto I now use for any tribulations I face: ‘No problem, no story.’ Every story has a complication. A point where unplanned events make our life uncertain and challenging. If we shy away or pay to eliminate those, we remove challenge and gain certainty. But we also learn less about ourselves and don’t become the hero of our own journey.

The takeaway from all these experiments is this: In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.

Everyone likes to focus on developing good new habits. But I want to know how we can resolve the behaviors that hurt us most. Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake.

As we learned, the scarcity loop arose to concentrate our attention and encourage persistence in behaviors that helped us survive, like finding food. But scarcity brain evolved other elegant machinery to make the most challenging searches the most rewarding.

We need to ask the deeper question and consider how we can find enough. Not too much, not too little.

Modern humans may have an unmet need to do what’s truly difficult for us. New research shows that depression, anxiety, and feeling like you don’t belong can be linked to being untested.

More than 70 percent of the country is overweight or obese—a figure that’s projected to be 86.2 percent by 2030—and obesity takes an average of 5 to 20 years off a person’s life, according to a study in JAMA.

Fitness fends off most maladies. Being out of shape is the new smoking, only worse. Research suggests that smoking takes 10 years off a person’s life, while the combined effects of being unfit may take as many as 23.

A rule: If you’re not paying for a digital service, YOU are what the company sells. The corporation games the system to take as much of your attention as it can in order to sell it to the highest advertisorial bidder.

The study showed that at-home silence was more calming than listening to Mozart. Other research found that two minutes of silence led to bigger drops in measures of relaxation like blood pressure and breathing rate compared to a handful of other relaxation techniques. Yes, silence is more relaxing than most of the ‘relaxing’ products marketers try to sell us.

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.

‘During [extended time without food], the body doesn’t shut down, it ramps up,’ Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist and author of The Obesity Code, told me. ‘Think about a hungry wolf versus a lion who just ate. Which one is more focused? The hungry wolf.’