TGIM: Comfort Kills

Welcome back to Thank God It’s Monday! This weekend I got to spend time celebrating a college graduation which was a nice way to step back from the typical day-to-day treadmill of accomplishments to experience life. It was exciting to watch the graduates celebrate four years of hard work and learning about life. It was also an invigorating breath of fresh air to reflect on how far I’ve come in the last seven years since I was in their shoes. What a wonderful treat it was to be able to be in the moment all weekend experiencing these sensations and not worrying about a homework assignment or a problem at work.
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tl;dr Technology is making life easier by increasing comfort and decreasing the effort needed to get things done. As a result of increased ease, we are becoming less resilient and consequently less happy. We have to go out of our way to seek challenges in order to find fulfillment.
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I listened to a podcast this weekend that inspired the topic for today: how the constant striving for comfort is killing us. We are very fortunate to live in the time that we do. Despite the craziness on the news, the world is the safest it’s ever been. Most people are not dying from starvation, war, or infectious diseases. Technology has continued to increase the efficiency of mundane tasks like grocery shopping, washing laundry, and transportation. We accomplish more in a day than most people were able to in a week. Life is, for the most part, good, and continues to get better.
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However, even though life has gotten easier, safer, and more efficient, people are the most depressed, obese, and medicated they have ever been. Even though we no longer have to hunt for food, worry about predators when we sleep, or generally worry about clean water, we are clearly suffering. But why?
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Humans are built to work hard. Evolutionarily, we benefit when we work the hardest (ie historically when we gathered the most food, found the best shelter, located the best water source). Our happiness hormones surge when we overcome struggles and accomplish something we worked hard for. Think about the proudest you’ve felt in your life, was it when you were handed a reward or when you did something you never thought you could do? Obviously, the latter.

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But as human nature goes, we tend towards comfort. It’s safe and humans are wired to go towards safety. After all, hundreds of years of evolution taught us that a lack of safety could mean death. Now, a lack of safety, or “discomfort,” probably won’t amount to anything more than a proverbial scrape of the ego.
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Yet we still turn to the comfort of couches, fast food, Amazon Prime shopping, and sedentary lifestyles. Is there truly any harm in enjoying these things? Not in moderation. But in excess, which is how the majority of people live their lives, it can lead to what Adam Grant referred to as languishing. This is a term that became popular during the initial stretch of long-covid when the horror of the unknown subsided but things hadn’t quite opened back up yet. “Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.” Sound familiar?

I believe that comfort and languishing are closer related than we would guess. Adam Grant’s article discussed how languishing came from a lack of purpose during the pandemic. And while that was a reality for so much of the world when life was turned upside down, this general sense of languishing has become a pervasive state of existence because of comfort.
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Without struggle, humans lack purpose, a sense of accomplishment, and joy. Without difficulty, humans can fall into this state of languishing because life becomes a series of clicks and swipes without meaningful work and connection. But life will continue to provide ways to be comfortable, so we need to seek discomfort to make our own joy.
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It’s counterintuitive that we must struggle to be happy but thus is the nature of human existence, irony. We have to seek physical struggle in exercise, mental struggle in work, and spiritual struggle in self-reflection because only through these discomforts will we be happy. When the path of comfort leads you in one direction, look for the road less traveled because there you can find the answer to languish.

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This is at the root of why we should be exercising, eating vegetables, and doing purposeful work, not solely for the health benefits, but for the sense of fulfillment that so many people are lacking. Comfort is leading to the surge of obesity, chronic disease, and languishing. It follows then that in discomfort we will find happiness.

If you found some value in this, please share it with a friend you think would enjoy it! And let me know if you’d like to be added to get TGIM. Or visit https://walshwellness.weebly.com/ for older editions and if you’d like to subscribe.

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This week my podcast recommendation is from Young and Profiting with Hala Taha, “Michael Easter: The Comfort Crisis, Embracing Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.” This interview was an incredible deep dive on the topic if you enjoyed the newsletter today.
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With that, let me know how you will seek discomfort this week on your mission to a happier, healthier you. Also let me know if you liked the pictures, hated the pictures, or if the pictures made no difference in your TGIM experience. I appreciate you all!
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Until next time,

Shannon