Aging and Comfort

Sitting is the New Smoking

“Aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort” - Gary Brecka

Modern life is incredibly comfortable, but does this equate to positive outcomes for humans?

We wake up in our warm beds in our climate controlled homes. We make our way to work more than likely by using a car of some sorts. We have all of our communications come into one pocket sized device. Whenever we get bored, we reach for said device. Even when we look at our self imposed “adversity sessions”, we are committing to them in an air-conditioned gym, with all sorts of modern equipment and devices designed to make things easier and… more comfortable.

To many today. This means life is seemingly good. Everything is a snap of the fingers away and very little can’t be automated. However, what happens when we remove all these comforts?

It is no secret that we are becoming increasingly unhappy in modern societies particularly in the West. Whether it be the increase in mental health problems, the uptake in psychoactive drugs being consumed, or the general lawlessness that results from these factors. One thing is clear, we are nose diving into misery as a society. One critical piece of this is the fact that we have everything at the tips of our fingers. People rarely cook nowadays, they just order delivery through uber eats or any one of the dozens of delivery apps, and it is embarrassing. We are living in a comfort crisis. Which is also the title of a book by Michael Easter that I thoroughly have enjoyed reading and is partly what will influence writing this article and it’s contents.

For as long as there’s been humans, life’s been tough. It was a fight for survival. Our ancestors spent 85 % of their lives outside. We’ve reduced that to only 3-5%. Yes that means that we spend over 95% of our time inside now. Sitting in temperature controlled rooms and food readily available to satiate us at the first sign of hunger. We used to have to risk it all just to find a meal. We could go days without anything, not a morsel of food. This was simply life. We take for granted, our constant supply of food and the variety we are presented with. To put it plainly, we are spoiled beyond imagination.

Without a doubt, life is much easier these days, but this comfort comes at a cost. We are more depressed, stressed, anxious and unhappy than ever in recorded history. Our physical struggles have been replaced by mental ones. Our brains were never designed to cope with so much stimulus to our mental frontier and so little to our body. We numb ourselves with food, alcohol, drugs, and screens so that we can achieve temporary dopamine highs to convince ourselves we aren’t miserable. But of course our efforts miss the mark and only result in worse dissatisfaction with life. Many anthropologists today are sounding the alarm bell and suggesting that we were much happier thousands of years ago. Our needs were simpler, there was a clear path forward to achieve these needs, and we naturally were more mindful as we proceeded to live in the moment.

The author I spoke of earlier, decided to break the monotony and dread of his everyday modern life in what most would consider an extreme way. He booked a month long hunting trip to Alaska. He was truly roughing it up in the vast wilderness of the most northern state, sleeping only in a tent and with none of the creature comforts of home. He writes about how the trip was intensely transformative for him and in only a few days, we noticed significant changes to his state of being. He was calmer, more fit, and incredibly mindful and present.

Now for most people, taking a month off to head up to the barren tundra of Alaska is a bit out of reach (although one shouldn’t discount it as a goal to work towards). However there are ways to introduce discomfort into our daily lives that are within reach for most of us.

Movement has become something we need motivation to do, instead of being apart of regular daily life

I read somewhere an interesting statement: “The moment we stop walking is the moment we start aging”. And I thought to myself, no kidding, everyone I know in my life that is in their middle ages can pretty clearly be placed into two camps. Those who regularly walk and look great or at least good, and those who do not and generally are overweight and have an aversion to physical activity.

We can begin by looking at movement not as a daily appointment that we dread going into. It’s important to note we are mobile creatures and are capable of incredible things. Getting up every hour are simply walking for 10 minutes. This adds up. Out of a 16 hour day you’ve compiled 160 minutes, nearly 3 hours of walking. This is easily enough for a great caloric expenditure. Sure 10 minutes every hour may be out of reach for most people. But go walk at lunch, you have an hour there. It’s do-able. The Aboriginals of Australia, have something called the walkabout. A rite of passage young men would go though, in which they would roam the great outback, dealing with soaring temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. No consistent food or shelter and only that which they can scavenge or hunt is fair game. Many cultures across the world have similar rites of passage. By participating in such intense challenges, young men return with increased levels of physical and mental endurance and a much deeper understanding of the world.

Even our workout routines are so ridiculously removed from how we are meant to move. We stick to strictly regimented 45 minute bodybuilding sessions that some influencer online curated so that you can grow your butt or your chest. It’s obscene and completely devoid of real human movement patterns that our bodies are naturally made to do. We are meant to move freely. To walk, run, swim, jump, carry, hold and bend our way through life.

According to Human Biologist, biohacker, researcher, and an anti-aging and longevity expert, Gary Brecka:

“Sitting is the new smoking in terms of its impact on early passing. Sitting and a sedentary lifestyle is now the leading cause of all-cause mortality.”

Forcing more oxygen into our cells is a key vector in longevity and our ability to live well

The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. We all die by asphyxiation one day. We give one final breathe and we pass. We literally die because of a lack of oxygen. One key topic Mr. Brecka highlights in his talks is that we are literally slowly suffocating ourselves to death because of our aggressive pursuit of comfort. He states that “for many years, we did not find a single disease ideological pathway from a viral attack to an autoimmune disorder, Type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and dementia, to all kinds of psychiatric conditions that did not have their roots in a lack of blood oxygen.”

We’re so far removed from what where we started. Bare footed grounding, yes even in winter. Adequate amounts of sunlight, and remembers our ancestors spent 85+% of their time in the sun, without developing any skin diseases or cancers (Hint: The cause is in our food). We don’t spend any time doing deep breathe work. We are constantly taking shallow breaths and our diaphragm barely moves. We also treat our body like a toothpick sculpture held together by Elmer’s school glue. We aren’t fragile, we’re built for roughing it.

We’ve gotten far away from the basics and what mother nature intended. Grounded, raw, bare feet touching the Earth, getting adequate amounts of sunlight, breathing and activity. So when thinking of how this all works and ties together, try and imagine that inside the mitochondria of our body, there is a little motor and it spins around like in a car. Every revolution is called a Krebs cycle. Each of these Krebs cycles can either make 2 or 32 units of energy. It has the option of being 16 times more or less efficient, and what determines this is the presence of oxygen. This is to say, you can get a 16 times larger energy output by simply getting enough oxygen into the human body.

How the oxygenation of our body ties into the comfort crisis, is that most activities that increase oxygen levels, are not fun. Or at least not fun in the sense of comfort. They kind of suck in fact, at least when you start. In the very least, they aren’t stimulating like sitting on your phone and scrolling. Getting enough sunlight exposure or “sunning” is absolutely critical to driving oxygen into the mitochondria. But, sunning isn’t “fun”, most people do not have the attention span to actually sit through a 10-30 minute sun exposure session in the morning, even if they do have the time.

Now if you want to deep dive into the biohacking space, and not into the hacky wierd trends that show up, but honestly get deep into the good stuff, you will indeed find certain thins are unattainable due to price. Whether that’s photobiomodulation, red light therapy, Pulsed ElectroMagnetic Field or PEMF and oxygen therapy, or expensive ice plunges. These can all be done without spedning a dime. Nature has given us a bounty of ways to stay healthy, without spending a cent and that’s because it was once all just part of life and how to survive. I will expand further below:

So what should we do to stave off the effects of the comfort crisis we all find ourselves in?

Move Often

• Walk a lot. It’s one of the best ways to get cardio while keeping muscles from atrophying

• Get sprints in whenever you can, they are amazing.

• Learn a martial art

• Lift heavy weights a few times a week. But make sure they are functional exercises and not silly bodybuilding routines.

• Swim, Dance, it doesn’t matter just move.

Disconnect

• Learn to be okay without stimulation. Whether that’s podcasts, music, people, etc.

• Learn to sit in silence, or conduct daily activities without any distractions.

Discomfort

• Learn to love the discomfort of hard things.

  • Ice Baths (Just make your own ice and throw it in your tub).

  • Cold Showers.

  • Allow yourself to feel hunger, it’s okay, you wont die.

Force Oxygen into your body

• Spend time in the sun, as much as you bloody well can and try to make sure you do so in the morning.

• If you live in the north, try and buy a red light therapy device, relatively affordable ones exist

• Grounding - Take your shoes and socks of, plant those feet on some terra firma and watch the magic start happening

Another fantastic way to maximize your body’s healthy and vitality is taking a genetic test

• https://shop.10xhealthsystem.com/products/10x-health-gene-testing-kit

• This will allow you to see what you are deficient in and what exactly to supplement for and in what forms. It will compensate for the bodies lack of ability to properly methylate nutrients. As an added bonus, you do the test once for your entire life.

The Bottom line is, you must take the hard path. The comfort crisis we find ourselves is a slow burn path straight into sickness and mental damnation. But the beautiful thing is that we can change this, we can alter the trajectory of society’s hopelessness. We just have to be willing to trade the easy stuff for the hard stuff. We’ve got to let go ordering food, we’ve got to begin dedicating time to the above mentioned practices even though they aren’t fun.

Welcome weary traveller. The road I take it, was long and fraught with peril. Here you may rest your head. - Project Lazarus