Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

And joining us is award-winning journalist Michael Easter, who's become a leading voice on how humans can

integrate modern science and evolutionary wisdom to achieve improved health, meaning, and performance

in life and at work. You can find his work in men's health, where he's a contributing editor,

along with outside men's journal, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Scientific American, Women's Health, and

much more. Michael's latest book is called The Comfort Crisis, Embrace Discomfort to Reclame Your Wild,

Happy, Healthy Self. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

You have spent a lot of time on this fascinating journey of yours to learn more about the mind and body benefits to living at the edges of our comfort zones and reconnecting with the wild.

How and why did you first become interested in this? Oh, man.

So I wrote the comfort crisis because I wanted to investigate kind of how modern day

comforts and conveniences are linked to a lot of our most pressing problems.

So things like obesity, chronic disease, depression, even feeling a lack of meaning and how

kind of by stepping outside of our comfort zone, we can really

improve our mental, physical, and spiritual health. And to write the book, I traveled, you know,

30,000 miles around the world. And I met with a lot of different experts ranging from, you know,

researchers of Harvard, special forces, soldiers, geneticists in Iceland, Buddhist llamas,

just kind of all around. But, you know, I think initially it was a variety of things.

And one of the main things is that I, you know, my background is I was an editor at Men's Health

magazine. And I noticed early in my career that anything that improves

human health or happiness usually comes with some form of discomfort. So for example,

if I want to improve my fitness level, I'm going to have to exercise. And exercise is not

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