The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Fall is coming, and fall outdoors is *the best* kind of outdoors. Temperatures are cool but not cold. Elk are calling. Trails are dry. Leaves are turning red and yellow and orange (why? Chlorophyll.)

In August, many of us scramble to get physically ready to take advantage of the season—hunting, hiking, rucking, mountain biking, and trail running among the turning leaves.  

Today we’ll tackle a few top-level fundamentals of outdoor fitness.

• The concepts are important for everyone, even if the wildest thing you do is ruck in Central Park.

• That’s because training for the outdoors likely has the most carryover to general health and longevity compared to other types of focused training.

Outdoor fitness indeed hits all the skills humans need to be physically useful and resilient—relative strength, cardio, mobility, and physical and psychological resilience. It makes you useful.

There’s also strong evidence that outdoor exercise has significant cognitive and mental health benefits over exercise indoors or in the built environment (more on that later).

Let’s roll … 

• P.S. This story may or may not have something to do with August’s Burn the Ships Workout, which is dropping Friday. 

1. Feed the Wolf

In short

Build more lower-body strength than upper.

The details

The 1980 U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team coach Herb Brooks allegedly used to run his players through endless lateral skating drills—which, I imagine, might make your legs feel as if they’re taking a bath in a vat of acid. 

As the players skated and suffered, Brooks would allegedly shout, “The legs feed the wolf.” 

Brooks knew that the US could never be as skilled as the Russians—but we could be fitter than them. And it all started with building legs like pistons.

Outdoor sports require that you produce force with your legs over and over and over because you’re covering ground and changing elevation.

Even rock climbing requires long hikes to crags in wild places while hauling heavy gear.

And you can literally “see” this phenomenon among top outdoor athletes across disciplines. Most are disproportionately shaped, with a relatively larger and more muscular lower body than upper.

How To Use It

A simple, effective way to approach lower body training is to hit the “front” and “back” of your legs with exercises that requiring one and two legs.

I do a few sets of exercises that fall into these patterns at least once each week. Here are examples. I’ve included moves anyone can do with anything that weighs something (e.g., a ruck).

• One-leg front of legs: Rear Foot Elevated Split Squat (You can do this with or without weight)

• One-leg back of legs: Swiss Ball Single-Leg Hamstring Curl (easier: Single-Leg Hamstring Bridge)

• Two-legs front of legs: Zercher Squat (less complicated: Goblet Squat)

• Two-legs back of legs: Romanian Deadlift (more complicated: Trap Bar Deadlift)

There is, of course, crossover. All those exercises work both the “front” and “back” of your legs, but the emphasis is different for each.

2. Build An Engine

In short

Do lots of easy cardio to build more endurance.

The details

Getting your body from one point on the map to another takes a good set of lungs. 

The problem is that many people think going really hard for short time periods—i.e. intervals—is enough to build great endurance.

• Intervals help. But improving your endurance requires spending lots of time in the slow and steady zone.

You may have seen different intensities of cardio classified by “zones” (E.g. “zone 2”). 

Zones are a useful directive for research and personal rabbit holes (listen to Peter Attia’s conversation with researcher Iñigo San-Millán if you’d like to go down one).

But don’t get too married to the idea of zones. As the running guru and author Steve Magness wrote, zones are just “a way to classify and categorize training. They distinguish between variations of hard and easy. That’s it … Zones and the borders between them are arbitrary … (they’re) classifications/categories that allow us to roughly organize training. They aren’t rigid. They aren’t even tied to precise training adaptations. There are no magic zones, or magic paces … everything is a stimulus that can lead to a potential adaptation.”

Read the full thread here.

How To Use It

Cardio Rule One:

Spend most of your cardio time going relatively easy, at a pace you can hold a conversation at or breathe through your nose during (nothing magic about breathing through your nose, either, it just works as a governor). 

This is where rucking shines—it keeps you at the ideal pace, plus you get a strength benefit and likely more fat loss.

Cardio Rule Two:

Go hard less often.

Cardio Rule Three:

Go exceedingly hard even less often.

That’s it. That’s the whole program. Here’s Steve, being all poetic about it:

3. Forge the Mental Edge

In short

A good attitude is sometimes more important outdoors than physical fitness.

The details

I recently spoke with Dustin Deifenderfer of MTNTOUGH, a training facility and app specializing in mountain fitness. 

“Our major pillar that we are going to run everything through is mental toughness,” he said. “Our philosophy is mental toughness trumps physical—someone who is more mentally tough and has better resilience and adaptability is usually going to outperform someone who is more physically fit than them in the backcountry.”

If you crack up in bad weather, get frustrated when the day gets long, are overly paranoid about bears, can’t smile through mishaps, etc, it doesn’t matter how fit you are in a gym.

How To Use It

I recently recorded an AMA about how the fallacies of mental toughness are also its strong suit. I’ve found that two things build what we think of as mental toughness. Listen here.

4. Build a Solid Core

In short

Do loaded carries and bird dogs.

The details

A stronger core reduces your risk of injury and improves your performance. 

For example, a group of scientists at the University of Arizona recruited over 400 members of the Tucson fire department. Injuries were plaguing the team.

The scientists taught the firefighters a simple core-strengthening routine and asked them to regularly practice it for a year. The results:

The intervention reduced lost time due to injuries by 62% and the number of injuries by 42% over a twelve-month period as compared to a historical control group.

Core strength also boosts performance. It provides a foundation to generate force from your legs and arms. This is likely why other research suggests that core strength relates to how efficiently you can cover ground. And, of course, it’s also critical to carry weight over ground. 

How To Use It

In my experience, variations of loaded carries and the bird dog exercise best transfer to outdoor sports. Here’s how to do the bird dog. I usually do a few sets at least twice a week.

5. Bulletproof Your Joints

In short

Do the exercises in “How to use it” once a week.

The details

When I was training to spend a month in the Arctic, the brilliant, savage Witch Doctor Doug Kechijian helped me train. 

His programs included a lot of drills to make my joints more resilient against injury. This was particularly important for my situation. 

If I were to roll an ankle 100 miles from civilization, it would have been a long hobble back to the landing strip. Assuming a grizzly bear didn’t find me first. 

This same rule applies everywhere. Getting injured on a trail sucks, with the ratio of suckiness increasing the farther you are from the trailhead.

How To Use It

To prepare for Alaska, I did various exercises to strengthen my ankles, knees, shoulders, etc. 

For example, this one helped my ankles. This one helped my knees. This one helped my hips and hamstrings. This one helped my shoulders.

I work them into warmups and do them each once a week.

6. Be Supermedium 

In short

Be strong but not big.

The details

Dudes often think more muscle = more fitness. But nature doesn’t give a sh*t about your biceps.

In the outdoors, strength is important, while excess muscle is more weight you have to carry. It makes each step more effortful. You’re better off being lighter and stronger.

• Think of it this way: A person who weighs 150 pounds and can squat 200 pounds will be better off outdoors than someone who weighs 250 and can squat 250.

This is why most elite outdoor athletes aren’t overly muscular. They’re built like Jimmy Chin, Courtney Dauwalter, or Alex Honnold.

There could be some argument for building extra muscle for a heavy hunting pack out. But I’d personally rather be 20 pounds lighter for the majority of the hunt and have the hour or two long pack out be a bit harder than carry 20 extra pounds for the other 7 days I’m in the backcountry.

How To Use It

Literally just do what humans did for most of history and you’ll find it:

• Eat whole foods.

• Cover lots of ground outdoors.

• Lift and carry things that weigh something.

• Chase function not form. 

Have fun, don’t die, be supermedium.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Correct posture can improve your rucking, walking, and lifting and fix the most common pain Americans face.

I got cozy with the research on rucking and back pain while researching my book The Comfort Crisis. Luckily one of those things, rucking, can help fix the other, back pain. But there are subtle tweaks you can make to rucking to get more out of it—more fitness, resilience, etc.

To understand how these two topics interconnect, let’s start with back pain.

Back pain is popular in the sense that McDonald’s is popular—more than a billion served.

Research suggests that 80 percent of people in developed countries will experience back pain sometime in their lives. A quarter of Americans say they’ve had it in the last few months, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

The good news is that back pain is mostly preventable.

A bad back can happen for reasons a doctor can see with a scan. Like an injured disk, tumor, or osteoporosis. 

But 85 percent of this pain comes from mysterious “nonspecific” sources. Scientists at Harvard estimate that 97 percent of nonspecific back pain is caused by how we live in the modern world. 

It results from a nasty combo: too much sitting, poor posture, and not enough physical activity. 

This trio makes us fragile. We become weak and adapt to odd positions.

Then when we lift something—this could be a weight in the gym or a box on our porch—we can’t handle the weight, and it goes somewhere it shouldn't. Pain pops up. 

There are solutions. And Katy Bowman has them. She’s a biomechanist and author of the new book Rethink Your Position. Today we’re covering ideal posture and making a few changes to your environment and habits.

Katy *gets* the 2% ethos. Here are a few paragraphs I pulled from a description of Rethink Your Position that Bowman published on her website:

Every day we make hundreds of choices about how to move our bodies.

Will we walk, or will we drive? Will we sit, or will we stand? Will we slouch or sit up tall? … All day long we make choices about the positions we place ourselves in, and how often we vary our body position, whether we realize it or not.

While disabilities might immobilize us or parts of us, by and large we have uncountable choices to make about how we move. The problem is, we make most of those choices subconsciously, usually choosing the move that’s easiest in the moment, and we suffer long term consequences for not being more deliberate in our approach to using our body.

… Bodies start to hurt when they aren’t moved enough, but also because when they are moved, some parts aren’t moving with ease. This then makes it harder to move enough, and our movements get more diminished, immobility and pain arises, and we think it’s all inevitable.

It’s not inevitable. 

So how do we make it not inevitable? One way is to fix our most fundamental position: how we stand. 

Bowman’s wisdom can not only bolster your back, but also help you ruck better and be a higher-performing and more resilient human. Katy is changing how we think about movement, and her new book is filled with ways to move better.

Leverage the “neutral spine” posture

In short

Keeping your spine in “neutral” improves your movement, balance, and stability while strengthening your back.

The details

The average human used to walk about 20,000 steps a day. Now most Americans take less than 5,000 and spend their days sitting while hunched over phones and computers. This has changed us in many ways. 

Posture is one of those ways. Hours of sitting while slumped into a screen, Bowman said, flattens your spine in your neck area and rounds your upper back. 

Exercising with that wonky spine—whether you’re rucking or lifting weight overhead—can lead to pain. Or, at least, make you work from something of a deficit. 

Think of it like a car with a slightly warped frame. The car is fine when it’s parked. Accelerate the car, however, and you might have some issues.

Hence, we need to rediscover our spine’s happy place. 

Here’s how to find it.

1. Stack your hips directly above your knees and ankle joints in a vertical line.

2. Center your pelvis. Your pelvis can tilt both forward and backward. Your pelvis’ top should be its bottom.

3. Redact your ribcage. When we “stand up straight,” we often tip our shoulders back and move the bottom of our ribcage forward. This can compress our lower back.
   The fix: Tip the top of your ribcage forward so it is stacked over the front of your pelvis.
   Be aware: If you are used to moving the bottom of your ribcage forward to feel like you’re standing straight, this will feel like you’re slouching (the next step will help reduce that feeling).

4. Slide your head back. Reach the top of your head toward the ceiling while sliding your head back (don’t lift your chin). This should feel like you’re bringing your ears back over your shoulders—all while keeping your ribcage in position three.

A spine aligned in these natural curves is called a “neutral spine,’” Bowman writes. 

It’s how our bodies naturally want to “be,” she explains—but we lose touch with this posture when we sit too much.

Remember these cues. It can take some work to get at first. But keep reminding yourself, and your posture will improve—which means everything else you do physically will also improve.

Apply it to rucking and walking

In short

A good carrying and rucking position should look about the same as the neutral spine posture. Otherwise, your weight is too heavy. 

The details

Carrying is a uniquely human skill. Compared to other animals, we’re losers in sprinting, jumping, and climbing competitions. But we can carry heavy things for miles and miles.

Which brings us back to the neutral spine. Bowman says that our natural spine shape is one reason we’re good at carrying. 

“(The shape) helps the parts of the spine—the bones, discs, ligaments, tendons, and muscles—carry loads efficiently and with minimal damage,” she writes in her book.

When you ruck, Bowman says your posture should only slightly deviate from that “neutral spine” position.

“Moving slightly out of a ‘neutral spine’ position is a part of carrying things on your back,” she writes. “That said, a significant change in position with added weight can also indicate that the load is too much for your current core or leg strength.”

• A sign your ruck is too heavy: “You’ll slide your ribcage forward or lean your torso forward to keep the backpack from tipping you backward, just as you might when giving a kid a piggyback ride.”

Researchers in Canada believe rucking (walking while carrying a weighted backpack or rucksack) can help relieve and prevent back pain because the weight “pulls” your spine into a position that compresses its discs less. But going too heavy too far and often can reverse that.

A good strong carry allows you to “maintain pretty close to the neutral spine alignment throughout most of your trek,” Bowman said. 

Your fix is simple: If you slip significantly out of the neutral spine, lessen the load for your average ruck.

Yes, it’s OK and even beneficial to push it every now and then. Like, in my case, when Jason McCarthy recruited me to do the One-Mile, 100-Pound Challenge.

But most of your rucks, most of the time, should be at a weight that allows you to move while maintaining that solid position. For example, I use a 30-pound plate for most of my rucks, which is about 16 to 17 percent of my body weight.

As your fitness increases, you can bump up the weight while standing well. 

Have fun, don’t die, and keep on ruckin’.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

I recently learned from 22 of the world’s brightest minds in health, fitness, mindset, community, warfare, adventure, and more.

Why it matters: These 11 ideas will help you meet goals faster, improve your habits and happiness, breathe and age better, and more.

11 Lessons from Sandlot Jax Speakers

I recently spoke at the 2023 Sandlot Jax fitness festival and also emceed all the other talks. There were 22 total. Think: A TED Conference focused on health, fitness, nutrition, adventure, and more. 

The speakers included CEOs of the world’s top fitness brands, Special Forces soldiers, CIA operatives, top nutritionists and trainers, and more. 

These ideas stood out:

1. Train in uncharted environments

From: Christian Shauf, Founder and CEO of Uncharted Supply Co.

• Exercise outdoors—the wilder nature, the better. It will improve your fitness and mental toughness more.

Why it works: Unlike a gym, the wilderness is not climate controlled, predictable, or perfectly manicured. All those factors make each moment tougher. You must account for the weather, terrain, wildlife, and more. This improves not only your fitness, but also your ability to manage all sorts of uncomfortable and unpredictable situations.

How to use it: Christian gave a fun tip that I loved. “Run outside and get lost. See if you can find your way home. I always wear a Garmin so I can get home, but I try my best to find my way home without using the Garmin.” The trick forces him to pay attention to his environment and exercise longer as he finds his way back.

2. Compete against yourself

From: Dee Brown, NBA veteran, and 1991 NBA Slam Dunk Champion

• Dee played against the greats. Michael Jordan, he said, is the greatest of all time.

• Jordan was famously competitive with other players. But Jordan’s real secret—and the secret of all the NBA greats—was that he was reallycompeting against himself.

Why it works: Psychologists outline two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation, they write, “leads to some separate outcome such as a reward, approval from others, or the avoidance of punishment.” Intrinsic motivation, conversely, is “doing an activity without the necessity of external prompts or rewards because it is interesting and satisfies the basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.” I.e., intrinsic motivation allows us to rise higher instead of falling to the level of our competition. The psychologists wrote that intrinsically motivated people are “more engaged and persistent, perform more effectively, and display higher levels of psychological health and well-being.”

How to use it: One of my favorite lines (one I remind myself of constantly) is “Be a racehorse.” When racehorses compete, trainers put blinders on the sides of their eyes. The reason: The moment those horses look at what the horses next to them are doing, they get distracted, slow down, or even collapse. I.e., they fall to the level of their competition. Take that same mindset in your work: Be a racehorse. 

3. Fix the problem and shut up about it

From: Paul Litchfield, Head of Product at GORUCK, Inventor of the Reebok PUMP

• Paul invented the iconic Reebok PUMP. But it almost didn’t happen.

• Disaster struck when Reebok was about to release their first run of PUMP shoes. The valves of 2,000 of 6,000 pairs of shoes weren’t working, making the pump useless.

• Paul secretly paid a team of sewers to work five days straight to fix the issue.

• The shoes dropped on time—and became one of the best-selling shoes of the 1990s. Paul didn’t tell anyone else at Reebok about the problem until a few years later. Catastrophizing the issue and looping in higher-ups would have slowed the process and led to a bungled launch.

Why it works: When problems strike, our first inclination is often to complain or look for help. Complaining does nothing. Help is necessary if we can’t fix the problem ourselves. But if we can fix the problem ourselves, we’ll work faster by solving the issue quietly and immediately.

How to use it: Got a problem you can solve? Don’t complain. Just fix it, move on, and don’t go looking for praise by announcing your accomplishment. 

4. Breath well under stress

From: PJ Nestler, VP of Performance at FitLab

• The downshift breathing protocol can help you recover quicker and perform better—especially under stress. 

Why it works: Box breathing—a slow breathing technique—has become popular among people interested in increasing their performance. And it’s great for when we’re at rest. But it backfires under high-stress situations, like intense exercise or performances. Better is to use the downshift breathing protocol, which matches the intensity of the situation. This better restores the balance of your oxygen and CO2, helping you recover and de-stress.

How to use it: When you’re in a high-stress situation and need to recover or calm down, try the downshift protocol: 

1. Take six deep and fast breaths in and out of your mouth. 

2. Now take five deep and fast breaths in your nose and out your mouth. 

3. Now take four “recovery breaths,” where you quickly suck air into your nose, and then slowly breathe out your mouth.

5. Smile first thing in the morning

From: Michael Chernow, Founder of Kreatures of Habit

• Smile immediately after you wake up. “And I’m not asking for a grin,” Michael said. “I’m asking for the biggest grin ever.” 

Why it works: Researchers at Penn State recently looked at the research on how smiling impacts mental and physical health. The studies “consistently suggest that smiling may have a number of health-relevant benefits, including beneficially impacting our physiology during acute stress, improved stress recovery, and reduced illness over time.” The scientists pointed to several plausible reasons why this is. But the TL;DR is that smiling—even forced smiles—seems to boost happiness and reduce our stress. We’re more likely to behave in a way that improves our lives and the lives of others.

How to use it: Just like Michael said. When you open your eyes in the morning, immediately look up and smile—big, toothy, near-idiotic—for 20 seconds. You’ll feel dumb the first five seconds, then it’ll be fun—and then you’ll have a better day.

6. Follow the 30/10 rule at breakfast

From: Dr. Mike Roussell, top nutritionist

• Eat at least 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber at breakfastto kickstart muscle recovery and rebuilding processes, feel more full and eat less junk throughout the day,  and more.

Why it works: Most people stack their protein and fiber in an unideal way. If a person eats 100 grams of protein daily, for example, they might eat 10 grams at breakfast, 15 at lunch, and 75 at dinner. Distributing the nutrients more equally across a day by following the 30/10 rule helps us live and perform better.

How to use it: To get 30/10 at breakfast, try a protein shake or Greek yogurt with berries, oatmeal with a scoop of protein powder, etc.

7. Age like a badass

From: Tina Petty, Burmese python hunter

• As you age, finding more adventures will improve your longevity and increase your sense of meaning. 

Why it works: At last year’s Sandlot Jax Ruck Panel, Tina asked us, “How do you continue to level up as you get older and the injuries come more often, and the recovery takes longer?” Dr. Kelly Starrett took the question and answered, “You don’t. You set competition aside and train for adventure.” 

Tina’s adventure is hunting Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades. They’re an invasive species decimating the environment and killing off most mammals (more on that here). She’s helping the environment in a way that gets her outdoors and moving far more than she would in a gym. The act also brings more meaningful rewards, because she’s helping the environment.

How to use it: What’s your version of hunting Burmese pythons? Escape the monotony of exercise by finding an adventure. Be a badass like Tina now and always.

8. Make exercise convenient and community-oriented

From: Miranda Alcaraz, CEO of Street Parking

• Miranda created Street Parking. It started with her and her husband Julian posting simple, at-home workouts online.

• It’s now morphed into a 35,000-member training group. They’ve discovered that the key to getting more people to exercise is to make exercise convenient and build a community around it.

• Their workouts have a low barrier to entry, and members post their workouts and interact together online and in person.

Why it works: Communities develop under challenge. Research shows communities become tightest during times of hardship rather than ease. We can create this through group activities like exercise, volunteering, and more.

How to use it: First, develop a handful of simple workouts you can easily do anywhere. Next, look for a community to do hard things with. It could be online or in person. An excellent place to start: Street Parking, F3 (which is free!), or the GORUCK Training app.

9. Carry stuff

From: Sebastian Junger, Author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe; Co-Director of the war documentary Restrepo

• For his book Freedom, Junger walked the railways of the Eastern US.

• He carried with him everything he needed to survive and came to some interesting conclusions about freedom and the act of carrying.

Why it works: I’ve written about this at length, but carrying is the ultimate human physical act. We’re the only mammal that can carry weight for long distances on our own volition. It allowed us to take over the world. Still today, it’s one of the best things we can do for our health and fitness.

How to use it: Ruck, duh :). But also carry things in your gym workouts by doing loaded carries (here are a bunch of carries to try), and in regular life by carrying every opportunity you can—duffel bags instead of roll bags at the airport (GORUCK’s 57l Kit Bag is my favorite duffel), groceries while shopping, putting a light ruck plate in your everyday bag (here’s the one I use), and more.

10. Work remotely—very remotely

From: Matt Sherman, Senior Advisor to the US Department of State and Defense during the Iraq and Afghanistan War (fun fact: I traveled to some rather dangerous parts of Iraq for my new book, Scarcity Brain. If I was in danger, I was to call a very high-level politician there and say “I’m in trouble and I know Matt Sherman”).

• After the war, Matt started hiking. He’s covered 15,000 miles on foot, hiked *everywhere,* and done hikes that last months on end.

• Matt carries gear that allows him to make calls, send emails, etc from anywhere.

Why it works: Matt shows that you can, in fact, live the life you want to live while maintaining a solid career. Tech can be a great blessing if you use it to do more of what helps you.

How to use it: Matt’s setup runs entirely through his phone. He recommends the Iridium GO! satellite wifi hotspot and OCENSMail low-bandwidth email app. He also uses a small bluetooth keyboard so he doesn’t have to type out emails on his phone screen.

11. Put goals on a deadline

From: Ebenezer Samuel, Fitness Director at Men’s Health

• Ebenezer has found putting your goals on a deadline allows you to reach them faster.

• The tactic has helped him get in shape for Men’s Health fitness videos where he has to do incredibly hard exercises.

Why it works: Having no timeline for a goal makes it easy to slack off. Research shows deadlines help us prioritize our goal. So we work harder—and progress faster.

How to use it: Next time you set a goal, give it a deadline.

Thanks for reading. Have fun, don’t die.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Last Saturday, I received a message on LinkedIn from Jackie Woodside. She’s a Boston-based therapist and executive coach by weekday who gives sermons at churches around the U.S. and Canada on the weekends. She wrote:

“I just finished The Comfort Crisis and will be incorporating it (and quoting you) at a Palm Sunday Service. My talk will be titled ‘Jesus did hard things and so should you!’”

I had to laugh. About a decade ago, I believed I was going to hell and that was that. But I cleaned up my life, and now my work is apparently inspiring sermons. The universe works in mysterious ways, indeed.

Today I’m not entirely religious. But I am spiritual. I think deeply about what Joseph Campbell called “the inner-value, the rapture that is associated with being alive.” Considering the teachings of all religions and ancient myths helps me do that. Many of them can inform us about the experience of living well today.

I replied to Jackie on Monday morning. I wanted to know more about her sermon and what the average person could draw from it—no matter if that person is religious in the sense that the pope is religious, semi-religious, or as atheist as Christopher Hitchens. It wasn’t only Jesus who found upsides for himself and others through doing hard things. The idea that challenge creates positive change is a theme found in all faiths, ancient myths, political movements, and the stories of everyday people like you and me.

“The paradox I want to explore today—one that I feel is not talked about or embraced often enough…,” Jackie said in her sermon, “is that to embody and live (like) Christ also means that sometimes we have to do hard things and embrace the suck.”

Life used to put hard things in our path often. But, as you know if you read The Comfort Crisis, we live in a world where it’s far easier to avoid hard things. We can exist in a bubble where we can avoid physical, mental, and emotional discomforts.

In her sermon, Jackie explained the premise of The Comfort Crisis and how this bubble can cause many problems. She fired off a few ideas from the book and said, “While we don't really do hard things anymore like our ancestors did, we more often experience the notion that ‘life is hard.’ We are so stressed and overburdened all the time. Life expectancy among young people continues to decline due to ‘deaths of despair.’ The answer to this conundrum, I believe, is to embrace doing hard things. Jesus did hard things, and so should we.”

I ran Jackie’s ideas past my friend Tyler Daswick. He’s an editor at National Geographic and the writer of a popular Christian newsletter called DudeNotes (it’s currently on hiatus as Tyler takes over more duties at National Geographic).

He explained, “A lot of creepy old men on TV have painted Christianity as a one-way ticket to private jets and dinners with celebrities, but the historical Jesus of Nazareth lived a deeply uncomfortable life. In fact, he taught his followers they could expectdiscomfort if they lived as he did. Jesus wasn't walking hard roads for bragging rights or even self-actualization; he was working to bring compassion, healing, and dignity to marginalized people. Jesus said he ‘came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Matthew 20:28). He truly sought to relinquish his comfort for others.”

So, like, WWJD? Heading into Easter weekend, here are four lessons we can learn from him and other stories embedded in religion and mythology.

Do What Terrifies You

Jackie told her congregation, “As a therapist for over 30 years, I’ve heard many sad things. Tragedies, more trauma than you can imagine, and untold stories of the horrors of what we human beings are capable of inflicting on one another.”’

But a quieter, more insidious sad story she hears revolves around fear. “I hear over and over again the stories of talented, brilliant, loving, creative, inspiring people not fulfilling their calling for one reason: They’re afraid of what people will think of them. Or afraid to fail. Or that they’ll be laughed at in some way.”

The story of the Agony in the Garden tells us that progress comes from confronting our great fears. It’s the final night of Jesus’ life. He knows he’ll be betrayed and tortured to death the next day—and he’s terrified of what’s to come.

But he prayed and acted, accepting his God’s will so that he could help others, Jackie said. You don't necessarily have to pray, but getting over fear will require action. Or else you'll stay paralyzed by it.

This same idea is embedded in Islam and Buddhism. The Prophet Mohammed told his followers to always trust Allah despite fear. Fear was one of the three temptations the Buddha had to overcome to become enlightened.

Science backs the idea that facing fear is a good thing. Research consistently shows that “exposure therapy,” where we slowly ramp up exposure to what we’re afraid of, is arguably the most effective way to overcome fear, PTSD, and anxiety.

Live Simply

Tyler explained, and I’ll let him take it away here because he’s a wonderful writer:

"In his most famous speech, Jesus said: ‘Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ... But seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you’ (Matthew 6:31-33). When we worry about protecting ourselves, we lose sight of how we can serve others. Jesus and his disciples left behind homes, careers, and sometimes their families to teach and heal the sick. They had no permanent home; Jesus himself was driven from his hometown. Once, the disciples grew so hungry on the road that they ate grainheads straight from a nearby field (Matthew 12). But they never starved, and the gospels claim that before Jesus died, he had personally fed and healed thousands of needy people. Simple living kept him open-handed."

Modern life is great, but it’s not simple. The average home contains more than 10,000 things. Americans throw away 1/3 of the food we produce. Schedules are more packed than ever. We consume nearly 11 to 13 hours of digital media each day.

An easy win: Instead of going all Marie Kondo and purging your stuff, learn to exercise pause before your next Amazon Prime purchase. If you realize you don’t really need the item, maybe donate half of its cost to a charity of your choice.

The longevity researcher Alex Bishop told me that people who spend more time serving others tend to live longer and register higher happiness levels.

Speak Truth to Power

“We could cite dozens if not hundreds of examples of Jesus speaking truth to power,” Jackie said in her sermon. For example, in Matthew 23, Jesus calls out the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and mistreatment of people.

“And we can look at contemporary examples of this today as well,” Jackie said. “Malala Yousafzai continues to speak out against the Taliban in support of girls' education and women's rights, despite surviving an assassination attempt in 2012. Or Colin Kaepernick, who sacrificed his career as an NFL quarterback when he took a knee during the national anthem and spoke out about police brutality and systemic racism against Black Americans.”

Positive change is difficult. But most change doesn't come from epic struggles. Inciting even a little growth—for example, having a tough conversation with a loved one, confronting a work superior about an injustice in the office, and more—is hard.

“Yet too often I hear from my clients or friends, or I feel myself ‘I better not say that,’ or ‘I don't want to upset them,’ or ‘What will they think of me?’” Jackie said in her sermon. See point one: Embrace fear and act.

This doesn’t mean we should all pick fights over everything we disagree with. Winning the larger war comes from figuring out which battles are worth fighting. My friend Melissa Urban wrote a fantastic guidebook of tactics for these difficult conversations, called The Book of Boundaries.

Embrace Solitude

Here’s Tyler again:

“Jesus' most rugged trial might be his 40-day wilderness fast. The gospels of Matthew and Luke say he went alone into the wilderness and ate nothing for 40 days and 40 nights (the Bible loves counting nights, too, as if we were concerned Jesus was sneaking a cheat meal at 11pm)—the gospel of Mark even says Jesus ‘was with the wild animals’ (Mark 1:13). Pretty gnarly. Jesus fasted and often prayed in solitude to focus on serving, even when people were clamoring for his attention: ‘Great crowds gathered to hear him...but he would withdraw to lonely places and pray’ (Luke 5:15-16). Solitude helped Jesus stay dedicated, focused, and attentive.”

Spending time alone outdoors is a classic narrative. Joseph Campbell points out that the Buddha gained enlightenment after retreating under the Bodhi tree for 49 days. Moses hiked to the top of a mountain alone to get the tables of the law. Every Greek city was founded by heroes who went off on solo quests.

This wild solitude isn’t easy. But it’s where we come to the center of our own existence and emerge back into society better for it. It’s why I do an extended solo, silent ruck or run in the Mojave desert near my home every Sunday.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

We’re overthinking sports nutrition and it might be creating more problems than it solves.

Why it matters: Following these guidelines will help you hit your performance goals faster.

Onto today’s topic: The world of sports nutrition is filled with all sorts of complicated, research-backed eating schemes and formulas. They tell us how much and precisely what we should eat before, during, and after our workouts.

This rabbit hole of sports nutrition leads nowhere for most people.

That’s because many sports nutrition studies are conducted on high-level athletes doing intense exercise. For example, scientists might test college track and field athletes running marathons in two hours and thirty minutes. Or D-1 soccer or football players doing two-a-day practices all summer. 

The lessons from those studies don’t necessarily apply to the average person. That is to say, us if we’re going for a longer hike or ruck on Sunday, a jog during the week, or lifting weights in our garage. 

This post will cover practical approaches to sports nutrition:

• How to know if you’re eating too much or too little for your workouts

• How to eat if you’re trying to exercise and lose weight

• How to eat for casual outdoor workouts (for example, rucking, hiking, jogging)

• How to eat for strength training

• How to eat for long, intense endurance workouts like a marathon

• How to eat for ultra-endurance events 

To understand these topics, I called Dr. Trevor Kashey. He founded Trevor Kashey Nutrition, and you’ll know and love him if you read my book, The Comfort Crisis. I’ve worked with him for years.

Dr. Kashey is qualified to lead us through these ideas for two reasons.

1. He has a Ph.D. in biochemistry with an emphasis on cellular energy transduction. He spent a decade in labs studying how energy moves through living things, a foundation not only for understanding human nutrition and athletic performance but also the basis of life itself.

2. He’s not just a lab dork. Dr. Kashey helped one country win 14 gold medals at the 2016 Olympic Games. He’s also helped bodybuilders and ultra-runners win championships. More importantly, he’s worked with thousands of regular, active people and seen what helps people reach their goals.

Let’s dive in.

How to know if you’re eating too much—or too little—for your workouts

In short

Tracking changes in your bodyweight across longer time scales, like a month, is more beneficial that trying to figure out how many calories your workout burns.

The details

Sports nutritionists have been trying to figure out the perfect formula that tells us exactly how many calories we burn while exercising. The idea is that by knowing exactly how many calories we burn, we’ll be able to determine exactly how many we have to replace during the workout. 

For example, here’s a formula from the textbook Bicycling Science, 4th Edition:

 [(Age x 0.074) — (Weight x 0.05741) + (Heart Rate x 0.4472) — 20.4022] x Time / 4.184

But, by the way, the above formula is only for women. If you’re a man, here’s the formula:

[(Age x 0.2017) — (Weight x 0.09036) + (Heart Rate x 0.6309) — 55.0969] x Time / 4.184

Got it? I don’t either!

“I’ve found these intra-workout calculators bogus for the general population because most people don’t know how much they eat outside of the workout. So for most people, trying to eat a bunch of food around a workout will only lead them to gain weight,” Dr. Kashey explained. “And with professional endurance athletes, you just give them as many calories as you can leading up to and during the race until digestion limits them. Basically, these athletes get limited by how much they can consume until their stomach goes bad or they vomit it up.”

There’s an easier way for the rest of us. It’s also the method Dr. Kashey used when working with the Olympic team.

Track your bodyweight. 

Most people track their weight in 24-hour timescales. Like, weighing more today than you did yesterday means you “gained” weight. But bodyweight fluctuates daily for all sorts of reasons. 

You’ll get a clearer picture if you track changes over longer time scales. Like a month.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Wake up and pee.

2. Weigh yourself.

3. Do this daily and write down that number.

4. Notice if the numbers are trending upward, downward, or staying put.

If after one month … 

… your weight has trended upward

You’re overeating.

If you’re counting calories, drop your calories by 1400 across a week. If you’re not counting calories, figure out a way to eat slightly less across a week. Maybe skip breakfast two days a week (just make sure not to make up for it with bigger meals later.) Conversely, if you wanted to gain weight, keep doing what you’re doing.

… your weight has trended downward

If your goal is weight loss, great. Don’t change anything. 

If you want to improve your fitness or maintain your weight, eat slightly more food. Start with the equivalent of about 100 calories a day.

… your weight has stayed the same

If you wanted to lose weight, see the advice in “trended upward” above.

If you wanted to stay the same weight, keep doing what you’re doing. 

If you wanted to gain weight, follow the advice in “trended downward” above.

How to eat if you’re trying to exercise and lose weight

In short

Eat fewer calories than you burn. Eating slightly more food on days you exercise and slightly less on the days you don’t exercise may give you an advantage.

The details

Eating fewer calories than you burn is how you lose weight. Exercise can help create that deficit. But your exercise performance can also suffer if you’re eating too little around when you exercise.

• For this reason, it’s ideal to eat slightly more food before your exercise sessions. To remain in a deficit, you’ll then need to eat slightly less on the days you don’t exercise.

Practically, this might mean that you eat a smaller lunch the day you aren’t exercising and a larger lunch the day before your afternoon workout.

Here’s a more detailed example: Let’s say you were eating an average of 2,000 calories a day to lose weight. Recall what Dr. Kashey said about thinking in longer time scales. Eating an average of 2,000 calories a day equates to about 14,000 calories a week. 

If you exercise four days a week, you’d eat roughly 2,200 calories on your exercise days, with those “extra” calories jammed in before your workout. Then you’d eat between 1,700 and 1,800 on your rest days. It still equates to 14,000 calories a week.

“But by doing this, you can maintain or even improve performance as you lose weight,” said Dr. Kashey. And if your fitness increases, your body weight and health will trend in a better direction.

How to eat for casual outdoor workouts

In short

You probably don’t need to eat anything.

The details

At the REI near my home by Red Rock Canyon, in Las Vegas, there’s a sort of rite of passage that tourists who’ve decided to hike or jog in the desert go through. It’s similar to how the Sherpas of Mount Everest visit a Buddhist monastery to receive a blessing before climbing the mountain, but much more American.

Tourists pilgrimage to REI and buy an arsenal of $7 hippy granola energy bars and $3 energy goo packets. On their hikes, which are typically just a few miles, they consume all of these items “for energy.”

It’s a certifiable *thing* to bring hippy snacks on hikes, no matter the distance. But you probably shouldn’t do this unless your goal is to gain weight. “For the vast majority of people, trying to replace the calories you eat in a workout usually just makes you overeat for the day,” said Dr. Kashey. 

Activities like hiking, rucking, and casual runs and bike rides aren’t so intense that your body needs extra fuel. It has plenty on board, stored in your liver and muscles from your last meal and tacked onto your frame as fat.

“If someone is trying to lose or maintain weight,” said Kashey, “I ask them if they feel OK making their other meals smaller so they can drink sugar water or goo on a hike or jog. That question tends to put it into perspective for people.”

There are basically two good reasons you’d need to eat or drink calories during outdoor exercise:

1. You’re exercising intensely have a high heart rate for more than 90 minutes. Think a trail race. (More on what to do in that situation below.)

2. You’re spending four or more hours hiking or rucking. Then you might need food, simply because you’ll get hungry.

How to eat for strength training

In short

Weightlifting burns fewer calories than you might think. Eat enough protein.

The details

Strength training isn’t a great calorie burner. Think about it:

• Most weight training only has you “working” for, say, 10-20 sets that last 30 seconds each. That’s just five to ten minutes of actual work.

The average person might burn 200 to 300 calories during an hour-long weightlifting session.

You may have heard about the “after burn” effect. It suggests your body burns a bunch of calories after weight lifting or interval training it recovers.

• The research suggests the after burn effect is very small and not worth getting worked up over. It’s probably equal to only 30 to 60 calories for the average person. 

But strength training is critical for health and body composition, especially as we age. It can help change your body, so you have a greater ratio of muscle to fat, which works all sorts of magic. 

To lose weight, you must create a calorie deficit through diet and probably exercise. But to maintain or even add muscle as you lose weight, you have to lift weights and eat enough protein.

As scientists at Harvard explained, “Physical activity causes structural damage to muscle fibers, especially when muscles are challenged with multiple repetitions of heavy weights. The body’s repair response involves fusing broken muscle fibers together to form new muscle protein strands, which in turn increases muscle size.”

This repair response requires protein. You’ll be better off eating at least 0.7 grams of protein per pound of your body weight.

This means…

• A 125-pound person would eat at least 90-ish grams

• A 175-pound person would eat at least 125-ish grams

• A 225-pound person would eat at least 160-ish grams

It’s also wise to spread your roughly equal protein across meals. Basically: Don’t have just 5 grams for breakfast, 10 for lunch, and 110 for dinner.

Hitting that protein goal takes conscious effort. This is where protein shakes help. Their magic is that they’re quicker and easier than cooking. You’ll probably hit your protein number if you drink a shake. I usually drink one when I weight train (more on that below).

If you’re doing 2+ hour intense workouts

In short

For lengthy, intense exercise (going hard for more than 90 minutes, like in a marathon), sugar and electrolytes are ideal.

The details

Intense exercise requires adequate energy stored in your liver and muscle. Hence, it helps to eat before and maybe even during a workout, depending on how long the workout is. (It’s not really necessary to understand how your body uses food as fuel, but here’s a brief primer if you’re interested.)

“Eat as much of what you need to eat within two hours of the training session or race,” Dr. Kashey said.

If you’re training long enough to burn through the energy your body stores (this usually takes 90-120 minutes of hard exercise), eat or drink something during your workout.

Follow these four rules to determine what to eat before and during an intense training session,

1. It should be easy on your stomach.

2. It should have the ideal nutrients for the activity.

3. It should taste good. 

4. You should eat it before you’re tired

Let’s unpack the rules:

1. It should be easy on your stomach.

This one is simple. It doesn’t matter how perfectly formulated a food is. It’s a miss if it upsets your stomach while you exercise.

Why it matters: Exercise increases the odds of GI issues (more on why below). GI problems are the number one reason runners drop out of running races, and it all tracks back to what the runner ate.

2. It should have the right nutrients for the activity

Some types of foods—or, instead, mixes of carbs, protein, and fats—fuel your workout and help you recover better. The wrong type of food can do the opposite.

At worst, the wrong foods cause problems. 

3. It should taste good.

Simple: If you don’t enjoy eating or drinking it, you’re less likely to eat or drink it. And if you don’t eat or drink it, it’s useless.

4. You should eat or drink it before you’re tired 

Research suggests you shouldn’t wait until you’re bonking to eat or drink. Remember that the food or drink takes a while to digest. So you should probably begin ingesting something about 45 minutes into a long, intense effort like a marathon.

What to eat

Sports nutrition researchers and the US military have studied this for decades. They’ve concluded that processed carbs like sugar paired with electrolytes are best for powering and sustaining intense cardio exercise.

Sugar has become a devil in the nutrition world. And, yeah, we probably shouldn’t pound sugar when we’re sitting around or on a casual hike or ruck.

But long, intense exercise is different. Your body demands more fuel and oftentimes can’t create it fast enough through burning your stored fat.

You can think of sugar and other highly processed carbs as a “ready-to-go” exercise fuel.

“When you exercise hard, your body prioritizes powering your muscles and puts processes like digestion on the back burner. That helps you run fast, but it also gives your gut fewer resources to extract energy from the food inside it,” Dr. Kashey explained.

More-refined carbs have been processed beforehand, so breaking them down is simpler and lower effort compared to unprocessed carbs and fats or proteins.

“If a food doesn’t require much digestion, your body can immediately start to absorb and use the nutrients from it, and that’s going to improve your performance more than anything,” said Dr. Kashey.

Eating stuff that’s processed beforehand saves your stomach from doing work, which can also prevent an upset stomach. This helps you not break that first rule.

This all explains why, for example, Tour De France riders often drink Fanta during their rides.

Also make sure to take in some electrolytes with your sugar.

A military study explained, “Sodium is the primary electrolyte lost in sweat, with potassium, calcium, and magnesium present in smaller amounts.” 

Lose enough water and electrolytes, and your performance will suffer. You might even overheat or cramp.

The military researchers said you don’t need electrolyte supplements (like electrolyte tabs) for short efforts in mild temperatures.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

New studies on female athletes are opening up a world of performance advice.

Why it matters: Sports research has ignored female athletes for decades, but studying women has recently led to breakthroughs for everyone.

In leading academic journals between 2014 and 2020, just 6 percent of studies were conducted exclusively with women. The assumption was that women were basically just small men. 

“When we don’t study women and men in similar proportions, it means that our understanding of sports science is weighted heavily towards men and male bodies. It can distort our understanding of what’s considered ‘normal’ physiology because we don’t have a representative sample. We end up making assumptions about exercise and fitness and how bodies are supposed to adapt and perform based on a partial picture of the human population.”

That’s according to Christine Yu, sports and health journalist and author of Up To Speed, an exceedingly well-researched book about the new science of female fitness and physiology. 

The result is that active women often struggle with unique conditions but leave the doctor’s office hopeless and without answers.

But recently, studies on female athletes are ramping up. And these studies have been revelatory for everyone. 

For example, here’s a cool crossover: When studying female athletes, researchers were surprised to discover that the same behaviors that cause bone and hormonal issues in active women were doing the same in men, tanking their testosterone.

Today we’re six lessons from this new science. 

1. Check your fifth vital sign

In short: Menstrual pain and abnormal cycles are red flags for women. So is low sex drive for men.

The details:

Yu spoke with professional female athletes who experienced irregular menstrual cycles, a common condition. One 20-something athlete missed her period for seven years straight. Her trainers thought this was normal.

“What’s shocking to me is that we don’t teach girls and women about these deeper and larger connections between the cycle, our overall health, and how it can influence exercise and performance. It’s only in recent years that we’ve started talking about the menstrual cycle and period symptoms within the context of athletics and even still, it’s largely a taboo topic,” Yu said. 

The surge of hormones from a monthly period is super healthy. Without it, women are at greater risk for stress fractures and early-onset osteoporosis. 

One study followed a small group of young elite runners and found that those who didn’t menstruate spent more days injured and ran less total mileage compared to their counterparts with a normal cycle. 

This is **critical** because building strong bones today leads to fewer issues in old age. Hip fractures are one of the most significant causes of death among seniors.

Doctors now realize that the menstrual cycle is as important a vital sign as heart rate or blood pressure. They call it the fifth vital sign. Here are some red flags for active women:

• You haven’t had a period in more than three months.

• Your periods are irregular.

• Your workouts are painful during your period.

Yu discovered that irregularities could often be a sign of serious conditions. For example, tennis pro Danielle Collins suffered regular period pain so severe that she was forced to pull out of competitions. It was endometriosis. 

In active men, low sex drive can signify hormonal problems like low testosterone and underlying issues around exercise or chronic disease.

Sometimes these issues have a simple fix. See below. And if that doesn’t work, consider talking to your doctor. 

2. Eat enough

In short: Undereating is common among female and male athletes, and it hurts performance and health.

The details

“Women are subject to so much pressure to look a certain way—generally, thin and lean but not too muscular,” said Yu. “To achieve a certain aesthetic, women often start to restrict food or certain food groups like carbs or train more. But if you don’t feed your body consistently, it’s counterproductive to an active lifestyle.”

The figures on undereating are all over the place. None look great. For example, one study of D-II college female athletes found 25% had disordered eating, 26% had menstrual dysfunction, and 10% had low bone mineral density. 

The figures grow for both men and women in sports where endurance, appearance, or weight classes are important. For example, wrestling, rowing, gymnastics, track, cycling, and others.

• In those sports, as many as a third of male and two-thirds of female athletes exhibited signs of eating disorders.

Take the Olympic women’s rowing team for New Zealand. The team long believed  “lean and fast” led to medals. The idea was that keeping calories low created lighter athletes and faster row times.

The problem: The team wasn’t winning.

Then a new senior performance nutritionist analyzed the team’s data and had them eat more. She also pushed the team’s coaches to change their behavior and language around food. 

The result: The team won four medals. Four.

How to find “enough”

Your body requires anywhere from 1500 to 2000 calories a day just for essential functions like breathing and regulating your body temperature. 

If you want to do more than exist—like, say, dominate everyone at the Olympics or your next local 10K—you’ll need to eat more than a baseline amount of food. 

And beyond improving fitness, eating enough promotes cardiovascular health, bone health, immunity, gut health, mental health, recovery, and injury prevention.

“In particular, women’s bodies appear to need a steady supply of carbohydrates, which may explain why women tend to perform worse while on a low-carb diet or when fasting,” said Yu. 

Look for signs that you’re undereating:

• For women: you haven’t had a period in a few months. 

• For men: low sex drive. Research shows undereating while being highly active leads to lower testosterone levels.

For women, eating enough often promotes menstrual and hormonal health.

There’s likely no “perfect” amount of food. But a general rule is to eat as much as possible until you begin to gain unwanted weight. 

An important tip: If you’re currently undereating, don’t just start pounding food. That big jump in food can often lead to fat gain (this is something Layne Norton, PhD, has explained in depth.)

Do this:

1. Determine how much you’re eating, then slowly ramp up your calories. Add, say, 50 more calories every day for one week. Weigh yourself along the way.

2. Next week add 50 more every day for a week. Continue weighing yourself.

3. Continue that process until you begin to see your weight creep up across the week. Note that having your weight jump up and down day-to-day is totally normal. You’re looking for trends.

3. Alter your exercise to age gracefully

In short: Different phases of life may benefit from different kinds of exercise.

The details

For women, “During the menopause transition, your fitness can feel like it falls off a cliff and the body doesn’t respond to training the same way it did in your twenties and thirties. It’s not in your head,” Yu said. “Your body might need a different stimulus, like lifting heavier weights or incorporating some high-intensity sessions.”

Advice for men and women over 45

We recently spoke with Stu Phillips, PhD, one of the world’s foremost researchers on exercise, nutrition, and aging. He told us, “I am convinced that as we age, aerobic capacity begins to take a back seat to strength as an important predictor of morbidity and mortality risk!”

• Women, as long as you move well, consider doing a variation of the classic 5x5 strength program. You could do the standard version or swap in variations of exercise that feel best to you. 

• Men, lifting weights after 45 may be more important than lifting weights in your younger years. 

Advice for men and women under 45

Get enough cardio.

This is particularly important for men, who often count lifting weights faster as “cardio.” Getting true aerobic exercise like rucking or running before age 45 sets you up for better heart health later on.

Why it matters: Statistically speaking, heart disease is most likely to kill you. And it’s often totally preventable by not living like a dipshit. 

4. Be versatile

In short: Doing just one sport or exercise has downsides. Do lots of stuff. (Parents, make sure your kids do this, too.)

The details

“51 percent of young female athletes walk away from sport by age 17,” said Yu. 

This is often driven by a young athlete choosing one sport and trying to become the best at it (usually because their parents see sports as a ticket to a scholarship). 

But for the kid, the sport begins to feel like a crappy job rather than a fun game (which … please remember that sports are games).

A fascinating paper titled “What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization, Predicts World-Class Performance” reveals the ideal path to becoming a killer athlete. Its lessons don’t just apply to young adults.

The researchers discovered that world-class athletes:

• Started their primary sport later in life

• Played multiple sports

• Stayed active in a variety of ways 

• Initially progressed more slowly than their peers 

For example, Steph Curry played baseball, football, and soccer. Alex Morgan did gymnastics until she joined club soccer at 14. (Note: There are, obviously, athletes who specialized early in life and became champions. Like Tiger Woods. But, on balance, most great athletes did not specialize … David Epstein’s book Range covers this more.)

Why it matters

The worst thing is not exercising. But the second worst thing is doing the same exercise over and over and over. 

Doing a bunch of different types of exercises and activities makes you more resilient, less likely to experience injuries, and improves aging. It also allows you to jump in on any fun activity or sport that comes your way.

5. Use better gear

In short: A new wave of gear companies are researching what makes gear better for women. The upshot: It’s helped them design better gear for men as well. 

The details

It wasn’t just scientists who assumed women were just small men. It was also brands that created gear. Yu refers to this as the “shrink it and pink it” phenomenon.

“It wasn’t until 2019, in advance of the Women’s World Cup, that Nike unveiled soccer uniforms specifically designed for women...The jersey has a longer sleeve to minimize exposure of the upper arm. The neckline is a cross between a crew and a V-neck so athletes can easily pull it over a ponytail,” Yu writes in her book. 

These might seem like minuscule tweaks, but Yu cites serious stories from athletes who were hospitalized from an ill-fitting bike saddle, suffered pain from a maternity sports bra gone wrong, or peeled off shoes that left feet blistered and toenails black.

When brands poke their heads out to experiment with clothing and gear that works for women, it helps them see the variety of body types and preferences in the market. 

The takeaway

Find gear that works for your body type. Women, know that this may take a bit more effort. 

Here are some brands picked by Yu and 2% that think deeply about women’s products:

• Oiselle makes women’s-specific shorts, running capris, and tops

• Brooks revolutionized sports bras (“They’re a company that has been very intentional about studying breast biomechanics during the design and development process,” Yu says)

• Kuhl and Alpine Parrot make great hiking pants for women

• Momentus, a sponsor of 2%, offers a performance supplement line for women. It was created in collaboration with Dr. Stacy Sims.

• LIV makes women-specific bikes. Their Avail Ar 3 was rated the best bike for women by Bicycling Magazine.

• GORUCK’s Rucker 4.0 20-liter size is designed with women in mind.

6. Watch more TV (we can’t believe we just said that)

In short: You can push female-focused research forward—for free—by watching more female sports.

The details

Funding is a key reason there are so few studies on female athletes. 

“Scientific studies are expensive to coordinate and run. Researchers rely on grants from agencies like the National Institutes of Health, organizations like the NCAA or the NFL, and private companies like Gatorade,” Yu says. 

For the uber-passionate, donate to the VOICE IN SPORT Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing equity in sports science research.

The next best thing you can do is watch women’s sports on TV. Sports television contracts are worth big money. The more viewers, the bigger the contracts, and the more money trickles into sports research.

“Watch the women’s games. Support the women’s game. Read about the women’s game,” Yu said.

Recent reports have discovered that leagues like the NCAA and the NWSL vastly undervalued and underfunded women’s sports. For example, this year’s NCAA Division I women’s basketball national championship was bonkers. LSU clinched their first-ever championship against Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, a record-breaking college junior. There were player rivalries! Unforgettable outfits! 

Or there’s the UFC. The women’s division fights are often the best of the cards. Just watch Amanda Nunes’ highlight reel.

(And, by the way, go Aces—the first team to bring my hometown of Las Vegas a professional championship.)

Thanks for reading. Have fun, don’t die, be fit no matter who you are.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

New research shows changing your phone to grayscale makes your phone less interesting. Why it matters: Boring screens get used less.

We use our smartphones too much. Everyone knows it. Everyone wishes their screen time was lower (the average American spends three to four hours a day on their phone). 

As a solution, we’re given a million different tactics to reduce our screen time. They range from common sense, like keeping the phone in another room, to insane, like locking it in a safe. 

We sometimes make excuses when we realize how much time we spend on our phones. Like, “it’s for work.” But research shows most phone pickups have nothing to do with a notification, like getting an email alert. 

We’re most likely to grab our phones to distract ourselves. We’re looking for stimulation. An escape from boredom or stress. For example, yes, email is essential for work. But do you really need to check your email every five minutes? Probably not.

Because once you’ve checked your email, you’ll start checking all kinds of other distracting apps.

You’ll find yourself on TikTok or Instagram. Or shopping on Amazon Prime or some app called Temu, which is apparently Amazon Prime shopping on a crystal methamphetamine binge.

And these distractions have consequences. For example, on Monday, the Surgeon General released a 25-page advisory warning about the harms of social media on young people. “There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents,” he wrote. 

But it’s of course not just kids. Distracting apps stress adults too. And they vaporize our time, our most precious resource, without us realizing it. No one will look back on their life and wish they’d spent more time flicking through Tweets and TikTok videos.

A science-backed solution

I spoke to Dr. Trevor Kashey, who’s spent the last few years steeped in behavioral science for his practice. He recently had an aha moment while researching how our environment drives our behavior. 

“Colors stimulate behavior,” he explained. “Fewer colors stimulate fewer behaviors.”This might seem weird, but think about it:

• Red apple: Eat it.

• Grey apple: Don’t eat it.

• Green light: Go

• Red light: Stop

And certain colors are more likely to drive behavior than others. Research going back to the 1950s shows that people find brighter colors more stimulating and pleasurable.This is why, for example, slot machines have all sorts of colors and blinking fancy lights. As do Instagram and TikTok and Amazon, and every other app.

Why it matters: “The stuff we see affects what we do,” said Dr. Kashey. “Change what we see, change what we do.”

His aha moment was that changing his phone screen to grayscale would … change what he saw and change what he did. He changed his phone screen to grayscale. As a result, he spent less time on his phone.

I hadn’t heard of this tactic. But it turns out it’s a thing. There’s research behind Dr. Kashey’s scientific intuitive leap.

The new science of grayscale

Dialing back your screen to greyscale effectively makes your screen more boring. As a study in The Social Science Journal put it: 

“When individuals look at grayscale digital displays, their attentional system does not process as stimulating of content compared to when they look at colored displays and do not receive the same gratification as a result.”

Those scientists took 161 participants. Roughly half turned their phone to grayscale and kept it that way for about a week. The other half kept their phone in color mode.

The result:

• The group who turned their phone to grayscale dropped their phone use by roughly 40 minutes. 

• They went from a daily average of 255 minutes down to 217 minutes.

Meantime, the control group saw their screen time climb by 15 minutes.

By random chance, the groups started with different levels of screen time. But the grayscale group saw a massive drop while the control group used their phone more.

The phones became less gratifying and stimulating with color removed from the screen. The slot machine went dark.

The downside, of course, is that darkening your personal slot machine is a bummer. For example, in the study, 20 participants assigned to the grayscale group cheated and turned their phones back to color just a couple of days in. They couldn’t handle it. 

Those who stuck it out said the following:

• “My phone definitely was not as interested in it as usual.”

• “Grayscale made my phone boring to use.”

• “It was very boring, and I didn’t want to be on my phone. There was nothing interesting to look at.”

• “It was really weird not having any colors at all, and at times I would get upset that I had no colors even though I knew there should be colors there. It was hard for me.”

• (Editor’s note: This one is the best) “Very annoying.”

But many adapted to the grayscale and discovered that their life improved. Those participants said:

• “It was kinda odd at first, but honestly didn’t bother me as much.”

• “I considered it a relief from all the color all the time, it was not too bad for me.”

• “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, I got used to it after a few days.”

The same researcher conducted a follow-up study. Knowing that excess screen time is linked to anxiety, he wanted to see if people would be less anxious after using grayscale. The finding:

• “Participants who had their phones in grayscale exhibited a significant decrease in problematic smartphone use, anxiety, and screen time.”

How to turn your phone to grayscale

Naturally, Apple has buried the grayscale setting deep in the bowels of your iPhone.

You go to: Setting —> Accessibility —> Display & Text Size — Color Filters —> Switch to On and click Grayscale

Note that the video doesn’t show the screen transitioning to gray. This is because Apple doesn’t record screen grab videos in grayscale. Your screen will go to gray once you hit the final tab and click “grayscale.” Here’s steps for you Android users.

Have fun, don’t die, and enjoy the gray.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Sleep is tainted with misinformation, and it’s driving up sleep anxiety. We dove into deep research on sleep and discovered the surprising truth about six common myths.

Why it matters: Evolution programmed us to all sleep differently (it was a survival mechanism). Understanding the nuances of sleep can help you figure out what’s good and bad about your sleep habits. The result: you’ll rest easier.

In brief

A lack of sleep leads to all kinds of physical and mental health problems. But as we’ve realized how important sleep is, we’ve begun making all sorts of hyper-specific recommendations around it. Many of those recommendations, however, are wrong—and doing more harm than good.

The details

If humans don’t sleep enough, we turn into unhealthy, insane idiots.

Consider the curious case of Randy Gardner. In 1963, Gardner was 17 and needed a high school science fair project. So he decided to see how long he could go without sleeping.  

Researchers testing Randy Gardner’s sense of smell during the (no) sleep experiment

Word got out. And once he’d made it three days without sleep, a scientist from Stanford named William Dement saw an opportunity. Dement observed Gardner for what became the longest period a human has ever gone without sleeping: 11 days and 24 minutes. 

Of course, Gardner paid for it. By day four, his concentration and short-term memory plummeted. For example, Dement would give Gardner mental tasks, like subtracting from 100. But Gardner would stop midway through.

When asked why he stopped, Gardner couldn’t remember that he’d even started. “It was almost like an early Alzheimer’s thing brought on by a lack of sleep,” Gardner told NPR.

Along the way, he became paranoid and began hallucinating. He went from a gregarious, outgoing teen to straight dickish. “The longer I stayed awake, the more irritable I got,” said Gardner. “I had a very short fuse. I was a brat.”

Other research suggests his body paid the price. Lack of sleep is associated with all kinds of poor health outcomes. 

• People who get less than five hours a night have a higher risk of heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, and weight gain.

• This is why, for example, heart attack incidents in the U.S. rise 25 percent the day after we lose an hour of sleep to daylight savings time.

But as we’ve learned how vital sleep is to keep humans physically and mentally well, we’ve begun to push sleep into the common trap we do with all good behaviors. We started making hyper-specific recommendations around it. 

Suppose you were to ask someone about sleep and sleeping better. They’d probably fire off a series of rules perfect sleep requires: you must sleep a certain amount of time at a certain temperature inside a room designed to mimic a black hole. 

• But sleep doesn’t follow rules. Like all of biology, it falls into ranges. Your sleep is your sleep. It’s individual. What works for one person may not work for another.

• This means cut-and-dried rules around sleep often leave people high and dry. Or anxious that they’re doing something wrong, leading them to make all sorts of changes and purchases to fix a problem that may not exist. 

So let’s dive into six big sleep myths.

Wednesday’s post will reveal a guide to help you figure out if you’re sleeping enough and some tactics to help you sleep better if you think you’re lacking.

Myth 1: Eight hours of sleep is best

In brief

There’s no strong evidence that eight hours is best. Most people sleep seven hours and, in fact, sleeping 7-ish nightly hours was associated with the lowest risk of death.

The details

Eight hours a night is the oldest myth in the book. 

Researchers in the Anthropology department at Harvard analyzed a range of studies on this. Their takeaway: “Most adult Westerners probably average about seven hours a night, a good hour (13 percent) less than the eight hours we supposedly need.” 

And the amount of sleep the average person gets changes depending on their age and the season. For example, Westerners sleep an average of 6.5 hours in the summer and 7.5 hours in the winter.

Of course, many Westerners are unhealthy. So you might think our lack of health is due to getting less than eight hours. People often point out that our sleep is disturbed by technology like TVs, smartphones, alarm clocks, etc. 

But in 2015, scientists at UCLA put sleep trackers on people from three different pre-industrial tribes from Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia. None of these tribes have electricity or smartphones, and all three of these tribes don’t seem to get the chronic diseases that kill most Westerners, like heart disease.

The scientists assumed that without electronics keeping them awake, the tribe members would sleep eight solid hours. And that would be one explanation for their great metabolic health.

Nope. They found the tribe members averaged between 5.7 and 7.1 hours a night. That’s less than us. Like us, they slept less in the warm summer months (5.7 to 6.5 hours/night) and more in the winter months (6.6 to 7.1 hours/night).

Scientists first realized that eight hours was probably a myth in 2002. That’s when researchers analyzed health and sleep data from one million Americans. They found that people who slept eight hours had 12 percent higher death rates than people who slept 6.5 to 7. The study was controversial since the sleep data was self-reported.

But the research has been piling up ever since. It suggests people who sleep seven-ish hours a night have the lowest risk of all-cause mortality. What’s more, it actually seems bad to get more than eight hours. 

Relative risk of all-cause mortality and nighttime sleep duration

As the same Harvard anthropologists put it:

“(Westerners) who sleep about seven hours tend to live longer than those who sleep more or less. In no study is eight hours optimal, and in most of the studies people who got more than seven hours had shorter life spans than those who got less than seven hours (an unresolved issue, however, is whether it would be beneficial for long sleepers to reduce their sleep time.)”

If you regularly sleep eight or even nine hours, don’t freak out. The are many factors at play here. The point is, rather, eight hours isn’t magic. Wednesday’s post will reveal a questionnaire that’ll help you figure out if your sleep times are working for you.

Myth 2: Light and sound will ruin your sleep

In short

Some people sleep better in darkness and silence. Others benefit from some light and noise, like having a TV on in the background. If early humans couldn’t sleep without disturbances, we would have never slept.

The details

I spent some time in the Bolivian Amazon with one of the tribes in that UCLA study for my forthcoming book, Scarcity Brain. 

They put me up in a thatched hut, and I slept on a small “bed” of elevated boards. I could see light through the stick walls—a campfire in the distance, the moon showing brightly on the surrounding jungle. And the noise was, well … babies crying, dogs barking, bugs buzzing, people talking, birds squawking, the jungle emitting a wall of jungle sounds.

It was chaos. But this sort of bedtime bedlam has likely been the norm throughout history. Us modern people—with our blacked-out, temperature-controlled, near-silent rooms, and plush beds—are probably the weird ones.

That’s the conclusion of Carol Worthman, anyway. She’s one of the great anthropologists of our time and the world’s foremost expert studying how different cultures sleep and how humans likely slept across our evolution. Her takeaways:

• Sleep has been a dangerous activity throughout most of history. It’s when we’re most vulnerable to predators. 

• To avoid danger, humans would sleep together around a fire. The light from the fire and sound of others talking, babies crying, and more may actually signal to our brain that it is safe to fall asleep. 

Still today, some noise and light help many people nod off. Consider my wife. She likes to fall asleep with the TV on—it helps her sleep better. This makes sense, given Worthman’s findings.

Worthman also shows that people can adapt to sleeping in light and sound. If we couldn’t sleep at all with sound around us, even some loud sounds, densely packed cities wouldn’t exist.

Obviously you can’t have an air raid siren going off and a strobe light in front of your face all night.

But the lesson here is to figure out what environment you sleep best in. Experiment—and don’t try to force darkness and silence if it’s not helping you.

Myth 3: Sleeping pills will help you

In short

Research suggests sleeping pills work by placebo and have clear health harms. One scientist believes we’ll eventually view prescription sleeping pills like we do cigarettes.

The details

As far back as the 1970s, a researcher named Daniel Kripke noticed that people who took sleeping pills had a greater mortality rate than those who didn’t. But it was a chicken and egg problem. Was their lack of sleep hurting them, or was it the pills?

Kripke has been looking into prescription sleeping pills ever since. In a massive 2010 study, he found taking sleeping pills “was associated with greater than threefold increased hazards of death …  in 2010, hypnotics may have been associated with 320,000 to 507,000 excess deaths in the USA alone.”

The study was observational; the researcher didn’t say sleeping pills directly caused these deaths. But he did write, “The consistency of our estimates across a spectrum of health and disease suggests that the mortality effect of (sleeping pills) was substantial. Even 10,000 yearly excess deaths caused by hypnotics would be too many.”

Funny enough, sleeping pills seem to work mainly by placebo effect. That’s according to a 2012 study. It found that people prescribed the pills slept the same length as those prescribed a sugar pill. 

When asked why he didn’t do a more stringent randomized controlled trial of sleeping pills, Kripe wrote, “Perhaps for reasons similar to the absence of randomized trials of cigarettes and of skydiving without parachutes.” 

One sleep researcher at UCLA thinks we’ll eventually view prescription sleeping pills like we do cigarettes.

Myth 4: We sleep to rest our bodies

In short

Sleep restores your brain more than your body. Getting a bad night’s sleep hurts some but not all types of athletic performance.

The details

Obviously sleep does rest our bodies, but so does, say, laying on the couch and watching Top Chef. There isn’t strong research suggesting that muscle repair after a big workout is vastly more powerful during sleep versus lounging.

Scientists from Stanford found that a bad night’s sleep can hurt athletic performance. But it depends on what kind of performance. Activities with a strong mental component are hurt most. 

For example, bad sleep doesn’t impair strength because lifting is often a quick, semi-mindless act. Bad sleep does seem to impact accuracy and lead endurance athletes to tap out earlier (this is probably because elite endurance sports are more of a mental than a physical game at the higher levels).

Let’s return to Gardner, the teenager who stayed up for 11+ days. He said, “Physically, I didn’t have any problems. Not walking or throwing the basketball around or playing the pinball games. But the mental part is what went downhill.” 

And so, as the Harvard scientist Daniel Lieberman wrote, “It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to realize that sleep is mostly about the brain.”

There seem to be two ways sleep helps our brain.

1. Sleep helps us learn and remember important things. When we’re awake, our memories seem to go into a sort of short-term bank. Then, when we’re in certain stages of sleep, our brain culls through these memories. It puts the most important memories in long-term storage and deletes the useless ones.

2. Sleep “cleans” our brain. The brain is like an engine that does a lot of work during the day. Engines emit smog—in the case of the brain, this smog is called “metabolites.” 

But because our brain is tightly sealed off, it can’t seem to get rid of these metabolites as it’s up and running while we’re awake.

Picture this like a car running at idle in a garage. But pretend the car’s engine can’t run with the garage door open. So across the day, the engine runs in the closed garage, and smog builds and builds in the brain. Run the engine too long with the garage door closed, and you get a dangerous smog buildup. 

As we sleep, it’s like the engine shuts off and the garage door opens. During certain sleep phases, some areas of our brain expand by 60 percent, which allows the previous day’s metabolites to clear. This also lets in enzymes that repair and rejuvenate receptors in the brain. Sort of like having a mechanic come in to tune the engine while the garage is open and the engine is “off.”

The researchers at Harvard wrote, “For every hour spent awake storing memories and amassing waste, we need approximately fifteen minutes asleep to process those memories and clean up.” Like all specific numbers, the researchers note, it’s an average. Some people need more than fifteen minutes, others less, depending on age.

Myth 5: Waking up in the middle of the night is bad

In short

Many of us seem “programmed” to wake at night. And that’s OK! What’s bad is worrying when you wake up in the middle of the night. That anxiety over lost sleep canimpact your ability to fall back asleep.

The details

Carol Worthman, the anthropologist who studies sleep patterns across cultures, has also discovered that throughout history, it’s been common for different societies to have two phases of sleep. Basically: many people wake up in the middle of the night and chat or even work for an hour or so, then go back to sleep.

Many Westerners, as well as different pre-industrial populations, do this. Importantly, these people don’t seem to be any worse off than people who sleep uninterrupted.

We all have our own sleep patterns, and a 2017 study suggests a very good reason for this.

A researcher from the University of Toronto and one of my friends and colleagues at UNLV, Alyssa Crittenden, tracked the sleeping habits of 33 Hadza hunter-gatherers for 20 days. They found that there were only 18 minutes when all 33 people were asleep simultaneously. That’s not 18 minutes in one night—that’s 18 minutes across 20 nights.

On average, there were usually about eight tribe members awake at any given point in the night. 

This is a normal and beneficial phenomenon. Here’s why we evolved to all have different sleep habits:

• When humans evolved from apes, we stopped living and sleeping in trees and started living and sleeping on the ground.  

• But the ground is much more dangerous—especially when we’re asleep. It’s where lions, hyenas, and snakes skulk around, looking for something to sneak up on and kill. 

• For safety, it’s necessary to always have at least one person awake and keeping watch. So evolution essentially mashed up our sleeping patterns, altering them as we age, so we’d always have someone awake and on watch. Scientists call this “the sentinel hypothesis.”

Another sleep researcher told the BBC that these mid-night wake-ups may have also given us a relaxing time to destress and meditate on our dreams and emotions. 

Hence, we all still sleep differently.

The problem with giving hyper-specific rules around sleep is that it can cause anxiety. “Many people wake up at night and panic (that they’ve woken up),” a neuroscientist at Oxford told the BBC. “I tell them they are experiencing a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”

Myth 6: You must time your sleep cycles to leverage REM sleep

In short

REM sleep still perplexes sleep scientists. We don’t have enough evidence to suggest that trying to time and alter our sleep cycles with sleep devices helps at a population level. (But please continue this if you’re doing it and it helps you.)

The details

You may have heard you should time your REM sleep cycles. 

This appears largely to be a theory invented by people who don’t study sleep. When the world’s top sleep researchers recently met at a conference, they called REM sleep “the proverbial riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” 

If humans couldn’t function unless our sleep cycles were perfectly timed, we’d have all died off. 

Imagine that it’s 200,000 years ago, and we’re asleep. We’re only 47 minutes into our final 90-minute sleep cycle. But then we get woken up by a tiger who has come into our camp because it’s craving human flesh. 

If we couldn’t perform well no matter what point in our sleep cycle we’d woken up, we’d die.

Timing sleep cycles seems to be one more way the rise of hyper-specific health recommendations makes our lives more finicky and anxious rather than better.

If you’re doing this and it helps you, please continue. But do make sure the practice doesn’t become a liability. People who practice specific routines often fall apart when their routine doesn’t go perfectly. Being resilient to change makes you a more versatile and effective human.

There are more myths out there. But those six seem to be the most common.

Thanks for reading this post, which started as something small and grew and grew.

Have fun, don’t die.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Let’s begin this week’s 2 Percent Newsletter with a task. Listen to the sounds around you for 60 seconds. Become aware of the layers of sound—unpeel all the noises around you. Here’s a timer. Stop reading and do this now.

How’d it go? What did you hear?

I had you do that to tell you this: Humans now live in more noise than ever. Scientists at the University of Michigan say that more than 100 million Americans live in noise levels louder than you’d hear standing next to a working washing machine or dishwasher. That’s 70 decibels.

We’ve become so used to living in noise that most of us now find comfort in the constant blare and feel uncomfortable in silence, according to a scientist in Australia.

This is very strange in the grand scheme of time and space. Humans evolved in a noisescape that was relatively silent. Our sounds were from nature. Any loud noises usually signaled trouble – like a roar from a predator or enemy, the booms of a violent storm, or the crash of a rock slide.

Loud = Danger

We evolved to associate loudness with danger. It’s why we still spook at the sound of an unanticipated loud noise.

Our bodies react to loud noises by releasing adrenaline and cortisol, stress hormones that kick on the fight or flight response. These doses of noise-induced stress hormones used to be infrequent but lifesaving.

Today’s jarring background noises can spur the same fight-or-flight response. But the difference is that these noises are nearly constant. This makes our hormones behave like slow-dripping water torture. According to the CDC, constant noise stresses us out.

Marinating in our noise-induced has consequences. In fact, the world’s number one killer, heart disease, isn’t just a consequence of too much food and not enough movement.

Noise = Stress = Sickness

The World Health Organization found that our exposure to a constant stream of decibels may be taking years off of our lives.

Too much noise was directly responsible for nearly 2,000 heart attack deaths in Europe. This is because noise pollution can elevate stress levels, leading to heart disease. Another study found that every 5-decibel increase in average noise exposure was associated with a 34 percent increase in heart attacks and strokes.

Noise pollution can also impact our mental health. Other research shows anti-anxiety medication use rises a relative 28 percent for every 10-decibel increase a neighborhood experiences. People who live near loud roads are 25 percent more likely to be depressed.

Even more studies show background noise impairs our attention, memory, learning, and interactions with others.

This is a complicated topic with many variables. For example, people who live in a lot of noise may also live in more air pollution, exercise less, have fewer financial and medical resources, and on and on. But loudness, the researchers all believe, plays some role in their poor health outcomes.

Silence = Relaxation = Wellness

Silence is worth seeking, even if it’s uncomfortable at first (and hard to find … there are only 12 places in the Lower 48 where you can sit for 15 minutes and not hear a single noise created by humans).

We know that seeking the everyday silence that comes from shutting off devices can benefit our brains and bodies.

Scientists found that two hours of the type of quiet we can find at home produces more cells in an area of the brain that fights depression. (Perhaps wear earplugs or noise canceling headphones, if you live in a city and want to try this.)

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 heart and breathing rate compared to a handful of other relaxation techniques.

Yes, silence is more relaxing than most “relaxing” products marketers try to sell us.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

I recently posted a thought on social media that drew a lot of love—and some pushback. I wrote:

“Morning routines are a distraction.”

I’ve appeared on many podcasts since the release of The Comfort Crisis. They’re all fun, and I enjoy every conversation.

The question I’m asked most often that isn’t directly related to my work is, “what’s your morning routine?”

I found it strange that I was getting this question so often—until I learned that morning routines are having a moment. The idea is that a well-choreographed morning routine is the secret to success in (insert anything). As one popular podcaster said, “a correctly scripted series of steps in the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day dictates whether you’ll have an optimal day.”

Morning routines first became popular among self-optimization gurus. Now Google searches for “morning routine” are up 600 percent. Major media outlets ranging from the New York Times to CNN to Self are running stories on constructing the perfect morning routine and delving into celebrity morning routines. TikTok videos tagged with #morningroutine have been viewed around 15 billion times.

We’re not talking about common morning behaviors, like brushing teeth and eating breakfast. These routines are filled with complicated wellness- and- productivity-related hacks. It can sometimes feel like a Saturday Night Live Stefan skit, with online influencers telling us our morning routine should have “... everything. 4 a.m. wakeups. Twenty minutes of meditation. Gratitude journaling. No phones. Athletic Greens. Cold plunge. Fifteen minutes of sunlight exposure. Breathwork. Butter coffee but only after 90 minutes of being awake. Zone 2 cardio …”

Routines, first of all, are just a sequence of actions we regularly do in a given environment. Whether we plan them or not, we all have routines because routines provide structure and predictability. A good routine should improve our focus and ability to reach a larger goal. A bad one leads to distraction and procrastination.

So the idea of designing a morning routine is good: it’s a conscious effort to clear the runway to reach our biggest goals.

But the more I’ve looked at the rise of complicated morning routines, the more I wonder if we’re straying away from that intent. I worry that, instead of clearing the runway, we’re actually putting barriers on it.

Why #morningroutines Are Popular

Carl Cederstrom, a professor at Stockholm University who studies the wellness industry, attributes the rise of morning routines to two phenomena happening at once. First, self-optimization became popular. “We live in a time that is hugely obsessed with success and finding hacks to get into success mode,” said Cederstrom.

Second, Cederstrom said social media allows us to broadcast the details of our lives. It incentivizes us to show the world that we live a “perfectly balanced and meaningful life,” as he put it.

I agree with both of those points. But I also think there’s something else at play.

I spoke with many brilliant behavioral psychologists for my next book, Scarcity Brain. As you know if you read The Comfort Crisis, humans are wired to avoid physical and psychological discomfort.

Morning routines are marketed as what kickstarts us to achieve our biggest goals, usually work-related. For example, building a business, writing a book, coding a program, raising good kids, etc. But these big goals are uncomfortable and uncertain. They take a ton of agonizing hours and effort. And we never know if we’re doing things right.

It doesn’t matter what your big goal is. How do you know you’re doing the right things to reach it? For example, how do you know your parenting will lead to good kids? How do you know your business decisions will create the largest profits? You can’t. You never will. And that uncertainty is uncomfortable.

Morning routines are different. They provide clear outcomes and “little wins.” We either meditated for 20 minutes or didn’t. We got in the cold plunge while drinking the green smoothie or didn’t.

These little wins feel good.

Do Morning Routines Predict Success?

I emailed my friend Leila Hormozi about this. She’s built and sold a few eight-figure companies and now focuses full-time on her and her husband Alex’s investment company, Acquisition, where she grows and scales businesses and helps people who work in them reach big revenue goals.

She told me that “there’s no cookie-cutter routine for success. I know billionaires who watch cartoons when they wake up. I also know broke people who have complicated two-hour morning routines. Vice versa. It's all about finding what works for you to achieve your goals.”

For every successful person who follows a 90-minute morning wellness routine, many more wake up and do things that would send online wellness and productivity gurus into a death spiral.

For example, Warren Buffett is worth $105 billion and arguably the smartest financial mind of our time. He wakes at 6:45 a.m. and pokes around some newspapers. Then he drives to McDonald’s and buys a Sausage McMuffin with Egg and a Coca-Cola. Full sugar.

Elon Musk rolls out of bed and immediately fixates on a screen and sends emails. Mark Cuban does the same. Sheryl Sandberg and Serena Williams don’t do anything but deal with screaming kids from 5:30 to 7:30 a.m.

One of my favorite writers, the brilliant Hunter Thompson, would wake at 3 p.m. Then he’d ingest enough booze and drugs to kill a horse. At midnight, he’d begin writing.

Where Morning Routines Go Wrong

As complicated morning routines became popular, we seem to have lost sight of what actually helps us reach goals. What really helps us achieve big goals is doing the actions that directly relate to the goal. For example, entrepreneurs build businesses by making sales calls, developing marketing strategies, hiring the right employees, emailing clients, etc.

Morning routines give us little wins that feel good. But those wins may not necessarily count towards the game we think they do.

Most of the behaviors in morning routines are good in and of themselves. It’s good to exercise. It’s good to go outside. It’s (maybe?) good to drink green stuff. But we can’t say doing those things upon wakeup helps us “optimize” or perform significantly better in unrelated domains.

And some rather pernicious problems can occur when we try to force together cause and effect—when we genuinely believe that a morning routine causes success in other areas of our life.

Consider: Scientists at Texas A&M and the University of Wyoming conducted three studies on work performance and morning routines. They found that when employees’ morning routines got thrown off, they became flustered, and the rest of their work suffered. In turn, the employees were less likely to reach their bigger goals.

Routines as Superstition

Psychologists call what happened with those employees who had their morning routines interrupted and suffered for it “superstition.” Superstition is when we falsely believe one behavior influences the outcome of another.

Baseball players are a classic example of superstition. Before throwing a pitch or stepping up to the batter’s box, many baseball players do all kinds of weird stuff. They’ll often wear the same pair of unwashed underwear, tap their bat or pull on the brim of their hat x number of times, chew the same gum, etc. Baseball players are so superstitious that there’s an entire body of research on superstition in baseball.

Of course, the research shows that none of these superstitious behaviors improve performance. They don’t increase the odds of a player getting on base or throwing a strike.

But problems arise when a baseball player can’t go through his or her choreographed routine. Studies show that when the superstitious routine gets interrupted, players get flustered—and that can decrease performance.

We can all realize that it’s silly when a baseball player doesn’t wash his underwear, chews the same gum, or pulls on the brim of his hat or taps his bat a specific number of times.

But somehow, the morning routine gurus have many of us believing that plunging into cold water, drinking Athletic Greens, or gratitude journaling for a specific number of minutes before our day makes us “optimal” or better at everything.

In truth, these routines might make us more like superstitious baseball players: If we can’t execute our routine flawlessly, we can get flustered. At best, this stresses us out. At worst, it can decrease our performance in working toward our primary goal.

This can make routines more of a liability than an asset. Research on a concept called mental flexibility backs this up. Not to mention, complex morning routines can be a waste of time we could have put into doing the stuff that actually moves the dial.

How to Use Morning Routines

If you have a morning routine that works for you, keep working it. As Leila put it, “do more of the stuff that helps you and less of the stuff that doesn't—it's pretty simple.”

But also make sure that what you think is helping you is actually helping you. This applies to all sorts of behaviors. It can pay to get vicious in drawing a clear line between cause and effect. How does a complex morning routine filled with a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with your primary goal help you reach that main goal? Why are you doing the routine, and how is it helping what you want it to help?

If you hear of some new routine you want to try, ask yourself, “what problem am I trying to solve with this new behavior, and how will this new behavior solve that problem?”

Take my own experience. The early morning hours are my prime time for writing. I’d heard on a podcast that making pour-over coffee can be a relaxing way to start the day. I figured that might clear my head before I started writing. So I made complicated pour-over coffee every morning for a year. It took fifteen minutes.

I eventually realized that making pour-over coffee didn’t change my writing. It only cut into my most creative and productive writing time. So I bought an automatic coffee maker and can now immediately start writing—and that allows me to get more and better words on the page, which is my main goal.

What we’re after here is freedom. Freedom from believing we need one thing to happen to make us “optimal” enough to make another thing happen. The more steps you need to accomplish something, the more barriers you’re putting on the runway.

What if you’re already optimal right here, right now? What if the runway is already clear?

So ... what do you think? What are your thoughts on morning routines? If you have a morning routine that's working for you, I'd love to hear about it. Reply to this email. Good news: The 2% Newsletter will soon have a comments section so we can all share ideas.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

I’ve written about the concept of Misogi in the 2% Newsletter before. As a reminder, it’s the act of taking on a challenge that you have a 50/50 shot of accomplishing to expand your capabilities.

This week, we’ll give a quick overview of Misogi (skip down to "The Rules and Guidelines" section if you feel well-versed) then we’ll explore why the two Misogi guidelines are so important and how to find your own Misogi.

The Case for Misogi

Over the course of human evolution, it was essential for our survival to do hard things. To be challenged.

We didn’t choose these challenges. They were part of life and didn’t come with safety nets.

These challenges could come from big hunts, moving from summering to wintering grounds, or a tiger lurking in the bushes.

Each time we would take on one of these challenges, we'd go beyond the edges of what we thought we were capable of. And by surfing those edges, we'd find that we’re capable of more than we realized.

But very recently in the grand scheme of humanity, many of us can survive without being challenged. We can have plenty of food, water, shelter, etc.

By not being challenged, we miss something vital about being human. We never realize what we’re capable of and this limits us.

Enter Misogi. It’s a circumnavigation of the edges of your potential to expand them.

The idea is this: Once a year, go out into nature and do something really hard. The point is to mimic the ancient challenges that humans used to face.

My friend Marcus Elliott first developed the idea of the modern Misogi. He’s a Harvard-trained physician who owns P3, a sports science facility that uses deep biometric data to improve pro athlete performance. But he also realizes that what truly improves his athletes can’t always be measured—it happens between the ears when an athlete accesses previously untapped potential.

The Rules and Guidelines of Misogi

There are two rules of Misogi.

Rule 1: Make it really hard. What's "really hard?" Answer: You should have a 50/50 shot at finishing whatever task you take on.

A true 50/50 shot. This is important because when we take on challenges today, we usually know they’re going to complete them. For example, no one runs a marathon wondering whether they'll finish. They wonder whether they'll finish under some arbitrary time goal. E.g., four hours.

Rule 2: Don't die. This one is self-explanatory … and a joke. I gave a talk in Miami the other day, and a woman thought this was serious. It’s a reminder to be safe. Bring water. Bring a phone. Don't be dumb.

Misogis also have two guidelines. And it’s not a Misogi if you don’t follow these guidelines.

Guideline 1: The Misogi should be quirky, creative, and far out. Something uncommon. “The more quirky the Misogi, the less chance you can compare it to anything else,” Elliott told me. When you remove superficial metrics, you can accomplish far more.

Guideline 2: Don’t advertise your Misogi. It’s okay to talk about Misogi with friends and family. But you don’t Tweet, Instagram, Facebook, or boast about your Misogi. “Misogis are inward facing,” Elliott told me. “A big part of the value proposition is that I’m going to do something really uncomfortable. I’m going to want to quit. And it’s going to be hard not to quit because no one is watching. But I’m not going to quit because I’m watching. And then I can reflect on how I still rose to the occasion in a big way. There’s some deep satisfaction in that. Did you really do what you think is the right thing when you were the only person watching? Or do you need an audience or a big pat on the back for that? Are you not important enough to do it for yourself? We had this guideline before social media, and it seems more relevant today.”

The Problem With the Guidelines—and How We Can Solve It

These guidelines are critical. But they can also present a problem. The quirky and unpublic nature of Misogis also makes it harder for others to get ideas for their own Misogis. For example, we run marathons because other people run them too.

Because people don’t advertise their Misogis, it’s not easy to come up with your own. This is why I’ve had hundreds of people reach out to me asking for a suggestion of exactly what they should do for their Misogi.

It’s an impossible question to answer. Fifty-fifty is different for everyone—that’s what makes Misogis so compelling. So I usually refer the person back to the rules and guidelines and tell them to introspect.

I love the self-examination of figuring out what weird task I think I may or may not be able to complete. But I also realize some people need more direction. And I’d rather someone do a Misogi with a little guidance than never try because they can’t figure out what to do.

This is why I’m asking for your help solving that problem.

If you’ve done a Misogi, please reply to this message and send me exactly what you did. (Don’t worry, you’re not breaking the guideline because it’s not a public share).

I’ll then start a webpage that lists Misogis people have done. It will all be anonymous. I’ll list only the person’s first name, age, and brief details of their Misogi. No Misogi is too small or too big. Send it all.

The idea is to provide a resource to the 2% community so we can get ideas for future Misogis.

Again, if you want to help, please reply to this email and send your age and a few brief details about your Misogi. Thank you.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

Let's stay on the theme of being a 2-Percenter.

It's probably not shocking that people today move less than we did in the past. Our early ancestors’ lives forced them to be active. Anthropologists at Harvard told me that humans were “essentially professional athletes whose livelihood required (us) to be physically active.” They didn’t “work out” because they spent most of their waking hours doing necessary-to-not-die tasks that we today would classify as exercise. They spent their days digging, carrying, walking, and sometimes running, covering anywhere from 5 to 20 miles. It was a lot of work, but they did the bare minimum needed to survive.

It would be impossible to mimic the constant effort our ancestors faced. And I don’t think it’s even desirable. Having the option of being lazy is a blessing. Very few people who toil for their food actually want to.

But our health has suffered because of inactivity. Research shows that being sedentary now kills more people than obesity.

Luckily, the more sedentary we are, the bigger benefits we’ll see from adding movement back into our day. Consider this wild study finding: Older women who got 4,400 steps a day experienced a 50 percent less risk of dying during the research period compared to those who logged just 2,700 steps.

Enter being a 2-Percenter. Going to the gym is great. But it often leads us to see physical effort as a 30- or 60-minute thing we do at a gym—separate and distinct from our daily lives. Then we end up being inactive the rest of the day.

Whether you go to the gym or not, figuring out ways to sneak activity back into your days can be even more effective and sustainable. That's what the 2-Percent movement is all about: Accepting short-term discomfort for the sake of long-term growth. Accumulating little wins across the day that add up to big changes.

Here are a few ways to do just that:

Take the stairs. We all know we should do this—but we forget how powerful it can be. One study found that men who climbed 20 to 34 flights of stairs each week experienced 38 percent fewer strokes than those who climbed 10 or fewer flights a week.

Sit on a stool or on the floor. People who frequently sit without using a backrest have back and core muscles that are anywhere from 20 to 40 percent stronger—and this can help prevent and relieve back pain. If you watch TV or read every night or meditate every morning, try doing it cross-legged while keeping your torso vertical. It’s harder than it looks—but the discomfort in your legs and back and core suggests you have a relative weakness there. Fix it, and you’ll be better off. (Fun fact: I fixed a reader’s chronic back pain with this tip.) This phenomenon also explains why people in developing countries, who use fewer backrests, have lower rates of hip and back problems.

Take walking breaks, phone calls, and meetings. Beyond the calorie burn, people who walk to clear their minds perform better on creativity tests and report being more satisfied with their jobs. Walking allows your mind to wander to creative places. (Also remember that you can always call into a Zoom meeting from your phone and go for a walk. I do this often.)

Ruck while (insert task). In preparing to spend a month in the Arctic for The Comfort Crisis, I knew I had to get used to carrying a heavy pack. So I’d do chores like cleaning, vacuuming, etc, while wearing a heavy ruck. I found it so beneficial that I’ve continued the practice. It’ll help you burn two or three times the calories and will also strengthen all your muscles without bulking you up.

Carry whenever you can. You’ll burn two or three times more calories than walking. Carrying is also one of the best ways to train your core. It can improve your performance in any physical activity.

Establish a “buy-in.” We all have a questionable habit or two we love. For example, binging Netflix or Instagram. Mine’s drinking diet soda (don’t ask me how many ounces I drink a day). Now, before I have a diet soda, I’ve established a “buy-in.” I do a quick bout of exercise before I pop the can. For example, a 60-second plank or 20 pushups. It adds up.

Speaking of adding up, here’s a full breakdown of the calorie burn of 10 minutes of the following activities:

Using a Standing Desk: 17
Walking Meeting: 40
Cleaning or Fixing Up Around The House: 47
Chopping or Stacking Wood: 109
Yard Work: 55
Carrying Light Groceries: 50
Cooking: 34
Dancing: 106 (a totally underrated form of stress relief)
Playing with Kids or a Dog: 79
Fidgeting While Sitting: 25
Walking Briskly (4.5MPH): 96
Climbing Stairs Briskly: 120

(These figures are for a 180-pound person and are drawn from the Compendium of Physical Activities)

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

The Invention of Exercise

“Exercise”—physical activity for the sake of it—is a very new concept. It took off after the post-World War II technological revolution. This is when new machines spread widely and began removing physical activity from our home and work life. The examples are endless, but to name a few: washing machines saved us from scrubbing, telephones saved us from walking down to the neighbor’s, pre-made staple foods saved us from grinding wheat (grinding wheat was a daily, back-breaking chore for about 20 percent of Americans up until about 1900). Desk work became more common, and even blue-collar jobs became less active. Etc, etc, etc.

Not coincidentally, this is when chronic diseases like heart disease became more common. We realized our new lack of physical activity probably had something to do with that.

So to maintain our health, we began offsetting our lost movement with exercise. We often did this inside hermetic gyms where we could control exactly how we would like to be physically active.

Soon we could watch TV while running at a predetermined incline and speed along a motorized belt. Or we could lift preselected weights that were perfectly balanced or attached to a machine where we sit on a padded seat, resting our joints against another pad, and move handles along a fixed movement path. We would quit when we felt like it. And this was all happening in a temperature-controlled building divorced from the rest of our life.

What’s more, we could pick one physical skill and chase it at the expense of others. We could build muscle for the sake of it. Or we could run and rarely use our strength. Or we could get really good at bending ourselves into awkward positions.

Physical Activity of the Past

Physical activity was much more dynamic for about 99.99 percent of human lineage. It was forced and unpredictable. We didn’t get to choose how we were active. We did what our environment asked of us to survive. Take hunting: We’d run as far and fast as we needed to kill an animal. Could be three miles. Could be thirteen. And then we’d have to carry the meat back an equal distance back to camp. When we’d gather food, we didn’t get to choose how far we’d have to walk or deep we’d dig. These acts required many physical skills—speed, strength, mobility, power, endurance, etc. If we built up one skill at the expense of others, we’d put ourselves at a disadvantage.

And this all occurred outdoors over rough terrain while exposed to the elements. A scientist at USC told me that running or walking on a trail may improve brain health to a greater degree. We have to make decisions about navigation, pacing, encountering obstacles, and more. This adds a cognitive challenge to the activity that we don’t get in a gym, he told me.

Modern exercise is good! It’s the result of progress. I’d much rather have to choose to exercise than be forced to for survival.

But I do think we’re still in a phase of figuring out what exercising for ideal physical and mental health looks like. I also think we lose something by only exercising indoors—separating exercise from our lives and making it hyper-specific.

How to Make Exercise Great Again

It’s worth exploring how we can put ourselves back into positions where activity is forced, a bit less predictable, and where we have to use many physical skills. So how do you do that? First, be a 2-Percenter. Figure out how to make your everyday life more physically challenging. But when it comes to exercise, the time you set aside for physical activity, here are some general guidelines:

1. Make exercise unpredictable

2. Exercise outdoors more often

3. Use multiple skills at one

4. Put yourself in positions where you can’t quit

So how do you do all that? It takes a bit of creativity.

For example, something as simple as a run or ruck on a trail presents much more variability and unpredictability. The trail isn’t perfectly flat and has many more ups and downs, rocks, and ruts. The weather won’t be a perfect 72 degrees. And if you decide to quit, you still have to turn around and make it home.

Or you could ruck to a playground or field near your home then invent a workout with what you can find once you get there. Or it could be that you go for a hike, notice a log at the side of the trail, and decide to carry it for a while. Yes, this is a strange thing to make up. But it’s far less odd in the grand scheme of time than running on a treadmill or using a weight machine.

Even better: Do all of these things with other people. In the past, we physically worked together. But gym exercise can often become a solitary act, with everyone in their own world behind headphones. For men, F3 is a great movement to find people to exercise outdoors with for free. GORUCK also has ruck clubs across the country. There are many other options.

Weaving together different research in neuroscience, physiology, psychology, and more suggests that this approach is an important addition to our lives. That isn’t to say you should avoid the gym if you enjoy it. Not at all. I have a gym in my garage and use it all the time. But we should think of creative ways to put ourselves in positions where we can’t easily quit and where exercise isn’t as predictable and sanitized.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

Humans evolved in environments that were rarely 72 degrees. We experienced temperature swings with the seasons.

In 1833, scientists theorized that exposure to the cold caused illness. Hence the term “catching a cold.” But it wasn’t until 120 years later that we realized occasionally being cold can be good for us.

JFK, Navy SEALs, and Ama Women

Something often forgotten in JFK’s famous “moon speech” is that he also called for “the Secretary of Defense to expand rapidly and substantially … special forces and unconventional warfare units.”

The US had experienced particular success with underwater demolition teams in World War II. Kennedy and his advisors wanted more of those water-centric warriors for the escalating conflict in Vietnam.

Eight months after Kennedy’s speech, the military established the first two Navy SEAL teams.

The problem: The American military didn’t know much about how the human body behaves when exposed to cold, deep water. So they looked to a curious group to understand the topic.

Starting around 10,000 years ago, women in the tiny fishing villages of Japan and Korea began diving into the cold waters of the Japan Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

No wetsuits. No breathing contraptions.

The women would strip down to a loincloth, diving trunks, or nothing at all.

They’d row or swim to a spot where the ocean’s rocky bottom was 10 to 90 feet below, and dive, scouring the cold, clear ocean depths for edible seafood like uni or mussels. People called these women the “Ama,” or “sea women.”

In the summer, the Ama worked six- to ten-hour days on the chilly water, doing more than 150 daily dives. From late fall to early spring, the ocean water dropped to just 50 degrees and the air temperatures could be just a couple of degrees above freezing. So they’d do a handful of dives, warm themselves near a bonfire on shore, then dive again.

The military sent 40 of the best physiologists from Japan, Korea, and the United States along the Pacific Coast to study the 18,000 Ama.

What We Learned From the Ama

The inquiry showed that the Ama had fewer incidences of 14 of the 16 illnesses the scientists studied.

Compared to their fellow villagers, the women were less likely to catch a cold, get heart disease, arthritis, liver or kidney diseases, and so on.

These results weren’t entirely attributable to the cold. Remember that other factors like swimming and spending all day in nature likely kept them healthy. For example, the Ama also had larger lung volumes, stronger muscles, and better endurance.

But the cold played a factor. And the results dispelled the old myth that the cold will lead you to catch a cold—quite the opposite.

The scientists also wondered how all that time in the cold impacted the Ama’s metabolisms.

A cold body, after all, ignites a complex network of calorie-burning internal furnaces to ensure that its organs don’t become dangerously chilled. So they picked, at random, 20 Ama and 20 villagers and invited them into a makeshift lab to have their metabolic rates tested.

The data showed that the Ama burned an additional 1,000 calories a day.

Research on the Ama would shape the future of combat diving. It helped the SEALs dive deeper, longer, and emerge from the surf ready to operate. But it also came with a lesson for the scientific community and you and me: We should probably expose ourselves to temperature swings.

The Case for Getting Cold

Thanks largely to the Ama research, scientists now know part of what’s driving the 1,000-calorie burn: brown fat. Brown fat is a metabolically active tissue. In the cold, brown fat acts like a furnace that burns our white fat (the type we try to lose with diet and exercise) to generate heat. This protects our vital organs from becoming too cold.

Which is precisely why a team of scientists in the Netherlands think getting comfortable with the cold can be an effective weight-control tactic. The bad news, the scientists say, is that our creature comforts have rendered brown fat moot. We now live at 72 degrees and rarely encounter extended temperature swings.

“In the past century, several dramatic changes in the daily living circumstances in Western civilization have occurred, affecting health. For example, we are much better able to control our ambient temperature,” wrote the scientists. “We lack exposure to varied ambient temperature [because we] cool and heat our dwellings for maximal comfort while minimizing our body energy expenditure necessary to control body temperature.”

Scientists call this burning of energy to stay warm “non-shivering thermogenesis.” Research shows it can elevate metabolism from a small percentage to 30 percent.

The scientists wrote, “Similar to exercise training, we advocate temperature training. . . . More-frequent cold exposure alone will not save the world, but [it] is a serious factor to consider.”

The cost of harnessing the power of brown fat is, of course, braving the cold.

But the scientists don’t think we have to go to extremes.

64 Degrees + More Time Outside

First: In winter, scientists recommend people lower their thermostats by three to four degrees each week. This slowly pushes our comfort zone, allowing us to adapt without unnecessary suffering. Then we can stop once we’re living in 64 degrees. Keeping the house at 64 degrees not only saves heating costs, it can also be beneficial for our health. It’s also an ideal sleeping temperature—and sleep improvements can lead to many health benefits.

Second: We should also spend more time outdoors this winter.

Ice baths are currently popular, and they probably benefit the people who enjoy them (oddly enough, people who hate them may not see the same benefits … I can write more on this, if you’re interested). But it’s hard to say if a few minutes in ice water is “enough” to get Ama-like results.

For most people, it’s better to prioritize time outdoors in the cold. Remember, the Ama weren’t getting cold in a tub at home—they were also outdoors and exercising.

The cold outdoors isn’t as intense as sitting in a tub of ice. But you’re exposed to the cold for longer—while also being physically active outdoors. And when you feel cold and want to quit, you can’t jump out of the tub and, like, drink a hot cup of coffee. You still have to brave the cold on the way back home.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

Why 10,000 Steps?

In the 1960s, a Japanese doctor named Yoshiro Hatano estimated that the average Japanese citizen walked just 3,500 to 5,000 steps daily. He worried that inactivity was hurting the health of Japanese citizens, and he suggested that everyone should double their level of physical activity. But how do you actually know if you’ve done that? You need to measure it.

Enter Yomasa Tokei. He was a watchmaker who saw an opportunity in Dr. Hatano’s recommendation. He took the shell of an everyday pocket watch but tweaked its internal parts and function. His watch no longer counted time, it counted steps.

He called this invention Manpo-kei, which translates to “10,000 steps meter.” The device took off. Walking clubs popped up around Japan, with members all using the 10,000 steps meter to get to at least 10,000 steps each day.

The number worked for a lot of reasons. It was round. It was memorable. It had five figures, which felt better than four figures. And hitting it required extra walking, but not so much that people felt like professional walkers.

So the number stuck. It’s become the standard recommendation for how many steps we should take daily.

Is 10,000 Steps Backed By Science?

Before answering that question, we have to account for how scientists generally think of steps and health.

The average American gets between 4,000 and 6,000 steps a day, depending on which study you read. That means some people get far more than 4,000 to 6,000 a day, but some get far less. For example, the average Amish man takes 18,425 steps, while the average waiter gets around 22,778. On the other hand, many Americans walk just 2,000 steps a day.

Scientists care most about those sedentary people. That’s because the most sedentary people have the highest disease risk and present the largest burden to our medical system. It saves more lives and prevents more suffering to ask questions that can help these people.

With that in mind, scientists want to know two things about step counts. First, what amount of steps is so low that it’s dangerous? Second, what minimum number of steps allows people to remain healthy?

The reason we ask these two questions is so that we can identify the people most at risk and then give them a reasonable goal to meet to improve their health.

What Amount of Steps is so Low That it’s Dangerous?

The answer to this question seems to be any step count below 5,000. The lower the number, the worse the outcomes. For example, one study found that people who took fewer than 5,000 steps a day had “substantially higher” prevalence of heart disease, the number one killer of Americans. Another found that people who fell below the 5k number had a significantly higher risk of depression.

But the good news is that if you currently get fewer than 5,000 steps, each extra step you take is powerful. For example, older women who got 4,400 steps a day had an elevated risk of dying during the study period. But they were better off than women who logged just 2,700 steps. The women who hit 4,400 steps had a 41 percent lower risk of dying.

Which leads to the second question …

What’s the Minimum Number of Steps that Allows People to Remain Healthy?

To answer the reader’s main question, I’ll quote a study in JAMA. The scientists wrote, “A goal of 10,000 steps per day is promoted widely, but evidence for this goal is limited.” Ten thousand is great, but we can probably get fewer than that and stay healthy.

Some studies say the minimum ideal dose is 8,000 steps. Some say 7,000. So let’s just say it’s somewhere around 7,500 steps.

For example, that same study on older women found that the women with the lowest risk of death got 7,500 or more steps a day. Interestingly enough, those who got far more than 7,500 weren’t any better off.

Other studies show getting at least 7,500 significantly lowers our risk of depression, heart disease, diabetes, and more. That number seems to be a sweet spot where we reduce our risk in the least amount of time.

Is Getting More than 7,500 Steps a Day Better?

I think so.

Even though some studies suggest that going above 7,500 steps doesn't offer more protection, others do. On balance, a more active person is more likely to be healthier than a less active person. Fitness is a hedge against sickness.

For example, a study in JAMA found that getting 8,000 steps per day led to a 51% lower risk of death compared to getting 4,000. Which is good—but not as good as getting 12,000 steps. The people who hit that number had a 65% lower risk.

So more is better. But the catch, as we can see in the study above, is that there is a rate of diminishing returns. For example, going from 2,000 to 4,000 steps a day might cut your risk of heart disease in half. But going from 15,000 to 17,000 might drop it by a percent or two, if at all. But that slight edge wouldn’t just apply to heart disease. It would apply to all sorts of diseases—add up enough slight edges, and you likely have a significant edge.

We see this in the real world. People with the lowest risk of chronic disease in the world—various hunter-gatherer tribes—tend to all get around 20,000 daily steps. They, of course, have other things going for them, like diets mostly devoid of junk food. But I feel safe saying that 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day is probably a historically “regular,” optimal level of human activity.

Of course, hitting that number today can present practical problems, especially if you’re trying to get it all in one long ruck or run. Which is why I harp on being a 2-Percenter—make the small decision to walk every chance you can so the steps accumulate. Take a walking phone call. Park in the farthest spot. Relax with a stroll rather than by scrolling your news feed.

Final Thoughts

As you rack up more steps, don’t lose sight of the larger goal. We don’t just walk and exercise to avoid disease. We do it to live better.

I try to go on a walk every single day. It’s not just for the steps—it’s for unplugged time outside to clear my head. I probably won’t see any possible disease risk benefits from these walks until I’m old. But I can get a physical and mental boost right now, with each step.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

One of my favorite ideas comes from William James, who is considered the father of American psychology. He said that when we die, our lives will have been a collection of what we paid attention to.

The Two Types of Attention

Our brains essentially have two types of attention, or “modes.” Focused and unfocused.

Focused mode is a mind at attention on the outside world. It’s on when we’re processing outside information, completing a task, checking our smartphone, watching TV, listening to a podcast, having a conversation, or anything else that requires us to attend to the outside world.

Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering. Scientists call the brain regions that fire on when we’re unfocused “the default mode network.”

The Case for More Time in Unfocused Mode

Focused mode is obviously critical to life and living it. But we now spend a significant amount of time focused on things that aren’t necessarily improving our lives. The average American now spends around 12 daily hours outwardly focused on digital media. Most media might be free monetarily, but we’re paying for it with time in focused mode.

And it’s expensive. Think of focused mode like lifting a weight and unfocused mode like resting. Like trying to do rep after rep after rep of an exercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life, with all our time spent focused outwardly on screens, overworks the hell out of our brains.

Unfocused mode, on the other hand, restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. The fact that we now spend less time mind wandering and more time focused may be causing us to reach near-crisis levels of mental fatigue.

Research shows that the onslaught of screen-based media has created Americans that one researcher described as “increasingly picky, impatient, distracted, and demanding.” These terms fall under the umbrella of “insufferable.” And overworked, under-maintained minds are linked to depression, life dissatisfaction, and the perception that life goes by quicker.

Focused Mode and Stress

More than half of adults said they were under “high stress” in 2017. That number rose post-pandemic. Anxiety grew by 39 percent in a recent one-year period. Attention spans fell by 33 percent from 2000 to 2015. Depression diagnoses are up 33 percent since 2013.

I spoke with Dr. Judson Brewer, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University Medical School, about this.

“I wouldn’t pin this on mobile technology (and our influx of media) one hundred percent,” said Brewer. “But I’d say it’s ninety percent due to it.”

It’s not just that we’re spending so much time in outward focus. It’s also that what we’re focused on can stress us out. For example, 90 percent of news is negative. Twitter and YouTube algorithms tend to upvote content that makes people feel sad, annoyed, outraged, etc. There’s a reason researchers are now studying “toxic Twitter” and YouTube’s “hardcore rabbit hole.”

The Challenge

Lean into unfocused mode. Give yourself some time to let your mind wander this week. Try even five to ten minutes of just sitting and letting your mind go where it needs to go. You’ll probably think about truly random and bizarre stuff if you’re anything like me. But you also may stumble into some great insights. If nothing else, you’ll give your mind a rest break, so it’s sharper for your next session in focused mode.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

Like most people, I make New Year’s resolutions every year. Like most people, I don’t achieve them all. I probably quit half of them.

But you know what? I’m ok with that.

A few years ago, I came upon some interesting research on quitting. It suggests that learning when to deploy grit and when to quit is perhaps one of the toughest but most important skills a person can master. Let’s dive in.

Grit vs. Quit: The Difference

Most of us are familiar with the pitch of “grit.” Academics say it’s composed of “passion and persevere for long-term goals,” or basically just picking something you want to do and not quitting. It’s billed as the secret to success. As Angela Duckworth said about her grit research in a popular 2013 TED Talk, “One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn’t social intelligence. It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ. It was grit.”

The grit idea boomed partly because American culture loves underdogs but doesn’t celebrate quitters. The grit idea allowed us to toss aside IQ and innate talent and buy into a Horatio Alger-ish narrative that life’s winners worked at their goal harder and longer while the losers tapped out.

But recent research shows that grit is misunderstood. Scientists at Iowa State University analyzed 88 different studies on grit. They point out that:

1) Grit studies selectively choose the statistics that make grit seem far more powerful than it is.

2) The correlation between grit and success is only modest and not much better than many other measures of success.

3) Grit is another way of explaining a long-established psychological trait of “conscientiousness.” The Iowa State researchers claim grit is “old wine in new bottles.”

Despite all that, the hype around grit has led many to believe that never quitting is the secret to success. The concept has since been (very controversially) flowed into public school curriculums, picked up by NFL teams, and used by businesses and health care providers.

And it’s reinforced the idea that quitting kills all success. I agree that people often pull the plug too early when the going gets tough. One of my favorite quotes is, “breakthroughs happen on the verge of breakdowns.”

But quitting, paradoxically, can often be the best way to get ahead.

Quitting isn’t Always Easier

Scientists started thinking about the topic of grit while studying West Point cadets going through Beast Barracks. It’s a seven-week freshman boot camp-ish course. Despite the name, it’s not as intense as it sounds. Along with daily PT and marching, Beast Barracks also involves stuff like marksmanship, playing games like dodgeball, and religious services.

One of the most famous grit studies claims that the grittier West Point cadets were 99% more likely to make it through Beast Barracks. While that stat is true, it also lacks any meaningful context. The data, in reality, showed that 95% of all candidates made it through Beast Barracks, while 98% of the grittiest candidates did. Some years the attrition rate at Beast Barracks is only 2.5% (for more context, the college dropout rate nationwide is 40%. And that’s at low-stress party schools).

In fact, with the Beast Barracks passing rate being so high, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the quitting candidates showed up, realized that the military experience just wasn’t what they’d thought it would be, and made the conscious decision to bow out. A former West Point cadet agreed with me on this idea. The life of an Army Officer in movies is far sexier than all the stuff it takes to be an Army Officer.

Couldn’t one argue that the handful of cadets who dropped actually had more courage and emotional IQ? They had to exit the West Point gates, tail between legs, and return home and tell their friends and family that they quit one of the world’s most prestigious, hardest-to-get-into schools. There’s a lot of shame in that. But if military life wasn’t for them, can you blame them?

Understand Discomfort

To understand when to quit, we need to realize that there are two types of quitting. I call the first type “short-quitting” and the second “long-quitting.”

My work in The Comfort Crisis shows that short-term discomfort often drives quitting. But this ultimately stops us from getting a long-term benefit. This is “short-quitting.” It’s quitting to avoid short-term discomfort at the expense of long-term benefits. For example, we might quit an hour-long workout at minute 15 because we’re tired. We escaped short-term discomfort but gave up long-term health benefits that would have come from sticking it out.

“Long-quitting” is the opposite. In it, we embrace short-term discomfort to improve our lives in the long run. In this case, not quitting will actually make our lives worse over time. Take the cadets who left West Point. A military career would have made them miserable. They, in fact, had to experience the short-term discomfort of public disgrace to gain the long-term benefit of living a life true to their innermost selves.

Long-quitting is vital in all kinds of contexts. For example, consider drug addiction. An addict must go through all kinds of hell and discomfort to get off drugs, but their life improves in the long term.

The Science of Quitting

The idea that there are two types of quitting was recently backed up by a team of researchers at the University of Southern California who wondered if grit has any downsides.

The scientists gathered 426 college students and assessed their grit with Duckworth’s Grit scale test. Participants then received a set of 37 anagrams and had to solve as many as possible in 20 minutes. The catch: 16 of the anagrams were unsolvable.

The result of the study: The “grittier” individuals completed fewer anagrams than the non-gritty ones. They got stubborn and sank their overall productivity.

This may seem like a contrived scenario. But similar situations often pop up in real life. Consider any timed test or day when we have a ton to do and not enough time to do it all. Success often requires that we make calculated decisions on what questions or tasks to quit to accomplish more overall.

The researchers point out that grittier individuals, “may not do as well on standardized tests like the SAT where success is improved if test-takers can pass over hard items to first identify and complete the easier items.”

Make Quitting a Skill

Instead of focusing on an overly simplistic “never quit” mindset, we should view quitting as a skill. As a series of decisions about efficiency and our intentions and objectives.

This takes honesty, courage, and an ability to see the long view—radical introspection about why we want to quit and what its consequences will be not just immediately but also weeks, months, and years from the moment of quitting.

And if the long view looks good? Raise that white flag. Or, you know, give up on that dumb New Year's resolution.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

Last week we covered why boredom can be a good thing. As a reminder, boredom is an ancient cue that tells us to do something else. In our past, that something else was often productive. We’d hunt, gather, mend our shelters, make tools, etc. Today we have an easy, effortless escape from it. We impulsively reach for our phone, watch TV, mess around on the computer, etc. The average American now spends 12 daily hours engaged with digital media.

Our collective lack of boredom is now linked to burnout, stress, anxiety, and, as we learned last week, a creativity crisis.

Cell phones are the most obvious boredom-stealer. They’re with us 24/7. People instinctively pull out their phone whenever they feel the slightest twinge of boredom. We’ve all noticed this in public. The other day when I arrived to give my 8:30 am lecture at the university where I’m a professor, I did a quick headcount. I counted 83 students on their phone and 6 doing something else.

We all overdo our phone screen time. Hence, there are thousands of articles and tips on how to use your phone less. But these articles would be better if they included a larger point. When people use their phone less, they often just swap it for another screen. They take an hour off their phone screen time, get bored, and add an hour to their TV screen time. This is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.

I spoke to Joe Rogan about this. Here’s the clip.

So let’s deal with our boredom in a way that won’t end up driving us more crazy. Try one of these nine methods to leverage the power of boredom.

1. Do nothing. Go inward and let your mind wander. Focusing inwardly is a mental rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently. Mind wandering is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

2. Take a walk and leave your cell phone at home. I mentioned this last week. The benefit: a mental reboot and more creativity, according to researchers at the University of Utah.

3. ​Spend 20 minutes sitting in nature. Research from the University of Michigan found that dose of nature most efficiently dropped peoples’ stress hormones.

4. Read a literary classic. I recently finished Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (the complexity of the name correlates with the complexity of the writing) by Marcel Proust. It was a strange and trying book. But it had enough brilliant scenes and lines that I’m glad I read it.

5. Think of your death. I covered the benefits at length in The Comfort Crisis. In short: It can alter your behavior in a way that improves your happiness.

6. Declutter. Clutter is associated with procrastination and higher levels of stress.

7. Learn a new skill. Anything. Newness forces into presence and focus. This is because we can’t anticipate what to expect and how to respond, breaking the trance that leads to life in fast-forward. It can even slow down our sense of time, which explains why time seemed slower when we were kids. Everything was new then, and we were constantly learning.

8. ​Do these three exercises. They help offset many of the tightness and movement problems we get from our modern, sedentary lives.

Things Not To Do

Boredom is neither good nor bad—how we use it makes it good or bad. Beyond mindless screen time, the most common way boredom goes wrong is when it drives us to eat mindlessly. Boredom eating is a huge driver of unintended weight gain.

Why It Matters

Steve Jobs once said, “I’m a big believer in boredom. . . . All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.” Some of our finest thinkers all believe boredom was the secret sauce that kept them sane, led them into interesting new territory, and spurred their best ideas.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

Happy December. This month we’re investigating how certain types of psychological discomfort can lead to breakthroughs.

Let’s start with Ellis Paul Torrance, an American psychologist. In the 1950s, Torrance noticed something off-target about American classrooms.

Teachers tended to prefer the subdued, book-smart kids. They didn’t much care for the kids who had tons of energy and big ideas – kids who’d think up odd interpretations of readings, inventive excuses for why they didn’t do their homework, and morph into mad scientists every lab day.

The system deemed these kids “bad.” But Torrance felt they were misunderstood. Because if a problem comes up in the real world, all the book-smart kids look for an answer in … a book.

But what if the answer isn’t in a book? Then a person needs to get creative.

The Torrance Test

This realization led Torrance to devote his life to studying creativity and what it’s good for. In 1958 he developed the “Torrance Test.” It’s since become the gold standard for gauging creativity.

He had a large group of children in the Minnesota public school system take the exam. It includes exercises like showing a kid a toy and asking her, “how would you improve this toy to make it more fun?”

The kids who came up with more and better ideas in the initial tests were the ones who became the most accomplished adults. They were successful inventors and architects, CEOs and college presidents, authors and diplomats, etc. Torrance testing, in fact, smokes IQ testing.

A recent study of Torrance’s kids found that creativity was a threefold better predictor of much of the students’ accomplishment compared to their IQ scores.

Yet new research suggests that creativity is dropping.

The Creativity Crisis

A scientist at the University of William and Mary recently analyzed 300,000 Torrance Test scores since the 1950s. She found that creativity scores began to nosedive in 1990. She concluded that we’re now facing a “creativity crisis.” And that’s bad news – particularly when we consider that creativity is a critical skill in today’s economy, where most of us work with our brains rather than brawn.

The scientist blames our hurried, over-scheduled lives and “ever-increasing amounts of (time) interacting with electronic entertainment devices.” The average American spends more than 12 hours engaged with digital media (that’s up one hour since I published The Comfort Crisis).

How to Get Creative

Before digital media, which started with the adoption of the radio in the 1910s, people spent much more time grappling with boredom. If we got bored, we had to dream up a solution for our boredom.

But our modern media complex has essentially put boredom on the ropes. Anytime we feel the discomfort of boredom, we now have an easy, effortless, hyperstimulating escape from it. We reflexively pull out our cell phone, watch TV, listen to a podcast, or surf the internet.

But there are good evolutionary reasons why boredom can go a long way toward boosting our creativity. As humans evolved, we’d become bored anytime we were doing something with a low return on our time invested. For example, think of picking berries from a bush. It’s engaging as you gather all the big, easy-to-reach berries. But once you've picked the easy-to-reach berries, it eventually becomes harder and harder to find berries, and you have to reach deeper and deeper in the bush. Boredom kicks on because you aren’t getting as many berries for your time invested.

So boredom is a psychological discomfort that arose that tells us to do something else. And in the past, the “something else” we’d dream up was often productive. Our berry picker might decide to move to another berry bush or hunt an animal.

The Boredom and Creativity Connection

When we become bored, our attention and focus goes inward and our mind wanders. We search for a solution for our boredom. And it turns out that this mind-wandering is a crucial driver of creativity. Ideation and creativity happen when we’re inside our own head, dreaming up big ideas rather than watching or listening to someone else’s ideas through a screen or speakers.

This is why other studies have found that bored people score significantly higher on creativity tests. It’s also why people often report having their best ideas in the shower—it’s a time of pure mind wandering.

Get Bored to Get Creative—and More

And so, despite what productivity gurus will have us believe, the key to improving creativity might be to embrace the discomfort of boredom. It allows us to think and process information distinctly, in a way that delivers more original ideas.

The way we dealt with boredom before we began surrounding ourselves in constant comfort delivered benefits that are essential for our brain health, productivity, personal sanity, and sense of meaning. But there’s been a cosmic shift in our experience of boredom.

Rediscovering boredom is critical to get things done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

An easy way to flow boredom back into your life is to take a 20-minute daily walk outside. But remember: leave your cell phone at home so you don’t unbore yourself.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

—

If there’s one food you should overeat today, it’s probably potatoes. The humble potato is the original superfood, and you should consider eating more potatoes beyond Thanksgiving. This week’s 2% newsletter explains why.

Science of the Potato

A Danish physician named Mikkel Hindhede proved you could survive on potatoes alone in the early 1900s. He had three laborers eat nothing but spuds with a dollop of margarine for 309 days.

Five doctors examined the men afterward and determined they were all in excellent health. One participant was described as “a strong, solid, athletic-looking figure, all of whose muscles are well-developed, and without excess fat.”

Hindhede’s work gave scientific legitimacy to what other cultures had long known: Eating mostly potatoes will keep a person strong and healthy. The Incans noticed this fact thousands of years earlier. Irish farmers experienced it in the 1800s. A recent study in the journal Nutrition discovered that the Aymara people of the Andes and Altiplano have ten times fewer incidences of pre-diabetes compared to Americans.

“Potatoes are a surprisingly nutritionally complete food,” the nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., told me. The USDA reports that a medium potato contains about 170 calories, 5 grams of protein, 39 grams of carbs, and nearly every vitamin and mineral your body needs. Potatoes have more than double the potassium of a medium banana and a quarter the vitamin C of an orange.

“Importantly, they have complete protein, a distribution of essential amino acids that’s similar to animal proteins,” said Guyenet. We don’t think of potatoes as “high protein.” But you could eat only potatoes and meet the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of protein.

Cost-Effective Nutrition

Potatoes contain more calories than most other vegetables. But this is actually a feature rather than a bug.

They’re in a sweet spot where they can give us enough calories to survive (try surviving on broccoli and lettuce alone) but not so many that we overeat.

Potatoes have long been associated with fullness, and scientific data backs up that observation. A study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the satiety index—a measure of how full a food makes you feel—of common foods and discovered that plain potatoes reign supreme. They registered 50 percent more filling than their nearest competitor, fish, and seven times more filling than croissants, which ranked dead last. This study suggests you’d have to eat seven croissants—roughly 1200 calories—to experience the same fullness you’d get from one potato.

That property combined with their sweet-spot calorie concentration makes potatoes an ideal weight-loss food. You’ll feel fuller on fewer calories, making you less likely to overeat, Guyenet told me. You also might save money if you start eating more potatoes: They’re the cheapest vegetable.

Where Good Potatoes Go Bad

If you’ve heard that potatoes are unhealthy, keep in mind the problem isn’t the potatoes. The problem is us and what we do with them. We cut them into little sticks or paper-thin wafers, then bathe them in 365-degree oil (A third of America’s potatoes become french fries). We boil them, then mash them with far too much butter and cream. (For the record, I’m 100% on board with too much butter and cream on Thanksgiving … but consider taking it easy on that stuff after the holiday.)

“If you look at nonindustrial agricultural societies around the world who are lean and don’t have metabolic or cardiovascular disease, they don’t fry or pump up their carbs like potatoes with fats,” said Guyenet. “Most of their plate is a plain starch—whether it’s potatoes, rice, sweet potatoes, or cassava—and the rest is a smaller quantity of something more exciting, like a meat with sauce and vegetables.”

If you’re worried about all those carbs, don’t be. The weight of scientific evidence suggests that carbs don’t make you fat. Overeating them does. And that, as the food satiety index study found, is hard to do with plain old potatoes.

For fitness, potatoes are a weird-but-good option. That’s thanks to their relatively high carb content, minerals, and amino acid profile. In the 2% Newsletter from two weeks ago, I explained how I once spoke with a professional ultrarunner who runs with a plastic bag of salty mashed potatoes. When he needs mid-run fuel, he’ll bite a corner from the bag and squeeze the potatoes into his mouth. They’re packed with naturally occurring electrolytes and certainly beat some sour-apple-flavored sugar goo.

Enjoy your potatoes today. And hopefully more days this year. And they don’t have to be bland to remain healthy. Surviving on only white potatoes is doable, but it’s not optimal in the long run. Potatoes lack two vitamins: A and B12. This is why that Dutch researcher in the 1800s gave those five men margarine with their potatoes. It’s also why most potato-dependent cultures eat them with a bit of greens or carrots and a small amount of animal products, like butter, milk, eggs, or meat. So feel free to add a bit of butter or sour cream.

Growing up, I’d always heard of basic, unexciting men referred to as “a ‘meat and potatoes’ kind of guy.” But the more I learn about potatoes, I’m OK with that designation. Because if I just throw some greens or carrots into the mix, I’ll be perfect.