Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast, the show that helps swimmers and triathletes love the water, become a better swimmer, and live a better life. Here’s your host, Brenton Ford. Welcome to the Effortless Swimming Podcast. On today’s episode, I want to talk about a book that I recently read, or listened to, on Audible, called The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. And I think the sign of a good book is you end up binging it because you enjoy it so much. And I certainly did that. It only took about two days to finish because I found the time to get through the book because I was enjoying it so much. And secondly, I think a good book will inspire you to make a change or do something different. And this book certainly did that for me, and I’m going to talk about what it was that I’ve actually changed after listening to this book. One of the concepts in this book that the author talks about is problem

creep. Where as we experience less problems, we don’t become more satisfied, we instead lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. And so you can see as life gets more comfortable, easier, the problems that we create are actually much more trivial than what they would be if we were living in the forest, struggling to find food and water. We’d have some pretty real-life actual problems of where do I get food, where do I get drink, compared to some of the things that we end up creating when life gets really cushy and cozy. I mean, even like an example of this that I noticed personally was that about 18 months ago, I lived just under two hours from the beach. And one of the things that I love to do is surfing. And I’d get quite frustrated that I’d miss days when they were good because I didn’t have the time to travel down two hours there, two hours back to be able to surf often. Or I might miss the best time of the day when the waves are going to be good.

So one of my problems was I couldn’t surf whenever it was good. Now, we’ve recently in the last 80 months moved to the coast where I’m two minutes from the beach and I can typically surf when it’s good. Now I find myself getting frustrated when the surf isn’t good on a day. So that problem or what I experience as a problem is it’s changed. The goalposts have shifted. Then if we get, say, a run of good waves, let’s say there’s four or five days in a row where it’s good and you can surf. Then sometimes I’ll find myself going, but the winds are not in the right direction or it’s too small or I’ve only got half an hour or an hour to be able to surf. So it’s very easy to move the goalposts and change what we consider a problem when life gets easier for us. So it made me realize that I’ve certainly done that myself and that I have to just remind myself to be grateful of what we’ve got and how comfortable life really is in the grand scheme of things.

Now, another thing that he brings up is the Tuffning theory. And he talks about a study that they did at Stanford where the scientists, they stress junk squirrel monkeys by removing them from their family once a week for 10 weeks. And they found that those monkeys became more resilient and capable when they grew up compared to their sheltered siblings. They became leaders, they became doers, and similar results were found in humans who had faced difficult things in life. Now, some people are forced into or thrust into challenging situations or life experiences. And I know for me, overall, life hasn’t been super difficult. A lot of those challenges that I’ve had compared to many other people that I know, so those sort of challenges have to introduce yourself. And the way that the author sort of talked about introducing difficult things into your life, one they call, he calls them Musogi. So he and his friends, there’s this Japanese term called Musogi.

And I think it translates to cold water. So immersing yourself in cold water for long periods of time. And they just kind of use this term for challenges that they would set up amongst themselves as a group. They’d set these challenges that were physically tough and mentally tough, that they had about a 50% chance of actually completing them. And one of the things that he mentioned was, it was something like a five mile

walking a rock along the bottom of the sea floor for five miles. And there was a couple of them, so they’d taken in turns. And I think it took them a full day to do that. And another thing that they did was, they went to the Grand Canyon, and they were trying to make their way around the rim of the Grand Canyon. It was something like, for a memory like 200 kilometers or something ridiculous. They didn’t get it, they only got about halfway, but just setting these really difficult things that they’re not sure that they can make. This podcast is brought to you by Form Goggles. Form empowers swimmers at every level to reach their goals. Whether they want to get stronger, faster, swim further, or be more efficient. Get lap by lap motivation with real time metrics and workout instructions right in your goggles. And Form’s recently released Form Plans, which included progressive series of workouts to help you achieve your fitness, skills, or triathlon goals.

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misogies, I texted two friends and I said, hey, let’s do this walk from where I live down to this other beach. Wasn’t huge, it was, I think, 33 kilometers. So not massive, it was certainly doable, but I just wanted something to have as a bit of a challenge that I could do with others. So we did that last week and it was so much fun. It was physically quite a challenge and I couldn’t straighten my legs for two days because most of it was on soft sand. But that’s like from the book, I had to remind myself like, that’s good. You wanna be going through these tough things that you feel for maybe a few days later and that you’re not sure how they’re going to go. And so we’re just going to continue setting some of these challenges, different places we can hike between and a few other things that I’ve got in mind. I’m going to continue to set them and it really gives me something to look forwards to and to work towards.

And in the past, there’s been an Iron Man, it’s been like a 20K rut in a swim. So whatever it is for you, there’s these physically challenging things that actually make life fulfilling. And I think gives us a greater perspective on what’s important. Because when you do something that’s physically challenging and you’re going through it, you don’t really care about what your boss said or you don’t really care about these other things. It’s just you and the task at hand. And I think it just can give you a greater perspective on the things that are really important. So I really like that idea of what they call misogy.

He also sort of talked about creating your own rites of passage to toughen up your mind and your body. And that’s similar to that, that misogy. And something that came to mind here for me was when I was in my early 20s, myself and some friends would go to a training camp that we’d just organize ourselves up in Far North Queensland. And for, I think it ended up being about five to seven days, depending on which year it was. But yeah, we’d go away in the training camp and we would train in the morning, we’d train at night, we’d run to the pool there and back. And we got so fit over that time. And it was really, really hard training. But it was something that bonded us as a group together really well. And we were doing it in the lead up to this swim event that was held in January. And it was kind of almost like a rite of passage to do this training week, almost like a sort of hell week and to prepare us for this event.

So having something like that to look forward to and becomes a bit of a ritual, I think can be quite important. Another thing that I quite like there is he talked a lot about being in nature without a phone and then just being present in nature. And at least the week after I finished reading the book, I was on my phone a lot less. And I just left it at home, I turned it off and found myself going for walks with the dog or even just like going down to surf but leave my phone at home and just not being on it as much. And then you get this, I felt like I had this space from this space in my mind where things are a lot quieter and calmer. And then I could actually think a lot clearer on what I wanted to do because whenever there’s a moment of boredom or silence and something’s not happening, I personally find that I’ll reach for the phone. Now, the good thing about swimming is that you don’t have your phone on you.

So it sort of forces you to not be on it, but it’s just very easy to always just have that phone there whenever there’s anything, whether it’s silent or there’s boredom creeping in. So I found that that was quite good to do. And another sort of another time that I found this to was a couple of weeks ago. It was school holidays and my mum and dad, they were looking after our kids for a couple of days. So my wife and I would go for a walk after she finished work. And I left the phone at home as we’d go for a walk and we’d walk for probably an hour and a half. And when I didn’t have the phone on me, conversation was so much better, so much more meaningful and I’m not distracted by looking at the phone. But the one time I did take my phone, it’s just you’re not really present. You’re not really there. So I think being in nature without a phone can be very, very helpful. And he talks about the way to combat loneliness

is by staying alone in nature for a while without a phone. So if you could do that for two or three days on, say, a camping trip or a hike or something like that, he says that, you know, the first day kind of like wanting to check your phone, you’re sort of still thinking about all the things going on in life. And then the second day and particularly the third day, you’re able to just kind of get into the swing of things. And I find it’s that tends to happen too. When when I was running when we were running our week camps in Thailand, the first like the first day, the first two would be it felt like I was still sort of caught up in normal day to day life. But then as you’re going into the camp on day three and four and so on, life just becomes what’s happening at camp. And much really present there with with everyone. Everyone’s getting into the groove and it almost feels like there’s not much going on outside of these these four four walls of the camp.

So I think it takes a bit of time to detox, isn’t the word, but just to just to tune out.

The old life or or being on the phone takes a bit of time to settle into that kind of groove. And the last thing that I’ll finish on here is he talks about ditching unnecessary comforts like warmth and food and a number of other things. So what I found myself doing after listening to the book was it talks about it’s good to be cold. You don’t need to be in this climate controlled room or car all the time. So I would force myself to go down to the shops wearing just a t-shirt and it’s like eight degrees outside. So just forcing yourself or letting yourself know it’s OK to be cold at times. And I know there’s a lot of cold water swimmers here. He’ll swim in eight degrees or nine degrees Celsius water here. This isn’t for you guys. You’re already doing it. But just a reminder that it is OK to not be comfortable at all times. And it can actually be a lot, a lot more satisfying when you force you force some discomfort into your life and you make the harder choice.

You take the stairs instead of the elevator or you walk down to the shops to get your food rather than driving. So taking the harder option can actually be much more satisfying. So I just wanted to share some learnings from this book. I thought it was really good. I listened to it on Audible if you’re wondering the best way to get it. But also you can get it as a as a normal book, too. So I hope you enjoyed this one. If you do end up reading the book and perhaps taking some things away from it. I’d love to hear from you and hear what you end up doing with it. So thanks very much for listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. I’ll see you next week with another episode. Thanks for listening to the Effortless Swimming podcast. If you’d like us to help you become a faster, more efficient swimmer, go to www.effortlesswimming.com.