Michael Easter

Michael Easter is an American health journalist and author whose The Comfort Crisis argues that embracing discomfort and hardship is essential for physical and mental wellbeing.

Michael Easter is a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a contributing editor at Men’s Health magazine who writes about the intersection of health, human behaviour, and the natural world. The Comfort Crisis (2021) emerged from his decision to spend a month in the Alaskan wilderness with a group of hunters — an experience he uses as a frame for exploring the broader argument that modern comfort culture has removed the challenges that shaped human physiology and psychology, with significant negative consequences for health, resilience, and wellbeing.

The book draws on research across evolutionary biology, psychology, and medicine to argue that voluntary exposure to discomfort — cold, fasting, sustained physical effort, time in nature without stimulation — produces measurable health and psychological benefits. Easter is a skilled science journalist, and he manages to make research on subjects like misogi (a Japanese practice of attempting one very hard thing per year) and the effects of boredom on creativity genuinely compelling. The narrative thread of the Alaska trip gives the book momentum and grounds the more abstract claims in visceral experience.

The honest assessment is that The Comfort Crisis is not a deeply original thesis — the argument that modern comfort is making us soft has been made in various forms by many writers — but Easter synthesises the research well and writes engagingly. Some of the more ambitious causal claims deserve scrutiny, and the book occasionally skews toward male-coded ideas of hardship and achievement. But for readers interested in re-examining their relationship to discomfort and looking for both scientific grounding and practical inspiration, it is a genuinely worthwhile read.