Nick DiMaggio’s Reviews > The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self > Status Update

Exercise-induced fatigue is predominantly a protective emotion. It’s a psychological state has little to do with a person’s limits.

“It is the nature of desire to get one thing and immediately want the next thing.”

Time in nature is a hell of a way to calm the turbulent sea inside our minds.

And so, despite what productivity gurus will have us believe, the key to improving productivity and performance might be to occasionally do nothing at all. Or, at least, not dive into a screen. It prompts us to think distinctly, in a way that delivers more original ideas.

“Building the capacity to be alone probably makes your interactions with others richer. Because you’re bringing to the relationship a person who’s actually got stuff going on in the inside and isn’t just a connector circuit that only thrives off of others.”

New situations kill the mental clutter. In newness we’re forced 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. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids. Everything was new then and we were constantly learning.

Lapsing into glow requires two conditions: The task must stretch a person’s limits and it must have a clear goal. The flow state is a key driver of happiness and growth. It is the opposite of apathy. Flow has the “potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strengths and complexity of the self.”

As we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. We end up with the same number of troubles. Except our problems are progressively more hallow.