Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson The Comfort Trap with Michael Easter
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Mar 2, 2026 
Michael Easter, journalist, professor, and bestselling author who studies how deliberate discomfort builds resilience. He explains why engineered comfort backfires, how variable rewards like social media hijack us, the lost value of boredom and nature, the idea of chosen hardship, and practical practices like rucking and the nature pyramid.
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Losing Mission Fuels The Scarcity Loop
- Humans need a mission; without it we seek easy, immediate rewards and fall into scarcity loops.
- Easter uses pigeons' experiments showing animals prefer variable rewards when caged, but choose predictable, productive options when returned to a full environment.
Delay Purchases With A 72 Hour Cart Rule
- Create simple pause rules to curb impulse purchases online.
- Easter suggests leaving items in your cart for 72 hours and disabling auto-fill so buying requires extra, deliberate effort.
Boredom Restores Creativity And Productive Search
- Boredom is an evolutionary signal that current activity yields low return and should change; modern tech replaces productive boredom with passive distraction.
- Easter reports creativity studies where bored groups produced more creative answers than phone-using groups.
