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OccupiedAuthor: Brock Cook
A podcast about Occupational Therapy for Occupational Therapists. Language: en-au Genres: Health & Fitness, Medicine, Mental Health Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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195 – Book Club – The Comfort Crisis
Thursday, 24 September, 2026
In this episode I'm unpacking Michael Easter's The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self — his argument that modern life has engineered discomfort out of almost everything, and what that's quietly costing us physically and mentally. I'm looking at it through an occupational therapy lens, and through my own experience with outdoor challenge and off-grid time. Topics covered: Scarcity vs. abundance — why brains built for scarcity struggle with modern excess of food, choice and stimulation Comfort creep — how yesterday's comfort becomes today's baseline, and the tension between removing barriers (OT's job) and removing all friction (not the same thing) Boredom as a "desire for desires" rather than a problem to eliminate, and what constant stimulation costs us Sensory desensitization — the modern noise load and what it does to stress and cognition Novelty and lifelong learning — and the direct link to OT's own Well Elderly Study evidence Misogi — Easter's 50%-chance-of-failure challenge practice, and how it maps onto the "just-right challenge" already central to OT Book: The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easterhttps://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Reclaim/dp/0593138767 The next book club episode will be about Rutger Bregman's Human Kind: A hopeful History. If you feel so inclined, please grab a copy, have a read and let us know your thoughts! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1408898950/?mr_donotredirect Instagram: @OccupiedPodcastFacebook: Occupied Podcast Host: Brock Cook Subscribe now and never miss an episode!
