How to Grow From Doing Hard Things | Michael Easter

Rucking resets your comfort threshold

Carrying weight while hiking forces mindful gait and builds mental toughness by resetting what you consider uncomfortable.

"I'm going to have to link up with all these characters. I have no idea what's going to happen. It's so exciting. The reels of the slot machine are spinning. The dice are falling, same exact thing, but it's channeled into a thing that like becomes more rewarding to me over the long run. And so I would just like to hear, like, how do you think about taking that sort of structure and making it helpful for a person? Yeah, well, the first thing is that the structure and the circuitry is exactly the same for gambling and going out and finding a great story and building a great story and having those experiences, including the pitfalls, the losses. that, by the way, set a lower threshold for what you consider a win. And then you ratchet up through there. And it's like, I'll never forget my dad being a scientist who's been on this podcast before. I'll never forget the first time I published a paper in science, which is like, it's like Super Bowl ring. He didn't say congratulations. You know what he said? He said, expect yourself to feel kind of low in a few weeks and expect yourself to wonder if it will ever happen again. And I said, will it ever happen again? He said, well, if I told you that, then the experience wouldn't be worth much, would it? I was like, damn it. The other thing I'll just, this is answering your question indirectly, but it's meaningful perhaps, is that my graduate advisor, when we published that paper, I was like, are we going to throw a party? Like, are we going to celebrate? She was like, I guess we could get a pizza or something, but the celebration was the work. I was like, what do you mean? She was like, the work was why it was the fun, right? You had fun doing the experiments. I'm like, yeah, but are we going to celebrate? We didn't celebrate it. And as a consequence, humbly, we went on to publish many, many more papers in excellent journals, not all in science, most of them in other journals. But the point being that she was teaching me to attach the reward to the effort. And I was like, ah, the fun is doing the experiments, getting the paper. You have to to take the reward and relegate it to a place below the effort. You can celebrate wins, but you can't let yourself internalize the wins more than the effort to get there. So there's that. So same circuit, it's this dopamine circuitry. And of course, when I say dopamine, that's a proxy for adrenaline and norepinephrine. Adrenaline's operating in the body to make you feel alert. Norepinephrine's operating in the brain to make you feel alert. So those three work together. They're cousins to like get out, get up and go, pursue things. And it doesn't matter if it's a 4.30 wake up or 4 a.m. wake up, sit down and mental movement or it's physical movement. I mean, evolution designed it this way and it's incredibly efficient and it has these pitfalls of gambling. If you have a proclivity for alcohol, alcoholism, or methamphetamine or cocaine, or if you like stimulants or for the process, like, you know, fill in the process addiction, shopping, sex, whatever it happens to be. And that base, you're draining the bank account on these cataclysmans. And then the reset is always abstinence. It's just abstinence, right? And then people in their second or third year of sobriety are like, oh my God, the world just feels so incredible. There are these magnificent moments from things that I just completely missed before. And it's because what brings about pleasure now is at a, you could say it's at a lower threshold, but the level of meaning is sky high relative to before. So there's that. So there's real value to understanding dopamine, catecholamine dynamics because you can identify where you are on the map at a given moment. That can tell you the direction to go. I agree. And I wish I could tell you, you know, you have dopamine catecholamine circuits for writing versus gambling versus wandering through Antarctica, not wandering, but trying to survive Antarctica. It's the exact same circuit. Yeah. Which is, you know, one of the reasons I want to shift us to rucking. Okay. I really dislike rucking, but now you've got me rucking. So tell us why rucking and things like it are so valuable and are distinctly different than like, quote unquote, hitting the gym. So I'll tell you how I sort of came to this realization, started writing about this in the first place is that when we were in the Arctic, we're hunting. So when you look at why humans are good at running, and by the way, we're good at two things. We're good at running and we're good at caring. And I'll tell you why we're good at caring. So the reason we're good at running is because we evolved to run long distances to chase down animals in the heat and spear them. So humans are really good at cooling ourselves in the heat, right? And we can run these long distances. Other animals can't manage their heat. So we'd slowly but surely run down animals. Eventually they would get too hot. They'd topple over from heat exhaustion and then bam, we'd kill them. Okay. So this is a theory called, it's called persistence hunting. So we won the thermoregulation game. We run the, won the thermoreg yeah. So we sweat, we don't have much fur, and then our bodies are also designed for this type of persistence hunting. There's a guy at Harvard, Dan Lieberman, who had this, I think it was in 2004, paper about this. How the reason we're built the way we are, one of the key reasons is so we could run long distances for persistence hunting. So I'm familiar with that research, right? I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. Cool. I'm like, yeah, this explains why I have like, you know, these big butt muscles, these arched feet, these whatever. So we go up to the Arctic, we're hunting, eventually successfully hunt a caribou. And we, you know, we're taking every usable part of it we can. So we load our packs with all this weight. It's like 100-something pounds in this damn pack. And start walking back to camp. And I'm just thinking about this research about, okay, humans evolved to run long distances so we could hunt. Great. But what happens after you actually kill an animal? You got to carry that damn thing back to camp, right? And so it occurs to me, well, wait a minute. We're also pretty unique among animals in that we can carry weight. Like no other mammal can just pick up weight on its own and carry it a long distance. It's like, huh, that's interesting. So I just start looking into this. And yeah, humans are the only mammal that can pick up a weight and carry it a long distance. And it absolutely shaped us into who we are. It allowed us to really conquer the globe because we could take tools into the unknown, right? We can cover these long distances in our two legs and our feet. Our hands are freed up to carry our tools, to carry whatever it might be. And it really turned us into who we are. Now, the thing is, is when you look at running, plenty of people run, right? Like running and marathons, that is a popular activity. But how many people are just like carrying weight as a regular form of exercise? The answer was really not that many. So I'm thinking like, okay, who actually still maybe does this? And it turns out it's the military. So rucking is sort of the main activity of physical training in the military. Just throwing weight in a backpack and going for a long walk. And I've actually started to sort of even shift my language from using the term rucking to simply saying walking with weight or weighted walking. And the reason for that is, is if I tell my mom, hey, you should rock, she goes, oh, okay. And she types in rock and she goes, the hell is this military stuff, Michael? I'm 75 years old. So I've started to call it more walking with weight. So it's a little more approachable for the masses. But I think the benefit of it is that you're getting cardio stimulus because you're covering ground, but you're also getting strength work because you've loaded your skeletal system, your muscular system. And that comes with a lot of benefits. You kind of got this two in one. So it generally will burn more calories per mile than walking or running. And that is simply because you've added extra weight. Of course, if you're running, you might cover more distance in the same amount of time. But if you just compare it by distance, it's burning more calories. And I think it's one of these activities that can really fill in gaps in people's training. And to what you sort of alluded to in your question is, there's a variety of reason it fills in gaps. But one of them is simply that it gets people outside. Like there's a lot of gym people who are like, yeah, I lift all the weights, but like I'm not doing that running thing. A lot of people can't run and like, oh, by the way, walking feels a little too easy. I'm not going to do that. So if you can throw some load on someone and have them go for a walk, it gets them outside. Helps thementially burn fat, it seems compared to something like running. So there's this interesting study and I'll caveat this by saying it was a very small study. I think it was only 12 people because they could only find 12 crazy enough people to do it. It was on backcountry hunters in Alaska. And so these guys carry these heavy packs out into the mountains for a week or whatever and they test them and they ended up losing a significant amount of weight, but it was all from fat. They actually gained a very minute amount of muscle, and that really shouldn't happen in the context of going out and losing weight. You're probably going to lose fat along with muscle, but with this, they ended up losing mostly fat. So I just think it's this amazing activity that we really wove out of our lives due to technology. Humans evolved to carry. People were carrying babies all the time, every day in the past. We'd go hunt and we'd have to carry all the meat back to camp. We would carry food that we gathered, like gathering. We're hunters and gatherers. Gathering is literally walking around, finding some food, carrying it, finding more, carrying it back to camp. And then we got, you know, cars, we got grocery carts, we got XYZ, we got furniture dollies that we don't carry as much. And I think we've lost a really important form of human movement and physical activity that we were literally born to do. And so my suggestion to all the listeners is get some weight and carry it. Easy to throw some weight in the backpack and go for a walk. And it'll be good for you. How much weight and how far? So if someone is just starting, I tell them to start light. I think, so after I published the comfort crisis with the, um, there's a chat, there's an entire chapter on, um, walking with weight or rucking. I got all these people in the military, rucking destroyed me. Okay. Well, how much did the military start you with a hundred pounds? It's like, well, yeah, it's like, if you did anything at that intensity immediately, just immediately went into like the red, you're going to get injured. You know, it could be squatting. It's like, yeah, I tried to max out on my deadlift every time I deadlifted, the first time I deadlifted. Therefore, no one should deadlift. You need to ease into this. So I tell people, women can start with anywhere from five to say 20 pounds suggest, um, men, anywhere from 10 to 30, depending on your fitness level. I would rather have someone really ease in and sort of get used to it. Cause a lot of people will say, yeah, I went a little too heavy and it really sucked. Like I want you to sort of on ramp slowly. And then from there you can build up over time. And so I have plenty of, you know, women who might weigh 130 pounds who now use 30 pounds, which is a significant amount of weight. Um, I'll have men who, you know, maybe they started with 20 and they're like, that's way too light. Like I've, I just have too much of a base of fitness. It's like, okay, good. Well, I'm glad we started there though. So we know for sure. And then they've ramped up to say 40, sometimes 60. I mean, for me, I generally, my sort of go-to weight is probably 35 to 40 pounds. And I find that that's a weight where it's uncomfortable. It's challenging, but it's also not so soul crushing that I'm like, I got to end this walk. I guess this absolutely I can still enjoy it. And of course, I'll go heavier sometimes. If I'm going really far, sometimes I might be like 20 pounds or something. I think it's really just like start light, take a walk, see how that feels. It doesn't have to be too complicated. Yeah, I said I hate rocking, but I love the way I feel afterwards. Maybe that's the form of exercise I don't like. There, I just outed myself as not liking a certain – I find that it forces me to pay attention to some of the smaller stabilizing muscles."