Dave Asprey - Smarter Not Harder

Dedicated to every drop of sweat you ever shed that didnt get you the results you expected.

Contents

• Stay curious and grounded.
• Be the monk who can meditate at the center of chaos.
• Respond with kindness when you see things that feel stupid.

What kind of person do you want to be? Whatever your answer is, this book is designed to help get you there. It is a book about health and fitness, yes, and it is also a book about all the things that you could do if you had more strength and energy. It is ultimately a book about how to be the best version of yourselfyou, unleashed.

Everyone talks about empathy and compassion, but you have to combine them with curiosity and equanimity, a profound mental serenity, if you want to hold on to your best self and continue to improve even when things get weird. That combination of qualities is what allowed me to navigate confidently through the past few years of truly weird global disruption. Those qualities, blended together, are also the core principles of living a good and happy life. They are essential in times of crisis, but equally essential when our lives seem superficially dull. And they are, as Im sure you know, extremely difficult to maintain consistently. Without even realizing it, most of us let them slip away. Sure, we may achieve them from time to time, but then the grind of daily life gets the better of us. We are too exhausted to allow ourselves to be at peace.

Over and over during the pandemic, Ive heard people talk about yearning to get back to normal, and it sounds wrong to me every time. That ambition is just so ridiculously small. All my life, Ive worked to improve my physical and mental resilienceto become better than normal and to help other people do it, too. The goal is to reach a higher baseline, make that your new normal, and then reach higher again. A period of crisis is the perfect time to move forward. Why would you want to regress to an old normal?

I want other people to have what I have. To be inspired instead of depleted. To be dangerous instead of afraid. By dangerous, I dont mean that you should do stupid things such as crashing your car or burning down your house. I mean that you can take bold risks, pursue dreams, and be unpredictable because you feel free to act like yourself. It sounds like a paradox, but its actually an extremely important truth: Being dangerous makes you safe and calm. Being dangerous blows away the sense of impending doom.

Being dangerous also requires a lot of energy and resilience, which is the reason why so many people imagine that a weak normal is the best they can hope for. Fortunately, there is another truthful paradox that can help you out. It is technically known as slope-of-the-curve biology, but I prefer to call it what it really is: the laziness principle . It is the central idea of this book, and it can transform your life. It boils down to one simple but revolutionary idea:

Laziness can make you strong.

I know, that sounds hard to believe. The reason its hard to believe is that your body has a secret, one that it doesnt want you to know. Your body is faster than you are. It senses, reacts, and responds to stimuli about a third of a second before your brain even knows what its up to. Before your rational human brain can apply courage or willpower and hard work, your body has already sabotaged you. It pumps you full of adrenaline that makes small fears feel like big ones. It transmits pain signals to convince you that little tasks are actually going to require a lot of work, which then gives you lots of reasons not to do them.

Why would your body sabotage you like that? Why would Mother Nature create such an unkind system? Because that is the only way things can be in the natural world. Your body is designed to maximize the likelihood that you will survive, have babies, and perpetuate the species. As a result, there are really only two things your body cares about. The first is not dying. The second is being fantastically lazy, so that you use as little energy as possible in the process of not dying.

Your body wont wait for you to decide what to do when a predator is about to eat you. It will start moving you away to safety long before you can make a carefully considered decision about how to react. Your conscious brain is simply not fast enough to respond to threats, which is why it is not responsible for your survival on a second-by-second basis. The autopilot function in your body provides an amazing advantage for keeping you alive over the long haul. Its the reason that humans are still around on this planet. But it comes with some major drawbacks.

During the course of the pandemic, we experienced those drawbacks in full force. We saw how our bodies reacted to the constant onslaught of uncertainty and scary news. At the beginning, our bodies registered the threat and responded with a flood of stress hormones and powerful feelings of anxiety. When the threat didnt go away, our bodies felt as though we were being relentlessly hunted by an unseen predator. They responded predictablyfirst with stress, then with depression. The reason so many of us were hit so hard is not because we are stupid. Its not because we are weak. Its simply because we are all equipped with an ancient biological system that is trying to keep us alive by making us think we are in charge, when in actuality we arent.

Who Is Really in Control?

Once you realize that your body makes decisions before your brain does, everything looks different. You can now understand the counterproductive responses that hold you back in life. Better yet, you can start to devise ways to hack your bodys systems so that you are in control for realso that you can make your body do what you want it to do.

The key to taking control is learning how to bend the laziness principle to your advantage. Maintaining laziness is one of the primary biological functions of every cell in your body. No cell wants to use any more energy or resources than the absolute minimum necessary. In response to any stimulus, big or small, all the cells in your body decide how to allocate their energy during that precious one-third of a second before you collect your thoughts. Without fail, they choose the path of less work. That makes sense as a survival strategy: if your cells demanded any extra, unnecessary energy, you might run out of food or you might be too tired to run away from a predator. When in doubt, the safest thing to do is to kick back and relax. If you let them, the cells in your body would be perfectly content to spend their lives living in your grandmothers basement playing video games.

That overwhelming tendency toward laziness is the reason why so many people gained weight during the pandemic. We could all have used the huge amounts of downtime we spent locked in our houses to work out, to meditate, to learn new skills, or to improve ourselves in a hundred different ways, but few took that path. Our bodies didnt want us to do those things; improvement requires energy, and our bodies were in a state of anxiety, focused on using less energy, not more. The laziness principle made binge-watching Netflix seem like a great idea.

The pandemic was different for me. I already knew that my body is designed to feel fear before I get to think about it. I had trained my mind to resist that fear, and I had trained my body to do a better job of distinguishing real threats from small threats. More important, I had begun developing strategies to outwit my bodys laziness by working with it rather than trying to fight it.

I want my body to be ready to handle extreme stress and to maintain itself forever. Who doesnt want those things? But my body doesnt want to do that. No ones does. The body automatically resists any demands that require a state of higher-than-necessary energy. Ive never been good at exercising for an hour a day or even a half hour a day for long periods. You probably know that feeling; the laziness of the body eventually overcomes willpower for most people. Over the years, Ive developed a set of biological hacks to guide my body to a more energetic, resilient state, but I always had the feeling that some important element was still missing.