THE WEDGE

In his previous book, investigative journalist Carney (What Doesn’t Kill Us, 2017, etc.) offered an account of fitness guru Wim Hof’s unorthodox program of breathing exercises and exposure to intense cold. Here, the author examines an expanded concept that he calls “the Wedge,” involving a variety of uncomfortable or unsettling regimens that disrupt one’s climate-controlled routines and foster more creative and healthy responses to stress. He revisits breathing exercises and ice-water baths, which he credits with curing his own autoimmunity-related mouth cankers, and endures agonizing heat in a broiling sauna, which he says cleanses his mind; saunas could also be useful, studies suggest, in alleviating depression. Drugs, he writes, are a multifaceted Wedge; he took Ecstasy with his wife and resolved thorny marital issues in a blissful rapture, thus achieving the equivalent of “eight months of weekly [couples] therapy in just the course of two or three hours,” and drank a Peruvian shaman’s hallucinogenic ayahuasca brew, which initiated a psychedelic trance that, he says, ended his addiction to video games. He also lost five pounds on the “Potato Hack,” a blandly filling all-potato diet that, he asserts, severs the link between hunger and instinctual noshing on tasty food. Carney deftly explains the biological and neurological bases for these unusual nostrums, and the book is full of intriguing research findings about links between the brain, the body, and the environment. (Neurotic anxiety, he writes, may be caused by faulty chemoreceptors in the brain that overreact to carbon dioxide—a universal trigger for panic.) His mystical effusions on the oneness of all being—“I was the mountain…the partition between the environment and what happens inside us is an illusion,” he rhapsodizes when climbing, bare-chested, to Kilimanjaro’s snowy summit—are less cogent, and his idea that “evolution seeks to preserve experience” will baffle evolutionary theorists. Carney sometimes sounds like a spiritual seeker, but his evocative prose and knack for scientific exposition make his urge to transcend the self by pushing his mind and body to their limits seem thrilling and sensible.

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