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The last episode of Alone in the Wild is tonight. The incredible Ed Wardle continues his journey into the Yukon wilderness, while we watch his beard grow and his stomach shrink and ask ourselves why he ever agreed to do this. I’ll never read an adventure book the same way again.

One thing that’s amazed me throughout is Ed’s psychological resilience. In the last episode he convincingly told us (I paraphrase):

My chest hurts, my legs hurt, I’m hungry and sore. My pack is rubbing against my back. But I’m happy. I’m happy.

In his award-winning book Stumbling on Happiness, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains one reason for this:

We might think of people as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness. This metaphor is unusually appropriate. The physical immune system must strike a balance between two competing needs: the need to recognise and destroy foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and the need to recognise and respect the body’s own cells.

If the physical immune system is hypoactive, it fails to defend the body against itself and we are stricken with autoimmune disease. A healthy physical immune system must balance its competing needs and find a way to defend us well – but not too well.

ps. More prosaically, for those wondering why Ed’s so obsessed with salmon, the answer is here.

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