5 Steps to Crack the Code of Our Comfort Zone

Why do we have this thing called comfort zone and why is it so darn important and compelling to live in?

Our nervous and endocrine systems have evolved over the past 250 million years to keep us safe and perpetuate the survival of our species. This finely tuned and concerted combination of thoughts, emotions, and bodily reactions is truly miraculous and has succeeded in keeping us alive…but are we truly thriving? Could this very elegant and complicated system built to keep us safe, be the very same culprit holding us back from our hopes and dreams?

The comfort zone is often defined as “a place or a situation where one feels safe or at ease and without stress.” As individuals, we are always unconsciously scanning for danger everywhere all the time whether at work, home or everywhere in between. Our built-in survival mechanisms always want to feel safe and secure in our jobs, families, friendships, and in society at large.  This never-ending quest to feel at ease and therefore without stress restricts us from stretching our skills, abilities, and imagination and truly engaging with the opportunities life presents on a daily basis.

Life as a human can be a scary place, full of challenging situations, loss, and disappointment. Personally and professionally, we have all experienced setbacks and even failures that gave us direct feedback that fitting in is good and standing out is bad. Loss of significant relationships even jobs generally reinforces the need to conform to the expectations of others and by doing so safety and stress reduction are achieved. Unfortunately, this default path of staying safe and pleasing others also dramatically impacts our ability to strive, thrive, and grow.

With our built-in subconscious systems seemingly on autopilot, constantly tracking danger and moving us away from it, will often lead us to a life that does not align with our stated goals and dreams. Unless we take the time and effort to consciously and gradually override some of these programs, they will be by default self-fulfilling. As we attempt to step out of comfort, without us knowing, our default systems left unchecked, will pull us back into comfort and we will find ourselves back where we started repeatedly…asking ourselves. “I was going over there…. How the heck did I get back here?” 

Often when you see quotes and articles on the idea of comfort zone it seem as bad. Like the quote I started this with from Farrah Gray “Comfort Zone is the enemy of achievement”. This idea that our comfort zone is bad and that living in some other zone is good is making a core part of us bad in a way. My suggestion is to look at our built-in Comfort Zone as something we need to first understand and then expand. Not something to work against, but to embrace. It’s running behind the scenes, let’s call it out and make it work for us, instead of against us. Let’s consciously mould and shape it, instead of allowing comfort to mould and shape our lives.

Taking the important first step of moving the “comfort zone” from a catchphrase to an ever-deepening understanding of our complex human systems is a big and lifelong commitment. Developing strategies to not resist the seductive and 95% unconscious pull of comfort, but actually understand and harness these psychological and biological systems to help us move into the driver’s seat of our lives, and consciously steer towards our hopes and dreams to absolutely the key to long-term success!

Challenge Zone

Success is not always achieved by the smartest person, but often by those who can experience discomfort for longer periods of time than the next person. By doing so what was once uncomfortable, becomes comfortable (the comfort zone expands). Like building muscle at the gym, first, we need to experience some strain while we break the muscle down by stressing it with some resistance over time. Our miraculous internal systems then react by rebuilding it bigger and stronger than it was before the stress, better prepared for the next time. We humans are extremely adaptive and built to continually grow. What is true for the muscles of our bodies, or also true for all our internal systems such as the various psychological and biological systems that make up our comfort zone. We can build our comfort zone bigger like a muscle at the gym.

To deepen our understanding of the comfort zone, we need to understand the very thing we are avoiding…STRESS! The common mistake is that our comfort zone system is something we move towards…always seeking comfort. But to get a clear understanding I would see it as a moving away system…moving us away from stress. It is a stress avoidance system that is running 24/7. By understanding stress and its role in our comfort zone system, we can, like a muscle at the gym strategically stress the system so it expands and is ready for the next challenge. Robin S. Sharma says it well “As you move outside your comfort zone, what was once unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.” We want this elegant system to work for us…not against us. We want to pursue our goals and dreams daily to become our new normal.

How much stress is enough stress and what happens when we exceed what we can handle?

Stress as defined by the World Health Organization:

• Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives. 

• Stress can be defined as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation.

Like the gym where we purposely go to challenge our bodies (stress them) so they will adapt and grow we need to create a similar challenge to our comfort zone. We need just enough tension to stimulate our internal resources, problem-solving, and creativity to new heights. This will vary dramatically from person to person, some with a high capacity for stressful situations over long periods of time, and others with a small amount of stress will send them running back to the safe space of their comfort zone.

So that we can more consciously look at these various areas, it would help if we label them. We all know the comfort zone. Let’s call the next area beyond the comfort zone, the one where there is just enough stress and tension to stimulate internal resources and thus growth drawn from our gym example as the challenge zone. This is the area where we can safely play and stimulate all internal resources, such as problem-solving and creativity. It is the workout space for the mind/body and spirit. The space of the once “Unknown and frightening” gets to become our “new normal.” 

Knowing we need to create tension through manageable levels of stress to grow is a HUGE step to building our comfort zone and having it work for us, not against us. Continually playing in the challenge zone is the key to expanding your comfort zone.

Danger Zone

We have looked at the comfort zone and challenge zone, but what happens when the stress is too much for us to handle? If we continue with the gym reference, if on our first day at the gym we decided to try for the Olympic bench press record we would likely be extremely disappointed and would hurt ourselves very badly in the process. But if we set breaking this record as a first-day or short-term goal, we would be setting ourselves up for failure as it would take years and years of decided training to even come close to this feat of strength. When we reach for a zone so outside of our daily comfort, most likely setting ourselves up for failure is a zone we will call the Danger Zone (cue Top Gun music).

Often when we hear quotes like “The comfort zone is nothing else but a graveyard for your dreams & Ideas.” We will often respond with BIG thoughts and ideas that stretch far beyond our comfort zone. But because the idea is dramatically different than our day-to-day life, we rebound quickly and with some force back into our comfort zone. Thinking WOW…I will never do, be that again, way too scary. We go at change with an all-or-nothing mentality. If I cannot have this BIG goal, then it is back to comfort I go. This way of approaching the comfort zone most often completely jumps past the challenge zone (the place for healthy stress and tension that stimulate growth) into the scare the shit out of me zone. The trouble with this strategy is that it puts our nervous system into HIGH alert and at the first sign we are not OK (and we are looking for them everywhere) we will slingshot back into comfort at lightspeed.

Jumping to danger zone activities that will more often than not have negative consequences will not only not achieve your goals it will also reinforce the need to stay in the safety of the comfort zone. Our goal in consistently spend time in our challenge zone so that our nervous system rewires and adapts, internalizing these new behaviors into part of an ever-expanding comfort zone. We want to continually challenge ourselves at just the right amount so that our comfort zone is always expanding to include new beliefs, behaviors, skills, and abilities.

Many of us have experienced the push and pull of these various zones, comfort, challenge, and danger in both our personal and professional lives. I know for me one of my biggest comfort zone leaps was when I decided to quit my corporate job as director of sales and marketing and start my own sales agency. Leaving the comfort of a steady paycheck, and a support team was frightening, to say the least. I had a couple of things working in my favour to help me from rebounding back to corporate life.

1. Many years as a B2B salesperson helped with dealing with the ebbs and flows of a variable income.

2. Building businesses for other people gave me the confidence I could build one for myself.

3. I took a small contract from the company I was leaving to help bridge the gap financially while I got things up and running.

4. My time as director gave me a great overview position to see more of the moving parts of what makes a successful business.

These factors and a few others helped me go into self-employment with a fairly expanded comfort zone from day one, but even with that in place, there were many times when uncertainty almost got the best of me and I was tempted to pack it in many times.

This quote from Chelsea Erieau “Stress acts as an accelerator: it will push you either forward or backward, but you choose which direction.” Really clarifies what we have been going over so far. We want the right stress in our lives (stress by our own design), the state of tension it creates is the key ingredient we need to grow. The tension stimulates us to reach for internal resources on problem-solving, creativity, connection, and communication to name a few. The right stress consistently applied challenges us and expands our world, acting like an accelerator for growth.  The wrong stress overwhelms our nervous system, quickly shrinking our world and sending us running back to safety and comfort.

If picking the right stress is key to growth and expanding the comfort zone, then how do we do that?

1. Accept that you have a comfort zone and that it is running the show 90+ percent of the time.

2. Knowing that your comfort zone exists and may be holding you back, be willing to challenge it so you can expand it in the direction of your hopes and dreams.

3. Engage in healthy stress whenever possible, this could take many forms. Reading books that challenge belief systems, taking courses for personal and professional development, find ways to challenge your mind, body and spirit. You need the tension to stimulate all your resources. 

4. Always have an attitude of growth and see opportunities for learning everywhere you look.

5. If you don’t have access to great mentors or coaches in your personal or professional life, hire one…invest in yourself.

As we stated at the beginning of this article, our comfort zone does a miraculous job of helping us survive in an increasingly complex world. But unless we take the time to step back and understand the psychological and biological systems running behind the scenes, the very system meant to keep us alive will at the same time stop us from living.

Dave Fyfe

Business Success Coach and Strategist