Name: The Comfort Zone
Rating: 4.3 (464 reviews)
Author: Kristen Butler

What’s in it for me? Ditch the discomfort mindset and embrace your flow.

Flip through any motivational or self-help book, and you’ll likely come across some version of this core message: You’ve got to push yourself beyond your comfort zone to accomplish anything worthwhile. The author heard these messages early in childhood, and embraced the idea that unless she pushed herself, lived on a growth edge, and leaned into her discomfort, she’d never achieve her goals.

And for a while, it worked. She studied hard, became obsessed with her goals and spent every waking moment pushing herself to achieve them. She crammed her college schedule to the brim, networked constantly despite being an introvert, and pushed all those uncomfortable feelings away, telling herself that the discomfort was actually good. It was a sign of growth.

That’s exactly how she burned out, too. Despite all the praise for her many achievements, she felt empty and apathetic. Worse still, she’d taught herself not to listen to her intuition, not to take her own needs seriously and honor them. So she missed all the warning signs of impending breakdown. By her early twenties, wracked with anxiety and depression, obesity and ill-health, she had a complete mental and physical collapse. Feeling like a failure, she knew something had to change. But it would take several more breakdowns before it did.

Finally, at rock bottom, she began to honor the quiet voice of intuition that told her it was okay just to be her. Not the grind-culture, go-get-’em hustle queen whose self-worth rose and fell with her latest accomplishment, but just her authentic, positive, and happy self. The one who liked having time to reflect, to connect deeply with others and herself. When she made those things a priority, things even got easier as she began to thrive.

So this Blink will bust some long-standing myths around what it takes to succeed, starting with the idea that you can’t grow or succeed without suffering for it. It will take an honest look at the costs of living outside your comfort zone for too long, and how you can avoid it by nurturing your intuition and making comfort a priority. Then it offers some practical advice to help you chart a new course toward the life you dream of – without ever leaving your comfort zone.

No pain, no gain? Think again

Take a moment and imagine a time in your childhood when you had trouble doing something, like your math homework or learning to ride a bike. What kinds of things did people around you say about it?

For many, the answer might have been something like, You’re just not trying hard enough, or If you want to get better at anything, you have to work hard. Or perhaps it was the ever-encouraging Nothing comes easy.

The real message in these comments is simple: anything worthwhile in life comes with a high price in effort, time or discomfort. Whether at school, work, in sports, or even around the family dinner table, the belief that hard work is the only way to achieve your goals is an accepted paradigm.

And beliefs matter more than you may think. The human brain believes things, like messages it hears from parents, teachers, religious leaders, media, or peers, and then actively looks for evidence to support those beliefs. The idea that experience determines your beliefs is actually false. Called confirmation bias by English psychologist Peter Wason, it's an all-too-human tendency to ignore evidence that contradicts one’s beliefs, and unconsciously seek confirmation of them instead.

So if you believe that you can only build a life you love by working incredibly hard all the time, you’re going to look for evidence that this is true. You’ll completely ignore the fact that this belief is actually chaining you to discomfort, anxiety, and stress. Even worse, this belief is based on the idea that there’s some fundamental deficit you have to make up for by pushing yourself to grow in uncomfortable ways – that you can only accomplish worthwhile things by working against your own nature and not being your authentic self.

That’s why the first step in finding your comfort zone is to seek out beliefs like this and start to challenge their implicit messages. If you’ve internalized the idea that your self-worth is tied to your achievements, you may feel compelled to keep pushing yourself as a way of life. That’s a recipe for burnout and exhaustion, and for denying yourself the love and compassion you so richly deserve just for being you.

So the next time you feel compelled to say “yes” to setting a goal or taking on a challenge regardless of how anxious or fearful it makes you, pause for a moment and ask yourself why you feel that way. You may discover that these beliefs are trapping you outside of your comfort zone, keeping you in places that are far less conducive to living a life you love.

Zones of living

If you’re not in your comfort zone right now, feeling authentic and fulfilled with life, you may be experiencing another zone of living that is far less pleasant. So let’s take a closer look at the three zones of living, to understand why choosing the comfortable one makes real sense.

When you’re not in a place where you feel fulfilled, authentic, and connected to the things that truly matter to you, then you’re living in either the survival zone or the complacent zone.

Create with comfort in the flow zone

If the survival and complacent zones are ultimately about acting from feelings of fear, anxiety, self-judgment, and lack of self-worth, let’s take a closer look at what living in a comfort zone might feel like.

Try to remember a time early in your life when you discovered something that made you feel incredible. Perhaps it was learning to ride a bike, or the first time you applied finger paints to a canvas. Maybe it was the first time you sang a whole song by yourself, or read a book out loud.

Growing in comfort: expanding the comfort zone

Remember the old fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare? Everyone bets the hare will win, given its quick and energetic nature. It is in fact the tortoise who wins, however, because he keeps a steady pace right up to the finish line, while the hare burns out. This idea of moving at your own pace and winning the race is timeless, but the story has even more lessons to impart.

Think of the tortoise’s shell as its comfort zone. It has everything it needs to feel safe and at home right there. From this safe place, it takes on the challenge of the race, knowing full well that if it stops anywhere along the way, it will be just fine. It is safe at home the entire time.

Key ideas in The Comfort Zone