I’m tired of reading ‘get out of your comfort zone’ posts online as a route to personal development or achieving goals. 🥱 Here’s my 6 reasons to stay in your comfort zone.
1. People are suffering from being in a chronic state of mild fight or flight just trying to survive the onslaught of modern life. Encouraging even more of that as a route ‘out’ puts even more pressure on people to be super-human. It’s really OK to just be a normal good-enough human.
2. Do we actually even spend a lot of time in our healthy, regenerative comfort zones? There are lots of unhealthy ways of getting comfort, and people rung out with just keeping up with daily life struggle to switch off and rest well.
3. Our ventral vagal system activates during rest, safety, and comfort. It’s in this nervous system state that great ideas, novel connections, creativity, solutions to problems and contentment tend to occur.
4. Feeling comfortable is a precursor for healthy, deep, nourishing, reciprocal relationships. To face the daily challenges of life right now, we need as much time surrounded by ‘our people’ as we can get. If we’re bringing our ‘comfort vibes’ to others, it facilitates an upward spiral for everyone.
5. Psychological safety, a.k.a feeling comfortable, aids good decision making. Good decision making facilitates good work life balance. Good work life balance is a sustainable life that avoids burnout, so you can keep on bringing your gifts to the world.
6. Over-achievers and perfectionists are driven by a pursuit to heal the adversity or historical trauma through outward successes. It will never scratch the deeper itch. Let's replace pushing a human-doing more with a human-being just as they are, and learning to be OK in that being-ness.
In short, it’s not about getting out of your comfort zone, it’s about ways to expand your comfort zone.