How Do Your Comfort Zones Impact Your Life?
Everyone has multiple comfort zones that they exist within
Even when a given comfort zone is unideal and maybe unhelpful to me and my life, that doesn’t mean leaving it is ever easy. Why? Because comfort zones are comfortable due to their familiarity. And the familiar is often comforting – even when not good for us.
There is always more than one depending on what it is and how it impacts you.
How do you recognize your comfort zones?
First – it’s important to understand that comfort zone doesn’t mean being comfortable. A comfort zone is a place of rote, routine, habit, and familiarity that makes it an environment where you feel stable.
A stability zone would be a better phrase. But let’s not confuse matters.
This is the paradox of comfort zones. Often, it’s the stability therein that causes us to hold to them – even when they’re not actually comfortable.
They’re by no means always places. Comfort zones can apply to people and self-care, too.
How do they impact your life?
This can be distressing. Why? Because many so-called comfort zones aren’t comfortable at all. They’re simply familiar.
A great deal of the sense of being stuck, incomplete, and like something is missing is often tied to a comfort zone. Again, a stable, familiar zone.
Why does this matter? Because if you need and want to change almost anything in your life, it will require leaving a comfort zone. And leaving your comfort zone always require action and intent.
To move out of a comfort zone require conscious awareness – here and now
Mindfulness for leaving comfort zones
Any intentional, willful act of change begins with conscious awareness of what it is you desire to change.
To do so requires mindfulness.
Mindfulness in this context is conscious awareness here and now.
Choosing to make any sort of change is very likely to impact comfort zones. And while the intent is to go somewhere better than where you are – resistance to leaving the familiar of your comfort zone will make it more challenging.
Resistance is connected to the ego.
Everyone has multiple comfort zones that they exist within.
This week’s Applied Guidance for Mindfulness Tool:
Let’s identify one of your comfort zones.
You might have an obvious comfort zone or two. But this is about finding the stability zones and hidden comfort zones.
Write this down.
1. Is there a place – literal or metaphorical – that you frequent? This could be a cubicle, a guided meditation, and the like.
2. When you are in this place, do you feel like it’s stable? Does it feel like you have maybe always been there? Does it feel secure?
3. Does thinking about leaving that place – and not returning – make you uncomfortable?
If you answered yes to question 3 – you’ve identified a comfort zone.
Now that you’ve identified it – is it somewhere you desire to remain, or would you like to leave it? There is no right or wrong answer – you alone know what it is.
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