This post discusses two types of comfort zones – the healthy comfort zone and the unhealthy comfort zone. I find these two types of comfort zones represent our tendency to live in the way we choose. The comfort zone is the zone where we live with stability, low risk, familiarity, and little challenges.
On the edge of the comfort zone lies the narrow zone of living on the edge of chaos. We experience this zone when we step out of our comfort zone in slow steps to meet new challenges, experiences, and opportunities. It is learning something new. We need not stay in this zone for a very long time. We may drop back to our comfort zones and assimilate the new learning, unlearn what needs to be, and enhance our skills by grasping the newly acquired ones.
If we are very daring and risk-takers, we may step out of our comfort zones in big steps into the uncertain zone- the danger zone. The uncertainty of this zone means that anything could happen that plunges us into chaos.
It is the zone where we encounter the extreme hangover effect.
Stretching beyond your comfort zone is curiosity. Only by stepping into the edge of the chaos zone, we may experiment curiously with creative ideas. This way we learn and grow.
What I described above is a healthy comfort zone. So what is the unhealthy one?
The Unhealthy Comfort Zone
Some people fall into the unhealthy comfort zone because they are happy to live with their fears hopelessness and no aspirations. They find their comfort in being worried and hiding in the shell of their comfort zones that are not.
One example is what the ancient Arab poet said “Is not their death for sale so that I might buy it”?
Some people accept living their lives in negativity. Instead of expanding their comfort zone, they shrink it.
The Inner and Outer Journey of Life
The writing of this post coincided with a great post that Biljana Savic shared. In her post, Biljana mentioned two journeys of life- the inner journey and the outside journey. When we limit ourselves to an inner journey, we may tend to fall in a comfort zone where we need to step out and share an outside journey with others.
When we mix with others, we gain new experiences and skills and gain new knowledge. We need then to go back to our comfort inner zone and internalize the acquired skills, lessons, and experiences. This is how we expand. Once we do that we need to venture again and share another outside journey.
Same with people who place their comfort zone in the outside journey. They need to step into their inner journey and experience the value of journeying inside self. This helps us learn and expand on our potential.
It is not a matter of being in a comfort zone as much as it is about stepping outside the comfort zone and experiment new life.
Extend This Analogy to All Opposites
The balance in life that brings growth is not living in one opposite but also stepping into the zone the edge of chaos where we experience the opposite of what we enjoy in our comfort zone.
Take positive and negative thinking. If someone is thriving in the comfort zone of positive thinking then he needs to step on the edge of chaos where he experiences some negative thinking. This alerts him to new risks and prevents him from getting too optimistic and being more realistic.
The reverse is true. If somebody lives in the unhealthy zone of negative thinking then he needs to step outside this zone and walk into the zone of the edge of chaos. He shall find that there is hope and that life is not as gloomy as he thought it was.
Life is about balancing our inner and outside journeys and experiencing both.
Thank you for pointing out this wise life message of yours to me. And you know by now how attached I am to the concept that “life is about balancing our inner and outer journeys and experiencing both.”
Everyone has within themselves an “internal continent”, which they will never stop exploring and which no one else will be able to explore in their place. But the internal journey often provides a reason for the external journey and animates its paths. The motivations for the two journeys, then, may be similar: tiredness and dissatisfaction with the present, curiosity for the new, thirst for meaning, the voice of something or someone calling us. The important thing is to be active protagonists of the choice: because choosing means excluding, distinguishing from the essential what is not indispensable, which makes us move and live, forces us to give up what, perhaps good in itself, would end up hindering the path, invites us to ask ourselves what to take with us from our past, and what about the new experience can help us grow.
This is the “king” comment for me Aldo Delli Paoli because you reflected accurately whatI wished to communicate in this post.
In particular what you wrote deeply “The motivations for the two journeys, then, may be similar: tiredness and dissatisfaction with the present, curiosity for the new, thirst for meaning, the voice of something or someone calling us”.
Dissatsfaction is a powerful motivator. The opposite is true because people who live in satsfaction in their comfort zones seek stabiliy on the expense of growth.
Equally important is your highlighting the need to figure out what lessons to take with us from the past and what helps us grow.
This is a crucial point because if we dwell too much on the past little time shall be left for us to grow.