Do You Recognize Your Comfort Zones and How They Impact You?
Everyone has multiple comfort zones that they exist within.
One of the biggest challenges I have when it comes to walking my chosen life path is moving out of my comfort zones.
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.
While I’m working on writing novels I’m also doing a multifaceted part-time job that’s a blend of administration, management, public relations, writing, digital, and creative work. I’ve also started a new paid gig writing blogs on specific topics requiring research on my part.
To juggle the demands of both jobs, I’ve had to be more diligent about my time management. This has had the effect of pulling me out of my comfort zone.
The reality is that I need to leave this comfort zone behind.
Why? Because since I work from home exclusively, I’m wholly responsible for how I use my time. There are deadlines to be met that require me to manage my time more effectively than I have been. And that impacts a comfort zone.
A comfort zone. Because 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.
Stability zone would be a better phrase. But let’s not confuse matters.
If you have worked in the same cubicle in the same office for a decade, it’s a familiar and stable space. When I worked in cubicles I tended to decorate and “nest” for an added sense of familiarity and comfort.
Thing is, it might be completely stable – but what if you hate your job? What if even though it’s a familiar place and experience – you’re not comfortable with it?
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.
This is why people stay in relationships that are bad for them. Being familiar and stable equals a comfort zone.
Hence, many comfort zones are taken for granted. Likewise, when they’re more about stability than comfort, they can be deceitful.
They’re by no means always places. Comfort zones can apply to people and self-care, too.
For example – I’ve been wearing my hair shaved close to the scalp for about 25 years. Recently, I decided to let it go. Would it fro like it used to? What’s it like now that it’s salt and pepper? And the biggest question – since this takes me out of the familiar “comfort zone” of my close-cropped hair – how long will I let it go?
This might seem silly – but how I’ve maintained my hair for 25 years is a comfort zone. It’s also a great example of how recognizing your comfort zones can be challenging.
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.
Jobs we stick with that aren’t good for our health, relationships that are bad for our wellbeing, and things we do to not inconvenience others but inconvenience and upset us are all examples of the familiar that become comfort zones.
Until you identify and recognize your comfort zones, you can’t know how they’ll impact you.
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. And that’s why you must recognize your comfort zones – so that you know what and where they are. Then you can better move out of them.
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. Specifically, conscious awareness of your mindset/headspace/psyche self via present knowledge of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. This knowing, in the present moment, doesn’t just inform you of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what you intend, and what actions you are, aren’t, can, or can’t take. It also empowers you to control and change them.
Change is the only constant in the Universe. Often, it’s utterly and completely outside of your control. But not always. When it comes to you and your life – given you’re the only one in your head, heart, body, and soul – changing yourself is what you can and do control.
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.
What is this resistance and where does it come from?
The ego
The ego, as I conceptualize it, is a bridge between your conscious self and subconscious self. It was created at a time when you were consciously working in your subconscious and aware of your beliefs, values, and habits therein at that time.
The ego is then both how you project yourself to the world at large and reflect yourself back to yourself. Often, the ego is – if not whispering in the ear of your subconscious when it’s driving by habit, rote, and routine – doing the driving.
Because most people don’t regularly practice mindfulness via conscious awareness in the present – the ego is how they identify. It’s who you have been, as far as you know, for a given period.
The ego loves stability. It seeks it. Even uncomfortable stability in undesirable places. Ergo – the ego wants to stay in given comfort zones.
This is why the ego will hold you to comfort zones you desire to leave. Recognizing this, however, opens the way for you to make new choices and fight any resistance you meet as you move forward.
Remember – you’re worthy and deserving of living the life you desire. While leaving comfort zones can be massively uncomfortable – it can also be utterly worth it.
Everyone has multiple comfort zones that they exist within.
Do you know your comfort zones and how they might be impacting you?
This is the five-hundred and seventy-eighth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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