Stepping out of your comfort zone

I dedicate this little post to an interesting debate sparked by our friends at Weltanschauung Italia, whom I greet with admiration.

The subject is as follows. There is constant pressure, both from personal-growth gurus and from “society”, to step out of our comfort zone. The friends at WI rightly point out that sometimes the comfort zone is a simple life chosen consciously, and that this kind of choice is not “a bad thing”.

From my point of view, these days the comfort zone increasingly coincides with a highly dynamic and “stimulating” life, while stepping out of it means choosing a “simple life”.

What I want to stress is that, at least in my case, the “comfort zone” has nothing to do with the outside, but only and entirely with the inside. We live in an age of constant stimuli and augmented reality, where society mythologises the person who is forever changing (job, lifestyle, partner and so on), and where emotional instability and social dynamism are considered qualities. Whoever unwittingly chooses to adapt to this “fashion” is, in a way, in the comfort zone. Of course, in this case the comfort zone is an uncomfortable, suffocating space, but the person living in it experiences the discomfort – in those rare cases where there is any awareness of that dissatisfaction – as necessary for their “growth”. Could we say, in general, that the comfort zone is an unconscious choice of social imitation over one’s own authenticity?

Could we consider that stepping out of the comfort zone is the choice of a simple life, made up of small, great habits that leave room for deepening the few meaningful relationships, and that it is the opposite of the constant search for stimuli? We know very well that devoting oneself to contemplation, creating spaces of silence and broadening one’s horizons are, for most people, uncomfortable situations.

If I ask myself how to recognise one’s “unhealthy” comfort zone, shall we say, as opposed to the “good” one the friends at WI refer to, the only answer that comes to mind is self-observation. Questioning yourself honestly costs nothing and you need nobody else, but how many people today are able to do it? Those who have the capacity to listen and who know authenticity know perfectly well when a choice represents a contrived, unreal “convenience” – a small compromise that leaves us dissatisfied – or the opposite. To understand, we need to look “inside” and not “outside”, and the idea of the comfort zone, at least in my case, is always and only an inner one.

I would add that self-knowledge comes through experiencing the “threshold” and feeling that “friction”, which is a discomfort. For this very reason I still consider it important to step out of one’s comfort zone, even if that more often means moving from complexity to simplicity and not necessarily the other way round.

m.m.