The Petrified Comfort Zone

How big is your comfort zone? Is it growing or shrinking? Has it petrified? All of us live inside an area called a comfort zone. It’s the imaginary space containing all the activities we have done often enough to feel comfortable about. It also contains our ideas about where we belong, how we should live, what we do socially, and so on.

You can visualize this zone of comfort as a circle, if you like, but the wall of that circle is not really there to protect us. It is made up of fear and self-imposed limitations. We like to believe that the wall keeps us safe, but perhaps you’ve noticed that it doesn’t work that way.

What that wall keeps us from, in truth, is getting all the things we want most. If we are willing to venture outside of it often enough, we overcome our fear and our zone of comfort expands. Not only that, when we expand our comfort zone in one area, it automatically expands in others, as well.

However, if we give in to our fears, that zone contracts. For some people, their comfort zone is just about the size of their apartment. There they sit, making up reasons why it’s better for them to stay put, convincing themselves they are better off. We see this often in the elderly, as they allow their worlds to get smaller and smaller. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way.

So, what’s the answer? To start, get up, get moving, and conquer your fears by doing what you need to do. Small steps first, and then the bigger ones. Little by little, day by day, you banish that old petrified comfort zone.

Being ruled by fear is not living safely. In fact, it’s not really living at all.