Overcome Avoidance to Break Out of the Comfort Zone

The comfort zone — essential for relaxation and peace of mind, yet slow death.

The comfort zone can be defined as the state in which you experience no anxiety; where your environment is according to your preference and under control. It’s your home base where you gather your thoughts after the previous adventure and set the stage for the next.

Having a home base is indispensable for your mental health, but it can also be detrimental — what if you get too comfortable there? Given its nature as a relatively stress-free state of being, it can be tempting to visit too frequently or stay too long when you do. You can even end up staying indefinitely if there is a period of chronic stress in your life. Sticking to the comfort zone can also result from not having clear, inspiring goals to move you.

Sticking to the known will eventually lead to stagnation, boredom, and depression. It can also give you a false sense of mastery over your life, where you think you have your life well in hand, but in actuality are avoiding the majority of it. It can also cause you to believe you have a better understanding of the world and people than you do since you are not being exposed to much.

The tug-of-war between the comfortable & known and uncertainty & progress is hard to settle and will disturb your peace of mind and prevent you from making the kind of progress you would like.

Risk & reward

It’s hard to give up on tried & tested, but the rewards are significant: Increased self-confidence, skills, understanding, psychological resilience, meeting new people, and discovering new things you like are among the expected rewards that cause people to venture outside their comfort zone.

Even when people end up staying too long in the comfortable and no promised reward can lure them out, they are usually driven outside eventually by the negatives. It could be feelings of stagnation, boredom, depression from feeling stuck, or horror at watching life pass away before them.

The problem, of course, is the risk, and also getting started from a position of inertia. Starting the ball rolling is not complicated, but could take a few tries. Simply find a few of the easiest things you could do to make a beginning on your venture and persist until you are up and running. A related problem is a possible lack of energy. I should say, the feeling of a lack of energy. This is most likely a perception rather than a reality; when you get started and take action, the needed energy will appear.

The major obstacle is an aversion to risk. Given the inner reluctance to suffer risk, simple persistence is unlikely to be enough. Depending on how risk-averse you have traditionally been, there could be enormous psychological resistance to contend with. But, it’s a necessary effort given how great the rewards are.

A depressed mind and a vision of the future

So, how to overcome the fear and avoidance of risk?

Start by figuring out what the smallest thing you can do is. Something not too challenging, but still relevant. Notice what comes up in the mind and body when you contemplate taking action on this. Beneath any reluctance and tiredness, you will find mind-generated excuses (in the form of words or images). These are key to understanding the aversion. The root of aversion in this early, simple stage of change is in essence the same as for the bigger things, and if you can figure it out, you will be well on the way to solving the entire problem.

For example, what comes up is likely a projected negative outcome: people reacting poorly, some minor disaster taking place on the way, picturing yourself feeling bad, judging yourself as unworthy in some way, picturing a repeat of a failed past endeavor, or picturing yourself trying and failing to do the thing. These are all mental projections of a negative outcome. They are spawned either from an unjustifiably pessimistic/depressed mind or from actual negative experiences.

This type of projection seems to be by far the most common reason for aversion, and they have the two principal causes of a depressed mind and negative experiences. The negative projections and the causes have a symbiotic relationship, where the depressed mind spins out negativity, which in turn confirms and feeds the mindset. Meaning, that the problem can be tackled from either end or, ideally, from both angles simultaneously.

Quieting down the visions of disaster would help a great deal with the depressed mind, and lightening the burden of the mind would slow down the fabrication of pessimistic projections. Let’s get an overview of some methods for accomplishing this:

• Mindfulness: Keep continual watch for the depressing anticipations of the future and simply look away from them in the mind. Refuse to give them attention; “Turn it off”. You will find a good introduction to mindfulness here.
• Write it down: Use your mindfulness to detect the negative thoughts and projections that refuse to go and quickly counter them with more favorable, but still realistic, versions. Do it in your mind if you are on the go, but, if at all possible, write them down, as getting the thoughts out of your head is a great help. Write down both the negativity and the optimistic (but realistic) counter. Do this with every single depressed thought you notice, no matter how small or frequent; the stream of such thoughts will soon subside. What is described here is a simplified version of CBT. You will find a good rundown of it here, and worksheets here.
• Positivity: Add more positivity to your mind to act as a counterbalance. As the mind becomes more neutral and eventually optimistic, the mind will produce fewer and fewer obsessive fears about the future. You can find an overview of methods here.

Any other methods related to combatting negativity, pessimism, and depression would obviously apply as well, but the methods above are a good entry point.

Engage and progress

Having sufficiently overcome the risk aversion, you find yourself outside the current bounds of the known. Finally, you have the chance to test your skills, stretch your abilities, try new things, and really challenge yourself — a whole new world has opened up.

Engage! — Captain Picard, Star Trek

In this state, suitable opportunities are grasped without hesitation and you follow your goals in any direction necessary, but, even though life is now wide open, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

It’s not a state of recklessness or rushing anything. Waiting and watching needs to be properly balanced with action, without sacrificing either. If you were to rush it and take stupid risks, you would likely end up failing and getting hurt, confirming some of your original fears, and making you want to retreat from the world again. Planning and smart risk-taking are key to sustainable progress.

Once in a lifetime

Of course, slow and steady isn’t always what is called for. Sometimes rare opportunities present themselves and there is great reward in successfully seizing them. These are the moments you are really looking for (or at least hoping for); the kind that has the potential to change your life. And if you are actively working towards them and looking for them, the odds will eventually favor you. These are the times that call for tolerating extra risk and perhaps even rolling the dice.

This willingness to go with it and take the chance could be better described as courage than as risk-taking.

“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.” ― Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo

Greater risk bordering on recklessness is justifiable in these situations; the chance must not be missed. Looking back 20 years from now, you want to be able to say you “took the shot”, changing your life whether it ultimately worked out. Whether it turned out to be the right opportunity is not as important as the chance to grow. If you fail to take advantage of something like this, you are telling yourself you are not the sort of person who will grasp even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Keep in mind that these sorts of opportunities can be cultivated to some extent. Do the right things and place yourself in the right position, and the odds might favor you.

Open-minded but nobody’s fool

As mentioned, risk-taking is not synonymous with recklessness or rushing. It’s also not the same as being gullible and willing to try anything. There is a big difference between being open-minded and gullible.

The key is to remember what prompted you to push yourself. What unfulfilled dreams or life experiences spurred you into action? What kind of depression or despair were you struggling with? Those things give you the focus & direction you need in your new adventure. You should be selective and critical in your endeavors, rather than being willing to try anything just for the sake of it.

If you already know what you want, free-form exploration is supplementary and not the main point. It allows you to discover new things you had never thought about before and allows you to relax. Exploring for the sake of it is also inherently satisfying, but it is still nothing compared to the satisfaction you get from making progress on your most cherished ambitions.

That being said, be sure not to close your mind to possibilities that look different from what you have envisioned. As mentioned, keep an open mind and a willingness to consider alternative paths to your destination. Be especially careful of falling into the trap of always doing things similar to how you’ve done them in the past.

Conclusion

The key is to overcome avoidance and move toward your dreams. A full life only becomes possible when we can routinely reach outside our comfort zone, grasping meaningful opportunities for growth. Only then is there progress, and a life without progress is not really a life at all, but mere existence.

With the former borders of life opened up, we are able to grow like never before and we also become available to potentially life-changing opportunities. Seize great opportunities but don’t become reckless. On a similar note, keep an open mind but don’t become gullible or distracted — stay on mission.

To sum it all up:

Overcome avoidance, pursue opportunity in the direction of your goals, take on acceptable risk, remain non-attached to specific views, and be willing to consider alternative paths, especially ones different from your past approach.