Comfort Zone

~ 2 Minute Read.

I strug­gle with leav­ing my com­fort zone. That’s that com­fy feel­ing of be­ing safe and do­ing what you al­ready know how to do, it’s easy, ef­fort­less and… most­ly risk­less. And that is nor­mal! You can call it “hu­man” or “in­stinc­tu­al” or your “lizard brain”, “low­er lev­el You”, you name it. It wants to keep you there.

I think the com­fort zone is a con­cept I in­ter­nal­ized through a book about lead­er­ship and project man­age­ment that I got gift­ed years ago. 1 To­day the com­fort zone con­cept is more im­por­tant than ev­er for me as it is one of those things that keeps me from go­ing all in with Vhite Rab­bit and work­ing on that “full time” 2.

I ac­tu­al­ly train 3 leav­ing my com­fort zone: since two years I have been go­ing for a quick swim ev­ery oth­er day (one of the ad­van­tages of liv­ing close to a lake), start­ing as ear­ly as April when the wa­ter is su­per re­fresh­ing still. Out of in­ter­est I did a “Ve­g­an Week” once to re­strict in­gre­di­ents I was used to, forc­ing my­self to try new ones. The net­work­ing code and in­fra­struc­ture for We­b­VR Pong put me out­side of my com­fort zone.

But guess what. All these at­tempts lead to my com­fort zone ex­pand­ing, mak­ing me com­fort­able with more types of tasks. En­rich­ing my di­et with new in­gre­di­ents, or cut­ting out bad ones—im­prov­ing my phys­i­cal and men­tal health.

Did you know very cold (or warm) wa­ter lets your body re­lease hor­mones that im­prove your mood? 4

I be­lieve that mak­ing it a reg­u­lar ex­cer­cise to force your­self out of your com­fort zone is high­ly ben­e­fi­cial to per­son­al de­vel­op­ment.

1
“Soft Skills für IT Führungskräfte und Pro­jek­tleit­er” (Yes, it’s Ger­man…)
2
My con­cept of full time is prob­a­bly a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than the gen­er­al­ly ac­cept­ed 40 hours work week.
3
Sim­i­lar to train­ing willpow­er, see What I’ve Learned’s video video about that.
4
Dis­claimer: this is a bold claim as I don’t pro­vide a source here, but you will find some­thing.

Writ­ten in 15 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 5 min­utes.