Is Your Comfort Zone the Best Place for You Right Now?

Previously published in Desk Stories, my weekly newsletter.

Just how wide is your comfort zone?

There are two definitions of ‘comfort zone’.

A situation where one feels safe or at ease.
A settled method of working that requires little effort and yields only barely acceptable results.

Your comfort zone is when you're in a situation where you don't have to do anything new or difficult. It's perhaps where you feel in control of your environment and where you experience low levels of anxiety and stress.

It is your safe space. It's where you know what you're doing, where you feel secure and nothing bad or embarrassing it going to happen to you.

However - taking steps out of your comfort zone is, as they say, where the magic happens.

Originally this newsletter was going to be about me encouraging you to take steps out of your comfort zone. I was going to use quotes such as:

““Do one thing every day that scares you.””

— ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

““A comfort zone is a great place, but nothing ever grows there.””

— ~ John Assaraf

But the thing is, taking big steps out of our comfort zones can increase stress and anxiety, it can put you into that fight or flight zone - and I'm wondering, after the two years we've just had with the Covid pandemic, whether this is the right thing to be doing right now.

For two years we've been living with fears, anxieties, case and death statistics, media scaremongering, government restrictions on our lives, the death of loved ones, worries about our own health or that of vulnerable relatives, our children and their schooling situation, jobs, redundancies or businesses forced to close and how you're going to cope when the world returns to normal. Plus so much more.

It's been a massively unsettling time. We have all been living outside of our comfort zones.

And then there is this pressure (from whom? The Internet? Friends and family? Newsletters like mine? Yourself?) to make 2022 a really great year to make up for the last two being pretty rubbish.

So you find yourself setting goals. You decide this is the year you're going to write that novel. This is the year you're going to start a creative business. This is the year….and so on and so forth.

For some of us a new year is inspiring and motivating. It's a new tide, the old year swept away. January brings that momentum, it propels you with your projects.

I personally feel motivated and propelled this year with my creativity. BUT not with everything in my life. I can't bring myself to get back on the rowing machine yet, my friend told me the other day that I didn't get out the house much and meet people for meals (is this a bad thing?!) I know I'm being cautious with a number of things.

Maybe at the moment we only have the capacity to take steps out of our comfort zone with one thing. For some of us that'll be our creativity. And for others it'll be a healthy regime, or budgeting the family finances, or deciding to move house.

Maybe after the last two years we've had enough of excitement and yearn for stability, for gentleness, to just be for a while without worrying about cases going up, or having to remember a face mask, what the screaming media headlines are or what some of the politicians got up to whilst we were all locked down.

If this is the case for you then do not feel pressured to set goals, to take a big leap out of your comfort zone and do all the things.

But equally you might need the distraction. You might be yearning for some quiet creativity. You might wish to continue to work towards your creative dreams but at a much slower pace.

And if that's the case take tiny steps. And once you've taken that tiny step and become comfortable with it, take another one. Slowly and surely. Tortoise-like but in a positive direction.

You don't have to go from writing in secret to uploading your book to Amazon in one terrifying leap. You can work up to that. One step at a time, gently and slowly but at a pace that's suitable for you.

As a population we've taken a real mental and physical health battering since 2020. Be kind to yourself and take the pressure off.

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