I have talked in my last two posts about the insidious constrictor and restrictor qualities that so impact our freedom and health in the responses of the Comfort Zone.

The hard news is that the problem isn’t really the Comfort Zone. The problem is us and our thinking – how we’re framing a particular issue. Are we treating it like it is the end of the world? Or are we pulling it apart to figure out what we’re going to do next, lucidly and without unnecessary anxiety or worry?

Most of us are not – and that’s why we’re wrestling with anxiety, fear, panic attacks and depression. This doesn’t make us bad or weak people. It just means that we haven’t acquired to the degree we need to the skills to successfully NOT convert problems/concerns into crises (in our thinking), which is the trigger for Flight or Fight, the creation of Comfort Zone walls and our descent into habitual fear and worry.

None of this would be necessarily so havoc-wreaking on our lives if our responses to the Comfort Zone were in the forefront of our thinking.

But one of the problems we face as we descend through the Chronic Anxiety Cycle – converting a problem to a crisis because it scares us, doing that Worry Engine thinking, landing on some Indefinite Negative Futures that really freak us out, doing Anticipatory Anxiety avoidance, and finally walling that fear away behind our Comfort Zone walls – is that we become less and less conscious of our responses to our fear.

The Comfort Zone is (Mostly) Unconscious

This is part of what makes our fear getting walled up behind a Comfort Zone boundary so insidious. We are trying SO HARD to get away from our fear and worry, and in the process we are making it very challenging to think about what to DO about that fear/worry!

And where does that leave us? It leaves us reacting, not acting. It leaves us not thinking, but twitching, veering away from even the possibility of bumping into our Comfort Zone. And we’re not even (usually) conscious that we’re veering away! This is the WHOLE MISSION of the Comfort Zone – to keep us away from danger. If that means not thinking about it, GREAT. Whatever it takes.

The Dangers of Reacting

How can living in unconscious reaction to our fears mess with our lives? Let me count the ways… one big result of this reacting is that we find ourselves making all kinds of assumptions about what we can and can’t do, what we must have and what we cannot stand, etc., based on our Comfort Zone. We’re making decisions based on the constricting and restricting nature of the Comfort Zone and we’re not conscious of the assumptions that are driving that thinking in the first place!

Which we’ve already discussed in this blog – the constrictive and restrictive nature of the Comfort Zone. All of these characteristics of the boundaries we create to wall away our fear are made of the same fabric – our increasingly desperate efforts to avoid the thinking that scares us in the first place.

DANGER – Don’t Think About This!

That is the sign that is hanging on the top of our Comfort Zone walls – every one of us. Not only is the Comfort Zone working to keep us away from what scares us by constricting our range of motion and limiting our freedom – but it is working to drive that scary thing literally out of our thinking.

NOT useful – not if we have any interest in getting our lives back in our hands. So the bottom line is we need to confront our fears – literally peek over the wall of that Comfort Zone boundary and reverse the process of running away from it. We need to look at it, face it head-on, and think about it, lucidly and clearly.

This doesn’t mean (usually) that just confronting it will fix things. Sometimes that works – especially if we’ve been forced at gunpoint (metaphorically speaking) to face a Comfort Zone fear suddenly – a real crisis surfaces, for instance, that forces us to leap that wall for sheer survival’s sake. But that’s pretty rare, and often even those circumstances leave us afraid and unwilling to cross that boundary line in our heads.

No, we need that small handful of skills I’ve talked about here on the blog (4 posts ago, the video on the Fear Mastery skill-sets) to do this work successfully, with good long-term results. Plenty of people either determine to face that fear or are forced by circumstance to face that fear, only to be overwhelmed by their Flight or Fight Responses.

That can make it even harder the next time to face your fears! Slow and steady, with the tools you need – this is how this work gets done best and most effectively.

Next Up

I hope you’re finding this discussion of the issues that surround the Comfort Zone useful – please let me know what you think! In my next post I will continue my review of these issues. Remember – you have the capacity to face your fear and worry – it doesn’t have to shut down your life. The tigers in your head are not real tigers!

Advertisement