A person’s comfort zone is a psychological state of mind in which a person is operating in familiar territory and feels in control and relatively free of anxiety and stress. It is a psychological space marked by performing routine behaviors that carry little risk. As the name implies, it is comfortable to be in your comfort zone. Conversely, it is stressful to function out of your comfort zone. If you’ve taken a physical or psychological or financial risk, you’ve likely left your comfort zone to do so – whether it was rock climbing or proposing marriage or quitting a job you disliked before securing another one.
Happy people generally spend a lot of time in their comfort zones. Unfortunately, a lot of unhappy people do so too. The difference between them is that those who are happy have expanded their comfort zones. Growth and change do not take place in your comfort zone. In order to not stay stuck, it is necessary to sometimes leave that comfort zone and try new things.
Risk-taking does not always work out, but sometimes it does. When it does, we can gain a new appreciation of ourselves and what we can accomplish and what we a capable of doing. We can learn that others appreciate and admire us more than we realize. And sometimes we can learn new skills that can be incorporated into our comfort zone.
As we do so, our comfort zone expands. We become comfortable doing things that we previously feared. That doesn’t happen if your comfort zone is too comfortable to the point of limiting you from fulfilling your potential in various areas of your life. In other words, your comfort zone is a good place to be – especially if it’s not too limiting to enable you to expand it.