How To Expand Your Comfort Zone?
The neurobiological evidence on the brain being reluctant to leave our comfort zone and … what should you do?
Nowadays, there are a lot of “hustlers” of the quickest self-improvement that try to conform to the constantly developing and changing environment. Those people have already heard of comfort zone more than a couple of times which they consider as a “limiting zone”. Generally, a comfort zone is a psychological condition in which a person feels at ease and in control of their surroundings, with minimal levels of worry and tension. It is possible to maintain a consistent level of performance in this zone. E.g. Magnus Carlsen’s comfort zone is chess or we can simply say that Cristiano Ronaldo can play decent football.
Those people are the masters of their disciplines in which they feel comfortable and secure. The better question would be whether they would still be this comfortable if they switched their disciplines? Certainly not…
There is a popular quote every one of us “is learning all the time”. Do we? One of the many neurobiological evidence published in the Neuron concluded that when result probabilities were fixed and the animal was more certain of the outcome, activity in areas of the frontal brain was drastically reduced, meaning that the brain was already familiar with the difficulty of a certain activity. The frontal lobe of our brains is a center of “intelligence maturity”, meaning that all of the logic, abstract thinking, and decision making takes place there.
The monkeys were given the option of hitting a red target, which paid out 80% of the time, or a green target, which paid out 20% of the time, in the first trial. They quickly learned that hitting the red target yielded higher profits, so they increased the level of uncertainty by switching things up and making the green target more rewarding. As a result monkeys stopped learning and their activity in the frontal lobe was dramatically reduced.
Why comfort zone then can be limiting? As Daeyeol Lee, Yale’s Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and professor of psychology and psychiatry said:
- “We only learn when there is uncertainty, and that is a good thing”
- “We really don’t want to be learning all the time.”
Generally, people avoid feeling uncertain, hence unsafe. That is why making a shift in the kind of activity that one does, disturbs that self-confidence and proficiency. As a consequence, we began to stay where have been. In zone in which you feel the “best”, the “greatest”.
The solution: is to expose yourself as much as it is possible in uncertain situations or failures.
The reason behind this is that every uncertainty becomes eventually certainty. What I mean by that is the process of familiarising with an unknown, uncertain feature that you potentially had been reluctant from the beginning. By doing that, you potentially expand your comfort zone capacities which are termed “growth zone”. The second thing that prevents people from taking action is the risk of failure. We are a very sociable species and since birth, our brains evolved particularly good at monitoring for perceived social risks as a result of this realization. Failure can be perceived also as a rejection from a university, job, or your beloved partner. Having that in mind, we may fear to risk our reputation or psychological distress from collapsing.
It can be seen from the above image that the transition from Comfort Zone → Fear Zone and also Fear Zone → Learning Zone can be the most difficult due to internal voices that are heard due to uncertainty. The most important skill is to set a mindset of liking the challenges in the Fear Zone. After the Fear Zone everything starts to resemble the feeling in the initial Comfort Zone.
Benefits of repeating those “first transitions” are very beneficial in the long term:
- Expanding your comfort zone.
- Redirecting your goals
- Flexibility
- Creativity
- Expanding your general intellectual capacity
Every education, experience and moments which are out of your comfort zone is your best lifetime investment. Keep those assets building up!
In conclusion, our comfort zone would never be erased from our lives. However, being able to consistently expand your comfort zone to the newer fields may completely change you as an intellectual person, capable of doing much more than used to.
