How to break free of our comfort zone

One of our most commonly held aspirations is to live a fulfilling existence, seizing all that life has to offer in the way of rewarding challenges and experiences. More often than not however, our fears prevent us from doing just that and in so doing, keep us stuck in a false comfort zone. In this article, I'll share with you some of the insights I have learned to shift that dynamic, and begin to see our fears no longer as daunting obstacles, but rather as invaluable and necessary contributors to our growth.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a short video reel of a friend of mine who’s a life coach, in which she convincingly made the point that people who procrastinate and are therefore not in an active sate, don’t do so out of sheer laziness, as we are often tempted to believe. Rather, what actually prevents people from taking action is our brain’s primal focus to ensure our ‘safety’ above everything else.

This deeply ingrained defense mechanism has been essential to the survival of our species, but regrettably also springs into action at times when we least want it to. We all have experienced moments when feelings of doubt and fear prevent us from doing the things we know would be good for us, or worse, make us forgo on a deeply cherished dream.

All this is pretty understandable once we take a step back and realize that for most of their existence, human beings have had to learn to survive and fend off life-or death situations in a hostile environment on a nearly continuous basis. In fact, it's not been that long since we’re able to master our surroundings to the extent that we don’t need to worry anymore whether a lion or a hyena is going to eat us for lunch.

We may all know this fact rationally, but that doesn’t mean that our amygdala, the primitive part of our brain that deals with our emotions, has gotten the memo as well... In fact, it’s quite the opposite, in that the amygdala is still very much functioning the way it did when we were still living in prehistoric times.

In a nutshell, this is what happens: when faced with a stressful situation, your amygdala gets activated much like a gas pedal hitting the floor. Stress hormones then get released in the form of adrenaline and cortisol, putting our body on high alert. This stress response helps our body cope with threats to our survival, by preparing us to confront or flee the dangerous situation – the fight or flight response.

This is of course critical when faced with an actual life-threatening situation. Unfortunately for us, since our amygdala hasn’t adapted itself to assess risks according to 21st century living standards (albeit from a Western perspective), this can lead us to experience reactions akin to when being in danger, while we’re actually in a safe environment.

Think for example of how your body would react if a colleague, or worse, your boss would berate you for not having done your job correctly in front of a group of peers, or if person you respected would roll his eyes dismissively at a comment you made. Both situations are not by any stretch of the imagination life-threatening, and yet there’s a high chance your bodily response would treat them as such.

Speaking from my own experience, I lived through such a moment in my second year of high school, when I had to give a book presentation with a fellow classmate. When it was my time to speak, it was the end of the day and I felt tired and didn’t quite feel like it.  As a result, about halfway in, I suddenly lost my train of thought and wasn’t able to make my points coherently anymore. Before I knew it, my body went into fight or flight mode: I started hyperventilating, my voice cracking up increasingly as I noticed the snickering glares of my peers before me.

From that moment on for quite some years to come, whenever I had to deliver remarks or even read in front of a group of people, I felt the exact same rush of anxiety creep up, taking me right back into that classroom. And so, to avoid reliving the experience whenever for example I was asked to read in class, I’d come up with all kinds of creative excuses, like imaginary colds or clogged nostrils… The whole episode made me so ashamed of myself that I didn’t share this experience with anyone for about ten years.

The turning point came when, after reliving the same fear for the so-manieth time during a presentation in graduate school, I’d finally had enough, and so when that very same evening I happened to bump into one of the school’s night guards with whom I had a good rapport, something came over me, and before I knew it, I was telling him the whole story.

As it happens, not only was he a very good listener, but he also happened to have helped quite a few former students overcome similar fears in years past by applying specific meditation techniques he had learned to master. And so, we ended up doing a few of his meditation practices together, which were tremendously helpful in recasting my fears in a new, more positive light.

That being said, although I knew this was a step in the right direction, if I ever wanted to come to terms with anxieties going all the way back to my childhood, I needed to dig just a little bit deeper. Afterall, if I had learned anything over the years, it was that when it comes to our fears, they have a tendency of creeping up on us when we least want or expect it, curtesy of our good old amygdala!

And so, over the next few years, I began exploring the issue of fear and how it keeps us locked in our comfort zone. Here are the two main insights I’d like to share with you:

- Lean into your fear:  A few years ago, I came across “The Tools”, a self-help book written by two psychotherapists for the rich and famous, Phil Stutz & Barry Michels. It provides readers with a set of practices in the way of five tools designed to help us overcome our fears and unleash our full potential. The Netflix documentary, Stutz, provides a fun yet also moving look at Phil Stutz’s groundbreaking work.

For the purposes of this article, I would like to limit my focus on the first rule entitled “the Reversal of Desire”, although you can discover the other ones here.

As the name indicates, the tool “Reversal of Desire” is about confronting your normal desire to run away from fear by imagining it having taken the form of a big black cloud and seeing yourself moving through it. The important part of the exercise is to make a willful effort to stop seeing your fear as something to be avoided at all cost, but to consider it rather as something of great value, that is there to help you grow.

-The healing effects of forward motion: research published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that lateral eye movement (side to side) while engaging in self-generated forward motion (walking or cycling) has the effect of calming the amygdala. In layman terms, this means that we can effectively reduce our stress or anxiety with something as simple as taking a walk in an open space.

This can be explained by the fact that when walking forward, our eyes naturally scan the space ahead laterally. This induces a hardwired process that tells our brain: “relax, there is no imminent threat ahead! By breaking down your state of flight or fight, moving forward thus causes your amygdala to quiet down.

And if that wasn’t encouraging enough, a new study uncovered the existence of an actual part of the brain tasked with confronting threats, as opposed to the default flight or freeze response induced by the amygdala. As it turns out, lateralized eye movements “activate” this area of the brain that encourages to “lean into the friction”.

Indeed, in an interview, one of the researchers, Dr. Andrew Huberman of Stanford University, spoke of how forward movement in the face of agitation triggers the winning circuit in the brain which is linked to boldness and courage.

Considering how everything in life is cyclical, whether it’s the different stages of our own existence, or the seasonal rhythms of the weather, the law of forward motion is always with us, whether we like it or not.

Reflecting on the above-mentioned insights, it seems to me that one of the keys to breaking out of our seemingly alluring comfort zone, is to go against, when it matters, the signals stemming from our brain that are programmed to keep us safe and therefore in opposition to that all-important law of forward motion.

Going down this alternative path by daring to embrace and even take joy in life’s inevitable uncertainties is a brave choice, as success is far from guaranteed. But who knows, you might just be rewarded for doing just that, as the following clip from the US sitcom Seinfeld hilariously illustrates.