“Get out of your comfort zone.” “The comfort zone is the enemy of progress.”
We hear these often. We hear it from great leaders and people who inspire us to be better. We nod in agreement because it resonates with what we already know to be true. We share/give it as good, unquestioned, and inspiring advice. But I am here to get us to stop and think about it just a little bit. Perhaps we need to question the good old advice.
Why call a place “comfort” if it’s a place we must escape? Why dress an enemy in the language of a friend? This is contradictory and counterproductive because we are calling a negative thing with positive language. It’s like labeling poison, medicine, and then spending energy reminding ourselves to never drink it. This is a classical Greek Trojan Horse we have installed in the computer of our minds. And perhaps that’s why we don’t really make much progress in escaping the so-called “comfort zone”.
If you think about it, the “comfort zone” of many people is a living hell. It is a place of quiet, unspoken suffering that they’ve settled in. They’re not really trying hard to get out of, or at least not successfully. If no one is truly comfortable in their “comfort zone,” why do we call it a comfort zone?
So to me, the phrase “Comfort Zone” is one of the greatest deceptions we’ve accepted. The deception here is that a positive, desirable word should be used to describe an undesirable circumstance.
To tell your brain that this is our comfort zone, and simultaneously say we must escape it, is just confusing. So why call it that? Why call a prison “home” only to insist we need to escape “home”? Where to? Why not just use the right word so that the associations in the mind are accurate and harmonious with the desired response?
The Psychological Basis Of the Term
Psychologically, the description is not entirely wrong, though. The origin of the term “comfort zone” lies in our psychological makeup. “Comfort” to the human psyche doesn’t always align with the word’s literal meaning. What is comfortable to the psyche/mind is what it is familiar with, what it is used to, and thus finds non-threatening. Familiarity with a situation makes it predictable to the mind, and thus it perceives it as less threatening than it actually is. Because of this non-threatening perception in the mind, we describe it as comfortable.
Something is “comfortable” to the psyche if it has known, seen, done, and sensed it for too long that it adapts to it and expects it, even if that thing is gradually killing you. It is like the frog that’s placed in cold water, which is gradually heated to boiling point. A familiar danger feels “comfortable” (non-threatening) and doesn’t trigger the fight-or-flight response that it normally should.
On the other hand, the unknown or the unfamiliar feels threatening, even when it is good. That’s why people can be very anxious and uncomfortable in places that are objectively safe and comfortable.
If you do a real audit, you’ll find that almost everything that makes you feel uncomfortable and unsafe isn’t necessarily so by objective standards. But when your brain goes, “I don’t recognize any of this, nothing is familiar,” it sends out “we are not safe” signals throughout your body. And it triggers your fight-or-flight response.
The more unfamiliar, the stronger the signal.
One thing we can be sure of is:
- It is not comfortable to be obese, even though that can be someone’s “comfort zone.”
- It is not comfortable to live in poverty, but it is a “comfort zone.”
- It is not comfortable to be in an abusive or toxic relationship, but it is a “comfort zone.”
- It is not comfortable to be homeless, but it’s been someone’s “comfort zone” for a decade.
The psychological grip these things can have on us is so powerful that people who have been in those situations for a long time often gravitate back into them when they are freed.
When we’ve lived in chaos long enough, we adapt to it to the point that calmness can start to feel suspicious, peace unsettling, and true comfort and uncomfortable. If we’ve lived in scarcity, abundance can bring anxiety (it won’t last). When people who have lived in poverty for a long time suddenly come into money like through a lottery, they spend it so quickly so that they can return to their “comfort zone”, to lack, that good old companion they know well. It feels safe psychologically, without their being conscious of it.
If we’ve grown up with constant berating and criticism, kindness can feel like “they must want something in return”. If we were always told to be quiet, speaking up feels unsafe even when we are now in environments that encourage and even reward it. It feels uncomfortable — like an ambush waiting to happen. A person who has experienced too much unkindness gets very suspicious of why someone is kind or nice to them. “What bigger thing do they want to get in return?”
That’s how the psyche works. A feeling of psychological “safety and comfort” lies in familiarity. Been there, done that. The known is “safe” even when the known is hell.
You might know someone who has spent years in a quiet, toxic relationship. No bruises or broken bones — just the daily drip of emotional abuse. But when they finally got into a great relationship, they found themselves anxious in it. No drama gets interpreted as no excitement or no love. Affection feels like a setup for eventual disappointment because that’s what they’ve known before. Strangely, they miss the chaos — not because it was good, but because it was what “love” felt like. They had become accustomed to living in a relationship where abuse or violence was expected and unpredictable.
This is also why some who’ve been incarcerated for a long time can’t handle freedom. As soon as they are released, they commit another crime that takes them right back to jail. Confinement, being watched, and the restricted, predictable prison routines had become familiar. But when they are suddenly thrown into freedom, it feels overwhelming and psychologically threatening. They don’t know how to be free anymore.
This is also why we sabotage progress and retreat to what we’ve always done when things begin to go well in areas we’ve been too used to just surviving in.
It’s not because we love pain, or because we like barely surviving. It’s because pain, when familiar, feels safer than joy that we don’t yet understand. And this happens in our psyche without us being conscious of it. We don’t even know that it is happening. But surely we return to the same places of familiar suffering. Addictions, doing just okay but not great. We remain in these places with a logically evident discomfort but a psychologically known comfort.
We stay in places that shrink us. Jobs that drain us. Relationships that suffocate us. Habits that slowly ruin our lives. And we call it the comfort zone. What a tragedy to attach a desirable quality to something so undesirable, only to try to talk ourselves out of it. It’s counterproductive.
We are, in effect, creating and maintaining a Trojan horse in our minds with this type of language. It’s the proverbial “The devil I know is better than an angel I don’t know”.
It’s not about true comfort or peace or ease. It’s just pattern recognition. The pattern I recognize feels safer than the pattern I don’t recognize.
And here’s the tragedy: In this zone, most of our dreams die quietly. We don’t reject them. We just delay them perpetually. We postpone them. And hold our desire for them, but we do not hunger for them enough. We get busy doing everything else but what we deeply want to do. We find clever justifications of why we can’t or shouldn’t do it now. We evolve complex coping mechanisms to manage the gap between who we are / who we want to become; where we are and where we want to be. We stay in the suffering that we know. We are so used to barely getting by or almost “succeeding”.
For some of us, poor fitness, poor eating habits, and coping with low energy and increasing wellness and health issues are what we are used to. Objectively, we are becoming increasingly uncomfortable living this way, but it is still sadly a ‘Comfort zone’.
And there are others. We don’t speak our truth — we cope with misalignment and self-suppression. We don’t pursue love — we cope with loneliness and being in (casual) relationships for occasional validation, approval, and reluctant appreciation. That is our objectively uncomfortable “Comfort zone”.
And so are almost all the things that we describe as “comfort zones”. Comfortable for whom or maybe for what part of us? The abused one, the rejected one, the starved one, the never-loved one? The one that’s always struggled for daily bread? Perhaps all of them?
The longer we stay in that place, the more we convince ourselves that this is life. But deep down, we also know it isn’t. Deep down, we feel the tension. We feel the discomfort of a life half-lived. We feel ourselves shrink while the things that diminish us expand. And that’s the irony — the so-called “comfort zone” is the most uncomfortable place to be, yet we endure there. Yet we call it the comfort zone. The language is flawed.
The reality is that “comfort zones” are often created to deal with difficult situations. The problem is, this temporary adaptation becomes a permanent landmark, and we begin to identify ourselves by it. Long after the situation that necessitated it has ceased to exist, the adaptation remains. It becomes a self-made prison deceptively called “the comfort zone”. The language is misleading.
A prison whose walls we know very well is still a prison. A familiar cage is still a cage.
Every time we temporarily break out from this prison, the unfamiliar freedom out there can feel overwhelming and threatening, so we retreat into our familiar cage. And then the psychological warning alarm stops blaring, and we remind ourselves that we belong to that cage, not out somewhere free. It convinces us that our imagined monster in Freedomland is stronger, bigger, and scarier, and we are safer in this familiar cage. After all, it saved us from something painful at some point in our lives, like the child who was constantly reprimanded to be quiet.
You can now see why calling these prisons comfort zones does us a serious disservice. Some of us have lived through real hell — violence, trauma, extreme poverty, aching silence. Most are still living one or more of these realities right now. Calling it a comfort zone minimizes the courage it takes to leave it behind and compromises the drive to seek out objective safety and comfort rather than a subjective facade of it.
A new perspective. A new direction.
Instead of calling something, we need to leave behind our comfort zone, let’s call it prisons, cages, limitations, and unpleasant adaptations that we need to leave behind. Let us start learning how to pursue zones in which we are truly comfortable, safe, empowered, and alive. Zones rooted in strength, freedom to be who we are, empowerment, and thriving.
Let’s call them Strength Zones, Thriving Zones, and Freedom Zones. Let’s objectively define them and pursue them.
Let’s teach our minds to gradually feel at home in these zones, rather than in our historical prisons and cages that were falsely branded to comfort. We need to learn to normalize the initial discomfort when we first step into our true comfort zone, so that we can hang around for a while till those objectively comfortable and empowering zones start to feel comfortable. Let’s visit these thriving zones often — even if they feel foreign at first.
Because here’s the good news. All “comfort zones” are created. What feels unfamiliar today can become second nature tomorrow if we visit it often enough and spend more time in it. But let’s train our minds to find comfort in zones where we are empowered to pursue our deepest desires, highest aspirations, and craziest adventures.
We can rewire what feels normal. We can choose courage over coping. We can train our minds to familiarize ourselves with our deepest desires. To find comfort in the places we deeply want to be. To do so, we must immerse ourselves in such environments often and regularly.
It takes more than a perspective change. It takes repeated exposure and reprogramming of our minds. It takes deciding to leave behind the false comfort of the familiar hell. It takes staying in the initial discomfort of Freedomland (the unfamiliar, thriving zones) for longer and longer. It takes deciding to retreat from false, short-lived comfort and pleasures that lead to hell afterward. It takes rationality and discernment, rather than emotion, to make good decisions about where to ground yourself. It takes gentle self-reminders that feeling afraid is not always a red flag. Sometimes it’s just a signal that we’re standing on new ground.
If you are in a familiar hell that has long been deceptively branded as your comfort zone, remove that label. Tag it prison, tag it hell, tag it “I don’t belong here”. Step out of this well-known cage and explore the unknown possibilities available to you to find true comfort. Do it afraid, do it scared, do it trembling, do it in tears. That is courage, not weakness. That is a brave step, even when you feel all your alarms blaring out. Think about it. It is the nature of a prison to alarm when its occupants break out. Don’t run back inside to silence the alarm; run far in the opposite direction till you can’t hear them anymore. Don’t rebrand the prison as home. Leave it behind. Yes, you will feel lost for a while, but that won’t last forever.
The moment just beyond the edge of familiarity is where real life begins. It’s where your true comfort zone is. And it is also your thriving zone.
Look at nature. Water is the fish’s strength zone and its comfort zone, and where it thrives. In the same way, our true comfort zones should be places where our strengths are amplified, and where we flourish — not places we need to get out of. It is stupid to tell the fish to get out of the water to do more with its life.
So yes, they lied to us. Align in your mind what your true comfort zone is. It is your empowered zone, strength zone, thriving zone. Get into it. Live in it like the fish. It’s the only place where you can thrive.