“Get out of your comfort zone.” “The comfort zone is your enemy.”
We hear these often. We hear it from great leaders and people who inspire us to be better. We nod in agreement. We share it as advice. It sounds true, unquestionable, and inspiring. But I am here to get us to stop and think deeply about it, to question the good old advice.
Why call something a comfort zone if it’s a place we must escape from? Why dress an enemy in the language of a friend? This is contradictory and counterproductive because we are wrapping up something we deem to be an enemy with a friendly ribbon. Why? Why do we associate the comfort zone with failure, regret, and suffering.
It is one of the greatest deceptions we’ve accepted. The deception here is that the word doesn’t mean what it means. That the comfort zone is not truly… comfortable or shouldn’t be. So why call it that? It’s like calling a prison “home” and then telling the person who is “home” to escape, to run away. Where to? Why not just use the right word so that the associations in their mind are accurate and harmonious with what is known?
Well, an explanation might be found in our psychological makeup. Comfort, to the human psyche, doesn’t always mean comfort or pleasure in the way the word means. It rather means familiarity, what we are used to. Comfort to the psyche is what it’s always known, seen, done, sensed. Something familiar can feel comfortable (non-threatening) because it doesn’t trigger the brain’s alert and distress system as it should.
But when we step into new unfamiliar spaces even places that are objectively safe and comfortable, we might feel uncomfortable, and unsafe simply because the brain is saying “I don’t recognize any of this”. It triggers our flight or fight mechanisms. While the feeling that we’ve been here before might raise no flags — even if here is dangerous, hell, but familiar.
Let’s be real
- It is not comfortable to be obese, but it is a “comfort zone”
- It is not comfortable to live in poverty, but it is a “comfort zone”
- It is not comfortable to never do what we truly want to do, but it is a “comfort zone”
- It is not comfortable to be in an abusive or toxic relationship, but it is a “comfort zone”
When we’ve lived in chaos long enough, we adapt to it so much so that peace can start to feel suspicious, and uncomfortable. If we’ve lived in scarcity, abundance can breathe anxiety like something good that will not last. And that’s why when people who have lived in poverty for long 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. It’s familiar, it feels safe psychologically without us being conscious of it.
If we’ve grown up with constant berating and criticism, kindness can feel unsettling, and uncomfortable — like an ambush waiting to happen, like “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 the known, even if the known is hell.
You might know someone who had spent years in a toxic relationship. No bruises, no yelling — just the daily drip of emotional abuse. But when they finally got into a great relationship, they found themselves anxious in the peaceful relationship. No drama gets interpreted as no excitement or no love. Affection feels like a setup. 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 random and unpredictable. In a way, this unpredictability had become predictable and they had developed coping mechanisms to deal with it. Some of such people easily return to toxic relationships a.k.a their comfort zones.
This is also why some who’ve been incarcerated for long, can’t handle freedom. As soon as they are released, they commit another crime that lands them another sentence. Confinement, being watched, the restricted and predictable prison routines, and abuse 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 has been 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.
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 and then try to talk ourselves out of it.
We were handed manipulative language. It’s not that it’s comfortable, it’s just familiar. It is suffering but suffering we are familiar with, suffering we can predict and are used to. 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.
And here’s the tragedy: In this zone, most of our dreams die quietly. We don’t reject them. We just delay them. We postpone them. And numb our desire for them. 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 are becoming and who we want to be. We stay in the suffering that we know. We are so used to seeing people barely get by or “succeed” in a job not in their life they deeply wanted.
For some of us, no exercise poor eating habits, and coping with low energy, diminishing fitness, and increasing health issues are what we are used to. We are becoming increasingly uncomfortable in this ‘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.
These are what we call “comfort zones”. Comfortable for who 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 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 thing that diminishes us expands. And that’s the irony — the so-called comfort zone becomes the most uncomfortable place to remain yet we endure there. Yet we call it the comfort zone. The language is flawed.
The reality “comfort zones” are often created as a way of dealing 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 no longer exists, 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 world feels overwhelming, and threatening that we retreat into our familiar cage. And then the alarms stop blaring and we remind ourselves that we belong to that cage not out somewhere free. It convinces us that our imagined monster in freedom-land is stronger, bigger, and scarier and we are safe 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.
This is 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 an objectively safe and comfortable reality and safety as opposed to a subjective facade of it.
What we need is a new perspective. A new direction.
Instead of calling something we need to walk away from our comfort zone let’s call it prisons, cages, limitations, and adaptations that we need to leave behind. Let us start learning how to pursue zones in which we are truly comfortable, safe, empowered, 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 as opposed to our historical prisons and cages. To normalize the initial discomfort when we first step into them and hang around for a while till the strength zones become where we 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 nervous systems to familiarize with our deepest desires. To find comfort in the places we deeply want to be. To do so we must take ourselves to such places often and regularly.
It takes more than a perspective change. It takes repeated exposure. It takes deciding to leave false comfort (the familiar hell) behind. It takes staying in the initial discomfort of heaven (the unfamiliar thriving zones) for longer and longer periods. It takes deciding to retreat from false short-lived comfort and pleasures that lead to hell afterward. It takes using rationale and discernment rather than emotions to make some of the decisions about where to ground yourself. It takes gentle self-reminders that fear 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 step into the unknown. Do it afraid, do it scared, do it trembling, do it in tears. That is courage not coping. That is a brave step even when you feel all your alarms blaring out. It is the nature of the prison to alarm when its occupants break out. Don’t run back inside, run outwards. Don’t decorate the prison and call it home. Leave it behind. Yes, you will feel lost for a while but that’s not going to 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.
Think about it.
Water is the fish’s strength zone, its comfort zone, and where it thrives. In the same way, our true comfort zones should be places where our strengths are amplified and we flourish — not places we need to get out of. You can’t tell the fish to get out of the water to do more with its life.
So yes they lied to us. Don’t get out of your comfort zone. Get into it. Live in it like the fish. It’s the only place where you can thrive.