The surprising power of comfort zones

And how I discovered mine was exactly where I needed to be.

About 10 seconds after this photograph was taken, my riding coach was giving me a leg up back into the saddle and instructions on how to make sure I wasn’t the only one to get to the other side of the fence on our next attempt.

My mouth was dry and tasted metallic. I felt nauseous. Frankly I was terrified. But it never occurred to me not to give it another go. (I did and we made it).

Now here’s the thing. I’m not a brave person. I’m not an adrenaline junkie or a thrill-seeker. I don’t like rollercoasters, I watch even the tamest scary films from behind a cushion. I’m a 45-year-old woman who knows she doesn’t bounce as well as she used to. Yet still I keep doing things that make me nervous, put me on edge — I’m driven to push myself out of my comfort zone.

There’s no hard and fast definition of a “comfort zone” but it’s generally thought of as a fairly passive state where someone can exist with minimal anxiety, where there’s little (if any) risk and where the only tasks to be performed are easily within your capabilities.

Psychologists who study personal growth point to the importance and many benefits of leaving your comfort zone. You will learn new skills. You will tap into resources and abilities you didn’t know you had. Taking risks is a growth experience and will lead to bigger rewards. It helps you deal with change.

All of which sounds great and has been enthusiastically embraced by popular culture and social media. It drives film plots, sells self-help books and is the subject of countless inspirational memes. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Great things never came from comfort zones. All progress takes place outside your comfort zone. And so on.

The message is clear — being comfortable holds you back. Staying in your comfort zone makes you stagnate. It’s a message I’ve definitely bought into — not just when I ride, but in the rest of my life too. I’ve left perfectly good jobs because I felt too, well, comfortable there.

Then, last year, I found myself questioning this whole notion.

As any equestrian knows, you and your horse will go through good times, where you feel like a strong, connected partnership and through bad times where, simply put, you fall off a lot.

I was going through a bad time. In fact, my sister joked that I should do “Trip Advisor” style reviews of all the local riding arena surfaces, as I’d fallen off on most of them. Which surface was the softest to land on, which was hardest to get out of your hair (a sand / carpet fibre mix, if you’re interested), that sort of thing.

I started to feel frustrated and stressed. I definitely wasn’t enjoying it. And then I realised something — despite relentlessly pushing myself, I wasn’t actually getting anywhere. So I decided to take a break from it. I stopped competing, stopped jumping, took the pressure off and felt an instant sense of relief (despite a niggling feeling that I had somehow “failed’).

That niggling feeling persisted and, after a few weeks, I decided I was ready to get back in the game and start jumping again. Only then did I realise just how badly the falls had dented my confidence. My conscious brain knew exactly what to do but in front of the fence, my subconscious brain was freezing, which made my horse nervous too. So, I went right back to basics, with the tiniest fences, barely more than poles on the ground. Back to deep, deep within my comfort zone.

I also tried hypnotherapy for the first time and, for me, it really worked. The wallop of doubt that had kept suddenly hitting me a stride or two in front of the fence just sort of evaporated. After a couple of sessions I told the hypnotherapist that I was feeling much more confident — but still only happy jumping smaller fences. Well, she said patiently, keep jumping the smaller fences and eventually you’ll get bored and want to put the fences up a bit. Essentially what she was saying was, stay in your comfort zone until you’re ready to leave it.

Well, you don’t see that on a meme.

Because when you look into it, the psychology of comfort zones and personal growth is, of course, much more complicated than Facebook or Instagram would have you believe.

As well as the advantages of leaving your comfort zone, psychologists also recognise there are benefits to staying in it — something I was discovering for myself. In your comfort zone you can draw on experience to tackle problems or achieve a goal. It’s a place you can rejuvenate yourself, you expend less energy (emotional and physical) in your comfort zone. You will feel more confident there and sometimes minimising risk is a good thing. Doesn’t sound like such a bad place when you put it like that.

One of the first people to study this area was a psychologist called Robert Yerkes. In 1907 he investigated the impact of anxiety on performance. He discovered that to improve your performance, you need to be more stressed than normal — essentially this is being outside your comfort zone. He called it “optimal anxiety”. But he also concluded that, “Anxiety improves performance until a certain optimum level of arousal has been reached. Beyond that point, performance deteriorates as higher levels of anxiety are attained.” Simply put, pushing yourself too far outside your comfort zone can be counter-productive. Again, never seen that on a meme.

So while yes, sometimes it’s good to make yourself uncomfortable — quit your job, date someone you’d never normally date, go sky diving, order the chef’s special when you always have Chicken Pad Thai — I think only you can know when to do it and how far to go.

Had I carried on pushing myself last year, I now realise I’d just have made the problem worse. Instead, by training well within my capabilities, I believe I’ve re-built a solid foundation, from which I can finally make the sort of progress I want to.

So, in summary…