Getting out of the comfort zone

When in your comfort zone, your brain doesn’t want anything to change. Your needs are met, you have zero stress, and your brain recognizes that the body is surviving. It’s a recipe for steady performance.

Your brain especially doesn’t like change. It requires so much energy for day-to-day activity that it doesn’t want to give extra resources to the attention required to do new things.

Getting out of your comfort zone from time to time creates just enough good stress to ramp up your focus, creativity, pace, and drive, and it helps you respond to life stress when unexpected things happen.

Your brain is busy. It hogs a ton of your energy resources to do what it needs to do every day, especially when you’re sleeping.

Your brain is lazy. Because it needs so much energy and there’s so much going on up there, it doesn’t want to do extra things. It doesn’t know the difference between a good new habit and a bad new habit, so it tries to get you to do what you’ve always done, by staying inside your comfort zone.

Your brain wants to keep you safe. Your own survival and the survival of the species depends on avoiding danger. Humans are built to live in a world where we have everyday threats to survival, like hungry cheetahs. Sometimes your brain fires up the oh-crap-there’s-a-cheetah fear response when it’s more like, you’re a few minutes late for class and most likely not going to die because of it. Your brain doesn’t always respond with the proper intensity.

Because of these tendencies, your brain craves routine. But doing the same song and dance every day of your life doesn’t lead to growth and maximum performance.

Getting out of your comfort zone from time to time alters your brain’s tolerance to change, for the better. Shaking things up every now and again shows your brain that there’s nothing to fear — you’ll be fine on the other side of a little stress, and it’s worth it.

‘All progress takes place outside the comfort zone’ — so let’s get out of there… and let’s do that TODAY.