Are you feeling stuck, unsatisfied, or unfulfilled? In this article, we’ll uncover how your comfort zone keeps you limited and how to step out of the prison of your own mind.

Your comfort zone is created in your mind

Your comfort zone is created in your mind.  It’s not real.  It doesn’t actually exist, outside of your own mind.  It’s simply experienced as if it was real, with all of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that come with this mental construct.  It’s that space within you where you say, ‘this is ok, this is not ok’ – which happens to be different for everyone – and then apply those ‘ok and not ok’ to your external world and reality.  We call it the prison of the mind.

Your comfort zone is a mental prison that acts as a placeholder for reality

In this prison, there are things you can’t think, say, feel, emote, and do, and there are things that you should think, say, feel, emote, and do.  In this prison, there are things that others can’t think, say, feel, emote, and do, and there are things that they should think, say, feel, emote, and do.  In this prison, the world is depicted and experienced as you imagine it to be.  In this prison, you define reality and ‘what is’ based on a set of conditioned beliefs, judgments, and expectations – often inherited from parents, your family, friends, and other external influences – of what should and shouldn’t be.  In this prison that you’ve built, you WILL inevitability come into conflict with ‘what is’, every time ‘what is’ comes into contradiction with your beliefs and triggers your fears.

Your comfort zone is the dysfunctional way we use to try to avoid pain

In your comfort zone, you arrange the world to our idea of what is ‘ok and not ok’ in an effort to try to avoid pain.  And avoiding pain becomes your main point of focus and attention, i.e. your highest priority.  All of your energy, time, and creativity are consumed by it, without you even realizing that it is happening.  That’s because, for the most part, our pain avoidance strategies are subconscious, and thus not consciously known to us.

Your comfort zone give you a false sense of safety – mostly from pain

Your comfort zone gives you a false sense of safety, and of being in control.  It creates a layer between you and the ‘unknown’, so that you never have to feel it and the fears associated with it.  Unfortunately, this false sense of safety you feel in your comfort zone is costly.  It keeps you fighting ‘what is’, creating resistance, conflict, and pain, and all of that just because of the urge to escape your own pain, which you can’t.  You can build a castle, control an empire, have the money in the world, and still experience the pain of loneliness, not being enough, not having enough, and feeling unsafe.  That’s because pain is not the result of ‘what is’, it’s the result of our interpretation of ‘what is’, and the lens look at the world and assess whether it is ‘ok or not ok’ – i.e. safe or unsafe.

Your comfort zone is what keeps you stuck

Most of the time, if something is unknown to us – i.e. outside of our comfort zone – we will resist it, reject it, label it ‘not ok and unsafe’, and experience a lot mental, physical, emotional, and even spiritual turmoil and pain as a result.  This is what most people experience when they feel stuck.  They have many different parts of themselves that are in inner conflict with ‘what is.’  They’re ‘holding onto to dear life’ in their comfort zone, resisting change and the unknown, and so they come to a standstill within their comfort zone.  Can’t go right, can’t turn left, won’t go up, shouldn’t go down, etc.  A world of impossibilities and dangers lurking all around., all the while stuck in the prison of their own mind.

Your comfort zone limits your capacity to achieve your intentions and goals

Your comfort zone is not as glorious as your fear would like you to think it is.  It’s filled with resistance, pain, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, simulacra recordings, wishful thinking, truncated memories, negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and all of the ideas that are limiting your experience of self, others, and life.  Your comfort zone keeps you stuck and unable to swiftly achieve your most desired intentions and goals.  You can’t get there from here, i.e. from your comfort zone to all the wonderful intentions and goals that you have for your relationships and life without some degree of change.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone leads to resolving perceived problems that you’ve struggled with for some time

Stepping outside of your comfort zone doesn’t mean more pain, rejection, or suffering.  It means the temporary discomfort and adjustment to a new reality.  A reality that is fundamentally different than the limiting beliefs, fears, expectations, and judgments that have created your comfort zone.  Stepping out of your comfort zone means breaking through the shell of your prior understandings and gaining new and creative insights – which may at first feel unsettling – about challenging situations that you haven’t known how to address up until now.  Albert Einstein said, ‘you can’t solve your problems using the same thinking you used when you created them.’  And truly, you can’t.  Those problems were created in your comfort zone – the prison of your own mind.  Stepping outside of your comfort zone means questioning everything, including the thinking that created the problems you’re looking to resolve.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone is the process of questioning with the only intention to truly understand

Questioning your negative thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears, beliefs, expectations, judgments, perspectives, inner and outer conflicts with the desire to understand and resolve it all.  That’s all that is required of you in order to get the results that you’re wanting.  Understanding yourself and your comfort zone means freeing yourself from the prison of your own mind.  It means questioning when, where, how, and why everything in your life has been safely organized not to trigger you, and how that has motivated you to reorganize the world around you so that it matches your belief system and keeps you ‘safe’ from pain.

Living inside your comfort zone is not living

Living inside your comfort zone is not living.  It’s surviving. It’s putting the illusion of psychological safety and the avoidance of pain before love, happiness, joy, inner peace, forgiveness, fulfillment, and God alignment. Living inside your comfort zone is what leads to misunderstandings and conflicts in all relationships.  Living inside your comfort zone creates and sustains suffering. Living inside of your comfort zones creates limitations and invisible glass ceilings that are difficult to perceive and break through.

Living inside your comfort zone is living in fear and breeding more fear

If all of our comfort zones are different, we will rarely meet each other outside of them.  We will isolate ourselves inside a virtual reality devoid of true connection, love, and fulfillment. Comfort zones lead to pain, separation, isolation, disconnection, loneliness, limitation, anger, resentment, anxiety, sadness, depression, suicidal tendencies, conflict, misalignment, miscommunication, violence, and war.  Comfort zones are always created from a place of fear, and thus continue to breed more fear.

Questioning everything leads to understanding and living a deeply rich and fulfilling life

If you want to get to know and understand your comfort zone, and step outside of it, all you need to do to start is, question everything.  Questioning everything doesn’t mean being a cynic, a pessimist, or filled with fear and doubt.  It’s not ridden with judgment, expectation, distrust, confusion, limiting beliefs, lostness, or paralysis.  Quite the contrary.  Questioning everything is the healthy, inquisitive, and creative process of understanding your deep intentions and motives in life.  Without this inner questioning, there can be no experience of deep fulfillment and alignment.  Your life matters.  Your happiness matters.  Your fulfillment in life matters.

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