Peter Hollins - The Science of Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone: How to Live Fearlessly, Seize Opportunity, and Make Each Day Memorable

By Peter Hollins, Author and Researcher at petehollins.com

Click for your FREE Human Nature Cheat Sheet: 7 Surprising Psychology Studies That Will Change The Way You Think

The Science of Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone: How to Live Fearlessly, Seize Opportunity, and Make Each Day Memorable

Table of Contents

My hair was flying everywhere and my eyes were starting to dry out behind the tight goggles strapped to my head.

I was standing on an airplane, about to jump off, with only a man and a parachute strapped to my back. I was terrified of heights; how did I end up here?

We have to rewind the tape a few years to when I first met a girl named Sandra. We had a brief flirtation, and we seemed to have terrible timing, because as soon as Id be available and single, she wouldnt, and vice versa. This dance went on for a while until that fateful summer when we were both seemingly available and ready to mingle.

I was less introverted than I was as a teenager, but compared to Sandy, I was a downright bookworm. She was extremely adventurous and thrill-seeking, often appearing to do things just for the sake of doing them. To be honest, I probably said no more out of habit and fear than anything else, so I admired her spirit and how many interesting situations it got her into.

You can see where this is going. I saw a part of her I admired and I liked her a lot, so when she suggested that we go skydiving to kick off the summer, I readily agreed. I agreed quickly as if I had been contemplating a similar stunt for years, and we set a date. If nothing else, I figured this experience would bond us together for the rest of my short life as I plummeted to my death.

To say that skydiving was out of my comfort zone was a bit of an understatement.

But as you can sense, all the motivations were there for me. I knew what I wanted from this experience (potential relationship with Sandra, cool pictures), and those were strong positive motivatorscarrots, in popular terms. I also knew what the costs would be if I didnt jump on this opportunity and how much I would regret not simply sucking it up for, in reality, just a few minutesthese were the sticks. I had a very clear sense of my whys, and so into the plane I went. I wasnt so focused on the fear itself as I was on what was waiting for if I did or did not act. Sandra was suitably impressed, and we dated for the summer until we realized we had idealized each other for years and werent actually such a good match.

We all have comfort zones for a reason.

They are necessary to growing our sense of confidence and showing vulnerability. They make us feel secure and safe, like heaping on blankets to ward off the cold (or monsters under the bed). And yet, if we stayed in the safe cocoon of our bed for our lives, what would we experience? What would we achieve? What would be the epitaph written on our tombstones?

Those questions all have the same answer: nothing.

Everything we want in life is squarely outside of our comfort zonessome closer, and some further outside. Growth, learning, and progress are outside. So are accomplishment, fulfillment, and satisfaction. They lie over the obstacles of fear, anxiety, and the unknown. The comfort zone for most people isnt about comfort; its about retreating from fear and the fear of failure.

Sometimes, all it takes is the proper motivation to exit the comfort zone and grab what you want. I clearly had some powerful motivation to jump off a plane for Sandra, but thats not necessarily something we can harness in daily life.

The Science of Breaking Out of Your Comfort Zone isnt just a pithy title with anecdotes about my checkered dating history. I wrote this book to be a detailed look into why we tend to stay in our comfort zones, what keeps us there, and what it really takes to break out and live the exact life you want. Often, we have told ourselves a story so often that it practically becomes true and you cant see a different version of your life.

Its almost certainly free and availabletheres nothing keeping you from it except yourself.

We are creatures of comfort. Most of us covet familiarity in our lives. The more we settle into a certain mood or situation, the more we know about how to act and what to do. This is a good feeling. We condition ourselves against disruption or surprise and favor environments where we know what to expect.

The place we go to soothe and relieve ourselves is called the comfort zone. Everyone has a different definition of what occupies that space. The comfort zone is a virtual place in our minds.

Your comfort zone might be populated by longtime friends who console and amuse you or family members youre close with. It could be a coffee shop or park you regularly visit. In terms of work, your comfort zone could be routine tasks that you execute easily or a state where operations are running normally with no issues.

Our psychological, emotional, and behavioral inclinations inform what the comfort zone looks and feels like, determined by any number of measures: our habitats, topics of expertise, skill sets, or overall frames of mind. The security we feel in these specific realms cant always be replicated in other areas of our lives, and thus we tend to stay inside our comfort zones.

But the entire concept of the comfort zone is illusory: its all in our heads. Its an intangible product of our desires, a fantasy thats actually achievable. Familiarity reinforces safety, and the comfort zone thrives on regular, routine habits in which we always know what were doing. We are always confident and empowered in a comfort zonetheres little risk, if any. Our stress and anxiety levels are low, and were generally happy and self-assured.

The refuge of the comfort zone, where routine reigns and dangers are low, can be a soothing, serene, and occasionally necessary mindset for us.

But its also necessary for us to break out of it. Absolutely everything you want in life lies outside of it.

The YerkesDodson Curve

The concept of the comfort zone has roots in one of the most notable behavioral experiments of the 20th century. In 1908, psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson tested how sudden increases in arousal affected a persons level of productivity. The rather coarse (and admittedly unkind) trial involved the scientists applying small electric shocks to laboratory mice in a maze to show how that stress affected their efforts to get out of the maze.

Their findings resulted in a law, popularly represented by the YerkesDodson curve.

This graph shows the relationship between a subjects being aroused or stressed over a given task and their level of performance of the task. Perhaps unsurprisingly, low levels of arousal or pressure result in low performance levels. This makes some sense: if the tension of motivation is at a low point, one has no incentive to act.

As stimulation kicks in and arousal levels increase, then the level of performance does as wellto a point. When tension levels get too high, perhaps because of anxiety or over-distraction, performance starts to decrease.

The YerkesDodson curve compares to a very simple illustration by Dan Blewett: