We sat on our folding canvas chairs listening to the concert. In front of us, thousands of young people stood or jumped to the amping music. Dazzling lights and images danced with the rhythm. Midnight edged closer. I wore a puffer jacket and I was still cold. The last set finished and I headed to my tent. That was the night I figured out a key that you might not expect.
The same layer of fat that keeps you insulated and warm can also hold cold like a chilly bag when it has been exposed to the cold air for too long. I climbed into my sleeping bag and waited for my internal heater to activate and warm me up. It didn’t. Sure, my upper body warmed up, that had been in the puffer jacket; but my lower body was not having a bar of it. All night I lay awake. My thighs were solid, as if the layer of fat had frozen. I was trying to sleep in thawing ice.
Fast forward to last year behind a pack of dogs in the arctic snow. I’d planned ahead and brought my sheepskin boots to keep me warm; but I left them in the bus. I thought I’d have a chance to get them between the walk and the ride. I was wrong. The wind chill factor was crazy. I’d already been outside for 5 hours and literally wondered how long I could survive this ride. I wore denim shoes and a pair of trousers. Silently evaluating the others and their ability (or lack of) to cope, I saw that single layer trousers and light shoes were my downfall. I shook uncontrollably.
Finally, it ended and I made my way back onto the ship, straight to my room. I turned on the shower and climbed in, staying there until my legs had soaked in the temperature of the water. I remembered the key. Disaster averted.
A reel I watched this week revealed that our comfort zone is not static or stationary. If we keep within the bounds of comfort, our comfort zone will shrink. If we step outside our comfort zone, it will grow.
There’s a book on our coffee table, called ‘The Comfort Crisis‘. In it, Michael Easter describes an experiment by a psychologist named Levari, who showed participants a series of 800 faces and asked them to judge whether the faces were threatening. After 200 faces, he deliberately reduced the number of threatening faces, but the participants were primed to find threats, so they kept finding threats based on the faces they were presented. He called it ‘prevalence-induced concept change’ or ‘problem creep’.
When we are presented with fewer problems, we don’t become happier, we shift our threshold for becoming dissatisfied.
Transport that idea to much of the developed world where we have heat pumps or central heating when the weather gets extreme, vehicles to transport us without exertion and food on demand.
Do we wander around grateful for our many blessings?
Sometimes. Some of us do.
Have we accidentally shrunk our comfort zones to a size that requires us to remain on alert, small or self-focused to stay content?
We are wired for comfort. When we find something that works for us, we want to repeat it over and over again. What does it take to grow our comfort zones? To step outside of them from time to time.
I flew into a tiny pacific island airport as a teenager and turned up my nose at the airport building. We stayed in a school and washed in a stream at the back of the school grounds. It was so hot that there weren’t any walls to many of the homes. Little lizards clung to ceilings and pillars. We interacted with the hospitable and friendly locals over the week that we were there. So much was outside my comfort zone. When I got back to the airport to fly out, I saw that this same airport building was one of the most magnificent buildings on the island. It was humbling. A change in perspective changed everything.
How much of our offence stems from truly offensive situations? Are some of our interactions merely uncomfortable? Have we allowed ‘problem creep’ to interfere in our relationships? Is our situation actually threatening or does it just seem that way because our other relationships are better in comparison?
Sometimes our comfort zone shrinks because of pain. We stop doing what we used to do because it hurts. Our restrictions become our new normal and we don’t return to what we did before.
When I had a chronic sore back, I stopped doing certain things because they were painful. My world of movement shrunk. Now that it usually feels better, I am increasing my activity. These last few days I have had the good kind of sore muscles in places that previously pulled on my back. That’s exciting to me. I can build strength where I have been weak.
Do we grow weak relationally because we don’t want to deal with the hard stuff? What is the comfortable distraction or limitation that weakens you?
How could we step out of our comfort zones, even gently, to stretch our limits and increase our strength or endurance?
Sometimes it takes interaction with others to go beyond the comfortable. What I wouldn’t push or persevere with on my own, suddenly becomes doable when it matters to someone else. It might be pushing through to finish that project, getting up early to jump in a lake, walking in the dark (or rain, or heat) to connect, listening to the hard thing because it matters to a friend, allowing someone to change or choosing an alternative activity to replace a habit.
Certain stages of life naturally stretch us: caring for young children, juggling responsibilities, helping older members of the family when their capacity shrinks, walking with someone through a difficult journey. Other stages of life require us to intentionally step outside the comfortable so that our world doesn’t shrink to be all about us.
What is one thing outside your comfort zone that you can do today? It doesn’t have to be extreme. A gentle stretch that you can relax into does more good than pushing hard for a few seconds. The gentle stretch allows restrictions to release and flexibility to increase.
We learn what we’re capable of outside our comfort zone. I wouldn’t have learned that key about recovering from the cold unless I had experienced it that night. When it really mattered last year and I was dangerously cold, I had a strategy to get warm quickly. Without that learning, I would have been in a bad way. Although we’re wired to search for comfort, it’s to our detriment to remain there permanently. Go ahead, step outside your comfort zone. See what happens.
