What is the ‘Comfort Zone’?  It has been a ubiquities concept in our culture since the eighties but perhaps it could warrant a little more focus here. 

 

Our comfort zone is whatever we're most familiar with. It includes our family, friends, house, income level, significant other, health, etc... It is that which we have surrounded ourselves with that makes us comfortable.  It is important to remember that our personal comfort zone has an upper limit where things can be too good as well as the more easily seen lower limit where things can be too bad. Of course good and bad are just judgments we put on the world but as far as the comfort zone is concerned we perceive these labels as very real.  Our brains are wired in such as way that makes us want to stay in our personal comfort zone because as long as we are there we inoculate ourselves from anxiety.

  

 

The Comfort Zone

 

 

So how does this work?  Over time our lives will unfold in ways that we like and a in ways we don’t.  As long as things tend to stay in a rather narrow band we feel a relative calm about our circumstances.  But if things start going too poorly we will feel anxiety and we will do whatever it takes to get back within our comfort zone.  For example if we get into a big fight with our significant other we may apologize, engage in ‘make up sex’, and cook them their favorite dinner to bring our internal emotional state back to normal.  But let’s say the other side of the spectrum shows up, things start going too well.  Perhaps you come back from an adventitious vacation and you have the strongest sense of togetherness your relationship has ever experienced.  Again we will feel anxiety and will do something, often unconsciously, to get ourselves back into the comfort zone.  Maybe we will pick a fight or spend too many days in a row not paying enough attention to them.  Things in our relationship may not be going quite as well as when we got back from our vacation but we feel much more comfortable.  We again will be in our comfort zone.

 

Our comfort zone is a very useful tool.  It gives us boundaries, it is an unconscious way of quickly determining if something is tolerable.  If circumstances do go poorly for us it will give us a strong emotional need to ‘get back to normal’.  At its best the Comfort Zone will grant us a place of calm to rest between adventures.  The down side is that if we stay in any one place too long our comfort zone can become our own personal velvet lined cage.  If we are not carful our place of calm can become a trap that we do not wish to escape from. 

 

 

The Comfort Zone works so well because it is guarded by the ‘worst thing in all the world’, anxiety.  Now, anxiety is just an emotion, a sensation felt in the body but that is not the way we perceive it.  We are hardwired to experience it has a horrible thing; a monster in the corner of our minds that must be avoided at all costs, a terrible thing that we don’t want to look at let alone think about.  The irony about anxiety is that if we actually wake up,  just for a moment, from the half dream we all like to live in and look at it, anxiety almost always evaporates.  The thing that we feared a moment before suddenly looks like a tree branch instead of a ghost trying to get into our bedroom window.  We often realize that what we feared never really existed, at least not in the way we previously thought.

 

The good news about the Comfort Zone is that, no matter what it may feel like, it is not set in stone.  We have all probably heard the phrase ‘expanding our comfort zone’.  Expanding what we find tolerable is a great practice* but it is not really what we are after when it comes to recovery from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), at least not for the purposes of our immediate discussion.  What we really want is to move our comfort zone up the scale to being comfortable with better and better things happening. 

 

Of course the real question is how do we do this?  The best way is to become increasingly comfortable with better and better events in our lives.  If 0% is the bottom of our comfort zone and 100%  is the top, then the real juice of life hangs out at 110%.  If we can stay in the place where life is an adventure but is not so far out that we panic then we will begin to grow.  One of the great things about the Comfort Zone is that it will move as we do.  If we spend consistent time 10% above the upper limit we will begin to get used to things going better in our lives.  Our comfort zone will move upward to encompass these new experiences.  One of the great aspects of this is that the upper limit will drag the lower limit up with it making 0% move to the previous 10% bracket. **

 

A huge thing to beware of here that our comfort zone can also move downward.  If we allow ourselves to get comfortable with bad things happening then we can get stuck in a situation that would never have been tolerable before.  This is a process that I raged against for a decade.  I tried each day to not let myself become comfortable in the misery that was my daily MCS nightmare.  I refused to lose focus on what I really wanted, to return to a state of good health. 

 

The challenge is that my single minded focus lead me to stumble squarely into the trap that the comfort zone can become.  Once I achieved my goal I didn’t move forward, and moving forward is the only way to cement gains that are made. 

 

Using the paradigm of the comfort zone how do we cement these gains exactly?  We set a goal that is bigger than our immediate target, raising the comfort zone to fully surround our target experience.  For instance if I want to lose weight I should aim for a healthy life lifestyle, if I want to get to a point where running five miles each day is no big deal then I should train for a marathon.  If where you really want to be is 10% higher than your present comfort zone then aim even 10% higher than that.  Ratchet up your comfort zone to not only hit your goal but go beyond.  Once your comfort zone has absorbed your goal well enough then your goal will become your new norm.  Then traveling too far away from this will create anxiety making sure you keep your gains. 

 

I will get over this bump in the road.  I know how to do it, I have done it before.  This time it will not take years.  Since I know the path the process will take weeks or at most months.  The real trick is to inoculate myself against getting back here.  I must get beyond the experience that I presently find comfortable to a new one.  I must accept that anxiety will present itself and move forward anyway.  Without fear there can be no bravery, and those of us with MCS can be some of the bravest people I have ever met.

 

*If you are interested in expanding what you find emotionally tolerable you may want to learn more about Zen Buddhism.

 

**This process of ‘ratcheting up’ the scale only seems to work fully for one item at a time.  If we upgrade our income it will not see a one to one increase in the quality of our relationships.  If we work on our health it will not automatically take us to the next level in the our spiritual practice.  I’m not saying we should work on a bunch of items on one occasion.  We as humans only have a finite amount of force to exert in any one given vicinity.  If we spread this force over a large area we will get only limited movement across that area, but if we focus ourselves on just one item we will get amazing results with that item.  The amazing results we will receive with that one item cannot help but to drag the surrounding issues with it as you grow.