Breaking the Zone

Many of us go through life feeling bored, complacent.

There comes a point in everyone’s lives where we may be doing our best but it’s not working — something has to give. You may have to take a moment and re-examine your life.

It’s a constant self-analysis. Taking stock of where we are in our life and deciding whether we are happy or not. And then changing it. Sometimes it’s difficult to walk away from something that’s been a part of our identity for a number of years.

Being able to take a leap of faith because inevitably you’re going to grow from it requires breaking your comfort zone.

When we think about stepping out of our comfort zone, it doesn’t feel exciting, inspiring or aspirational. If anything, we’re normally overcome with fear and anxiety and all kinds of thoughts to self-sabotage ourselves like “I’m not good enough” or “maybe this is not worth it”.

The truth is that maybe there’s so much resistance when we break out of your comfort zone is because our own brain is actually resisting us.

The top 3 reasons why we resist stepping out of our comfort zones

Uncertainty — This is a normal part of when we do something that we’ve never done before. Your brain interprets uncertainty as a threat, much like it would when you see a snake or a lion running at you. You’re going to have an intense stress response happening in your body.

High Emotions — Normally when we step out of our comfort zone, it triggers fear and it can trigger anxiety. Our brains struggle to cope with a high degree of emotions.

New Situations — Anything we do that is not part of our normal routine is run by a part of our brain called the pre-frontal cortex. This part of the brain requires a huge amount of energy to work optimally. There is a level of fatigue that we experience as our brain adjusts to the new normal.

It is true that all growth and progress that is going to happen in your life will happen as you take a step out of your comfort zone.

Here are 4 simple steps of how you can overcome your brain trying to resist you:

Awareness — you just need to be aware that’s this is something that’s happening.

Interpret the experience correctly — If you start to feel fear or start thinking this may not be worth it, you need to understand that this is something that is happening because you’re pushing your internal barriers.

Create space — We need mental and emotional space to adjust to the changes and things that are happening in our lives. You’re pushing yourself internally and going against internal fears or limits over your life. You need to make sure that your giving yourself time to emotionally process it, to recover and to rest.

Work like a pro — Even though we may be aware that our psychology is working against us. We should just go with it. Whatever it is, we should keep pushing forward and work like a pro.

We all have the power to live rewrite our own story and live life in a way we want to. To do this, we must take risks and break comfort zones.

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