Post No.: 0861
Furrywisepuppy says:
Some people’s comfort zones are inside an office or up a mountain rather than in front of an audience or at home looking after a baby (unpaid work is still work, and is often more toilsome than highly-paid work). For others it’s vice-versa.
Therefore a ‘strong and confident person’ isn’t so much someone who has the most ‘extreme’ comfort zone, because that’s subjective, but someone who has the widest range of comfort zones, like someone who can happily cope with both office life and looking after children. Or our comfort zones are logically wider if we can navigate not only with navigation apps but also with paper maps or just road signs, as another example.
And we often cannot tell who’ll be comfortable in a certain situation and who won’t – top swimmers in a pool can have phobias about being out at sea, base jumpers can be terrified about the prospect of going into space, and entertainers can be in their element in front of thousands of eyes yet timid and unsure when one-to-one with a single stranger. We can be scared of some things but not other things that others find scary, like being fine with bats but frightened of wasps.
It’s okay to wear makeup, but how do you feel without any? It’s okay to drive a flashy car, but how do you feel getting on a bus? Some people are afraid of using public transport because they’re afraid of ‘the types of people’ they might encounter there, or afraid that other people will think lesser of them because they’ll ‘appear poor’! Either reason, or another, is a fear. And fears indicate our weaknesses – at least more than they do our strengths. It helps our happiness and stress levels if we’re strong enough to be content, secure and confident whether we have a little or loads.
Logically, the fittest organisms will have the widest comfort zones (e.g. they can survive whether they’re in hot or cold environments, dry or wet conditions, or when food is plentiful or scarce).
Our comfort zones are shaped by what we’re used to i.e. what’s personally familiar to us, and what we’re used to is influenced in part by our upbringing experiences, like the foods we were raised with (to many people, their comfort foods are related to what their parents used to cook or serve them when young if they were happy mealtime experiences). To widen our comfort zones therefore, we must expose ourselves to more diversity of people, places and experiences – we need to make the unfamiliar more familiar. The fact that others can find comfortable what we don’t means that they’re not objective judgements of ours and we can change them.
Adolescence is a natural time of rebelliousness, non-conformity, experimentation and trying to discover one’s own identity, hence is a time when one may push outside what one knows. However, independent-mindedness or non-conformity for most people simply means conforming to, following or parroting another group (e.g. emos, punks, mods, rockers or skinheads)! People are willing to be rebels… but just not the first one! It’s nevertheless important not to stifle a teenager’s desires to socialise and try new things (unless their desire is unhealthy, dangerous or inconsiderate towards others obviously), otherwise they might find it difficult to transcend the habits and comfort zones that were ingrained in them during their earlier upbringing experiences.
If you live with more then you cannot be certain that you’re able to live with less. But if you can manage to live with fewer resources then you should be able to live with more.
A touch of luxury is absolutely nice occasionally, but the adaptable are able to mentally and physically cope fine without it too. We can become weak if we emotionally depend on having more than we strictly need – the more external ‘armour’ we depend on, the less need for intrinsic strength (just like the more driving aids we depend on, the less need for intrinsic driving skill).
Some material goods give us confidence – but it’s a confidence we should’ve already possessed. (The desire to possess certain material goods is often like these material goods own us rather than we own them!) We should feel confident in ourselves in our ‘naked’ state. We only need physical armour if our own naked skin isn’t tough enough to cope, and so we only feel we need psychological armour, like expensive material accoutrements, if our own naked confidence isn’t tough enough to cope.
If you’re able to stand comfortably on the edge of a beam that’s 1m from the ground then you should be able to stand comfortably on the edge of a similar beam that’s 5m from the ground (unless the wind is so much greater up there). But for most of us that’s not the case because we’re thinking about the different consequences if we fall, even though we shouldn’t fall, except as a consequence of over-thinking about falling.
Why do some people gravitate towards the thrill of bungee jumping or wingsuit proximity flying i.e. towards basically a bit (or a lot) of fear or danger? Maybe it’s about the curiosity of novel experiences? Yet it must be more than that. The mesolimbic reward pathway activates not just when something good directly happens but, for some more than others, when something bad stops happening. You felt you were about to die… but you didn’t! When what bad could’ve happened doesn’t happen – it’s like ‘phew!’ It’s like we laugh when we discover that the punchline to a joke wasn’t that someone actually obliterated their pelvis when they dive-bombed into a frozen pool thinking that the surface would break open when it didn’t!
Psychological horror movies are about the fear of the known unknowns of a threatening nature. Horror genre videogames are most scary when tense (e.g. Visage), not when they’re all-action blood fests (e.g. Left 4 Dead). They leave things to our imagination, which can assume the worst even when nothing is about to happen. We’re also not in control of the situation as much as we’d like. The fight-or-flight response raises the excitement. The adrenaline makes everything feel enhanced and heightened. There’s a furry rush! But then there’s relief. The stress is acute, not chronic. And the memory of the event it leaves is vivid and prominent.
In physical emergencies, the fight-or-flight response can also potentially un-tap our ‘hysterical strength’ – which is a sudden display of extraordinary strength that could help us to survive in a life-threatening situation. There are plenty of anecdotal reports about this but there are no lab experiments to categorically prove this phenomenon exists though because it’d be risky and unethical to place participants under genuine life-threatening situations.
There are some advantages to seeking novelty and taking risks – to explore, discover, experiment and create – because if we find somewhere or something that improves our survival odds then that’ll be beneficial for oneself, one’s family and tribe; and therefore signal one’s attractiveness too.
Is it down to one’s genes or development? Whatever the case, we can adapt. If we fear the unknown then we should get to know the unknown i.e. we should seek more education and experience. It’s like going through a ‘haunted house’ for the second time is far less scary than the first. Some things really needn’t raise our blood pressure because they’re no credible threat towards us. Even for those things that perhaps should because they genuinely can pose a danger to us, it’s not about being complacent but we can turn the source of fear into one of respect. Courage, after all, isn’t the absence of fear but the mastery of it.
Athletes train for many hours doing what they do, thus you frequently hear them say they’re far more nervous taking part in a quiz show or talking in front of a crowd for the first time than competing in their particular athletic events :E. So relevant preparation and practice reduces our nerves and increases our confidence. If we want to be brave, we cannot be lazy.
A trained doctor doesn’t fear seeing a gruesome skin disease on another person, a wildlife expert doesn’t fear confronting an unusual-looking creature, a person educated and experienced about different cultures and ethnicities doesn’t fear noticing new cultures and ethnicities around them. To them it’s just another day at the office, as it were. Things are only ‘strange’ or ‘alien’ to oneself if one is under-educated about those things or hasn’t been exposed to them enough. Therefore it’s normally the under-educated or insular who go ‘eurgh’ or tell people to go away based on how they look. We still mightn’t like something but we can adapt to tolerate it.
Trusting that the laws of physics are reliable, and understanding probabilities and statistics, can help reduce our apprehension in certain situations. For instance, when there’s a safety rope to catch your fall – as long as the equipment is appropriate, well-maintained and used correctly, and the anchors are sound, then you’re not going to break the laws of physics! It’s therefore a question of whether you trust those who set the rope system up? If you do then you should jump with total confidence once you’ve decided to jump. If you don’t then you shouldn’t be there at all.
Now being startled when taken by surprise isn’t necessarily a sign of being scared – the flinch is a sign of having working reflexes and reactions. We might’ve been on edge and primed to recoil due to expecting something, but we might’ve been just focusing hard on something else and then were caught by surprise. It’s an evolved survival response anyway – well imagine not reacting rapidly enough to a real threat? It’s how someone responds in the seconds after ascertaining whether a threat is real or not (e.g. whether they continue barking or flailing about, or start cussing or blaming others for their predicament) that tells us whether they’re truly scared or not. Similarly, someone can instinctively say, “Ow” if they get gently bumped into, but it’s whether or not they then cause a scene about it that tells us how hurt they really felt.
Well fear is an evolved and useful emotion for survival itself so it’s hardly necessarily wrong to feel it – is fearlessness good (being brave) or bad (being psychopathic or foolish)? It all depends on the context.
Also, is something an act of pluckiness, desperation or simply having nothing to lose? Is it more about having the boldness or having the opportunities to express it (e.g. there aren’t as many free solo climbers from the Netherlands compared to Switzerland for a reason)?
Yet we shouldn’t let narrow comfort zones rule or define our lives. We shouldn’t avoid opportunities out of self-consciousness or the fear of failure or rejection. If we’re feeling too comfortable then we’re not learning or exploring life to the fullest.
We must push ourselves and feel a little discomfort to grow. It’s exactly the same with muscles – they won’t grow stronger unless you put them under loads that test them. In fact we atrophy if all we seek is ease and comfort. No pain (unless injury or over-training), no gain. If you don’t try something new, you won’t go somewhere new.
Post No.: 0323 espoused training harder than the test conditions even. Challenges are required for improvement, even if the rewards may manifest later, like unlocking a new skill. Experimentation is required to find novel ideas. And courage is required to open and take opportunities.
Woof! Although one can be happy living within one’s existing comfort zones, and that’s okay – being fine with a wide variety of situations and having wide comfort zones, like being tolerant with a wide array of cuisines, musical genres, climates or intellectual subjects, helps to reduce our anxieties whenever we’re unexpectedly called into novel situations or whenever unexpected opportunities are waiting to be seized.
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