IS IT TIME TO LEAVE YOUR COMFORT ZONE? How Leaving Can Spark Positive Change

BY JESSICA A. KENT

ou hear it all the time: Step out of your comfort zone. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Nothing grows in your comfort zone.

But is that true? Can getting uncomfortable and enduring the stress that comes with it really help you grow as a person, move you towards achieving your goals, and push you forward to the next stage of your life?

Let’s unpack what “getting outside your comfort zone” means and how it can be your new tool for achieving the life you desire.

The Science Of The Comfort Zone

So you want to run a 5K. You see a 5K raising money for a good cause, and you’ve always wanted to run one, so you sign up.

But you’re not a runner — the most fitness you get is walking between classes — so you know being able to run that 5K is going to take some work and be a bit of a challenge.

In other words, you’ll need to step out of your comfort zone, or your place of greatest security, and get uncomfortable in order to achieve that particular goal.

How do you know where that boundary is — and is the “comfort zone” even a real thing?

The idea of comfort zones is rooted in research conducted by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. They developed the Yerkes–Dodson Law, which states that performance increases as stress increases, and performance decreases as stress decreases.

However, at a certain point, high levels of stress inhibit performance.

In the context of our 5K example, this means that while you may just want to just walk on a treadmill to train, there’s not much stress in doing so and therefore no increase in performance. However, when you apply