Why it’s good to get out of your comfort zone

Imagine lounging in bed, watching Netflix (or some other streaming service), while intermittently scrolling through your phone under the covers. No demands, no discomfort, no one needing anything. Just warmth, ease, and the next episode.

Many of us have experienced the pull of an afternoon (or even a day) spent like this. And yet we also know, intuitively or through past experiences, that too much time spent in this comfort zone doesn’t actually serve us well. It can leave us feeling flat, disconnected, and maybe even more anxious than we were before. We sense that comfort, while lovely in small doses, is not where we grow.

Why is this the case? And what’s the alternative?

I recently came across a short video by Pema Chödrön (a wonderful Buddhist teacher whom I recommended in my last post) in which she describes a model for personal growth that is so insightful.

The model, originally developed by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, describes our experience as three concentric circles. The smallest, innermost circle is the Comfort Zone.  The middle ring is the Learning Zone, where we encounter challenges, solve problems and learn new skills and behaviors. The outermost ring is the Excessive Risk Zone (sometimes called the Chaos Zone) where the challenge is much greater and we risk harm to ourselves or simply shut down rather than grow.

This may seem simple enough. But Chödrön goes on to suggest that the more time spent in the comfort zone, the more our comfort zone shrinks. Over time, the things that once felt manageable start to feel even more threatening. The world outside gets bigger as our inner world gets smaller. This happens not because the world has changed, but because we’ve stopped practicing being in it.

The antidote isn’t to seek out chaos or to push ourselves into overwhelming situations. The Excessive Risk Zone (which is the outermost ring) isn’t where growth happens. Chödrön likens jumping into that zone to being thrown into the deep end of a pool when you don’t know how to swim. It doesn’t build confidence; rather, it can re-traumatize.

The learning happens in the middle ring.

Here is the wonderful flip side: the more time we spend in the Learning Zone, the more our Comfort Zone expands. What once felt overwhelming gradually becomes manageable. The world doesn’t change, we do. There is a Buddhist teaching which states: the hero thrives in the forest of suffering. In other words, we thrive not in spite of difficulty, but because of it. When we understand this, we might be more inclined to leave our comfort zone and enter the proverbial forest, where true transformation can happen.

When we sit down to meditate, especially in the beginning, we are almost immediately nudged out of our comfort zone. The mind, accustomed to constant stimulation, suddenly has nothing to cling to. Thoughts arise that we’d rather not look at. Emotions surface. We become acutely aware of how little control we have over our own mental activity. Many people’s instinct is to escape that feeling, which is understandable. But what if we stayed just a little longer than feels entirely comfortable?

Chödrön offers a wonderful example from her own practice: she worked with her tendency toward stinginess by deliberately giving away small things that felt meaningful to her. Not grand gestures. Just small, consistent steps into the learning zone. The practice wasn’t about deprivation, it was about noticing the edge, and choosing to step just past it.

We cannot remove difficulty from our lives. But we can change our relationship to it. And that, over time, can change everything.

One gentle note: if a meditation ever becomes truly overwhelming, it is always okay to come out of it. The goal isn’t to white-knuckle your way through unbearable experiences. The outer ring of chaos is not what we’re striving for. But that middle ring, that slightly uncomfortable, slightly unfamiliar stretch? That’s where the hero lives.