The Man in the Black Mercedes, Part 2

The Comfort Trap: or What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?
by Judith Sills, Ph.D.

(Page 3 of 6)

This book centers on the paradox of the psychological comfort zone. We need to be comfortable to live fully, yet if we're too comfortable, something essential dies. A life that is too much work erodes the body, but one that requires too little effort depletes the soul. Between these two poles there is a harbor, a state of psychological grace, a platform of emotional well-being. It is your comfort zone. It is a haven. And, by its very nature, it is temporary.

Your current comfort zone includes the familiar, tolerable, and therefore safe circumstances you have created in your life. For some period these circumstances - your job, your affair, your passion for bridge, your neighborhood, your friendship circle, your marriage - may be intensely satisfying. When satisfaction is added to safety, your comfort zone functions exactly as intended. It becomes a psychological greenhouse where you can flower, thrive, and contribute something back to the world.

At some point, however, every comfort zone diminishes in satisfaction. The job ceases to challenge or the management no longer supports you; the marriage hits a logjam of conflict and disappointment; the old friend exploits your generosity yet another time; the excitement of dating devolves into the chore of selection; the passion of the affair becomes the poison of guilt; and the nice girl is still sitting around, waiting to meet her Duke.

Over and over we will return to this same theme: Comfort is pleasure plus safety, satisfaction colored with security. There are intense satisfactions - deeply honest relationships, sexual thrills, athletic feats, great goals - which can only be delivered in the absence of security. These satisfactions can only be achieved beyond the boundaries of one's comfort zone, though, and that is the point. Comfort is charismatic precisely because it is safe - and therein lies its power. But safety limits the amount of satisfaction any experience can deliver - and therein lies its painful limitation.

Our comfort zones are constructed from utterly idiosyncratic elements, but some structural features are universal. Comfort is physical, of course. Before your spirit registers its vote, comfort begins with your body. And much of comfort is contrast, lost over time when the sharpness of relief disappears. Comfort is a fire when you are in from the cold and a fan when you are escaping the heat. It is knowing you have sisters who would lay down their lives for you but not seeing too much of them over the holidays. Comfort is rest after effort, but not endless rest. It is relief after risk, but not eternal safety - because eternal safety stops being satisfying.

Identifying the physical aspect of comfort is easy because, after all, we know what feels good. But the essence of comfort is something emotional, and that is not so simple. Emotional comfort is the feeling of "fit," and we seek it as instinctively and cherish it as passionately as we seek love and value money. But unlike love and money, which are publicly professed ideals, we do not celebrate our quest for comfort. Sometimes we don't even realize it.

First and foremost, emotional fit is established by habit and routine. Routine defines us, carving our lives into little mini-zones of emotional comfort - my coffee shop, my preference for black, one Sweet'N Low not Equal please, my parking spot, my nightly ritual of walking the dog or stalking the bars. The soothing balm of routine defines and confines us all. We always do what we always did, unless we make a conscious, focused, and often formidable effort not to. This is true whether what we did felt good or bad, because in some essential way it feels like me. It fits. Fit is only partly defined by the complex matrix of your routine. It is also powerfully influenced by the sweeping psychological concept of identity. You and I have a rigidly etched idea of who we are. That idea is huge, pervasive, and probably only partly understood, but its power over our lives cannot be overstated.

We are largely the people we expect to be, because that identity shapes the way we sort through the thousand life choices with which we are confronted daily. Sometimes, though, those old familiar choices can leave us suddenly stuck.

Identity's enormous influence over how we act explains why the man who believes he will be the boss's favorite probably will be, while the woman who believes men only want her for sex finds over and over again that men only want her for sex; the man whose managers never appreciate him re-creates his experience of being undervalued in job after job with no sense of his own contribution to the process, while the woman who cannot leave her high-paying job to have a better time is correct when she explains that she cannot.

"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right," goes the saying. Your identity defines whether you think you can or think you can't, and those thoughts then delineate the boundaries of your current comfort zone. Change those boundaries and you will certainly change what you think. Change what you think about who you are and you will profoundly change your life.

Frankly, why bother? Why make such an effort to think differently, to be someone new or act in a way other than you usually do? Because as comfortable as those behaviors are, they limit you. If what you want to achieve or who you want to be is inside the zone of your identity or your habits, you are, at least temporarily, content. Eventually, though, what once made you content may now afford you little uplift, and possibly a good deal of sorrow.

What to do? Well, that would seem obvious enough. Leave. Move on. Stir things up. Quit. Focus elsewhere. Start something new. Make a change. If what you are doing is no longer working, do something else. If the horse is dead, get off.

Except, sometimes we don't. Can't. Won't. Don't know how. Aren't sure we should. Don't know where to go next. Can't break the rule that says we shouldn't go there.

Or, you know perfectly well what you should do, but you can't seem to get yourself to do it. Hate yourself for your inadequacy, mourn the price of your anxiety, but still you stay put. Not entirely sure of what is holding you in place but unable to move forward under your own steam. Stuck in your comfort zone.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Judith Sills, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who for the last decade has appeared regularly on such national television shows as Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and NBC News. She is a contributing editor to Family Circle, the largest-circulation women's magazine in America, and also writes for O, The Oprah Magazine.