The Invisible Electric Fence: Anxiety

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

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Here's the fine print on comfort: It comes with an invisible electric fence. Keep well away from pushing your own limits and you will be cheerfully oblivious to the walled platform you have created. But stretch out past your zone and you will get a jolt of anxiety that will certainly get your attention. At the very least, when speaking out in the meeting where you usually only look down, or standing up to the bully to whom you had always said, "Yes, dear," the anxiety you feel will give you pause. At its worst, it will keep you from even contemplating quitting or moving or marrying or divorcing or any other "-ing" that is just on the other side of your cozy niche.

Anxiety is the invisible fence that bounds all of our lives. It is what we would do almost anything to avoid. Anxiety is the opposite of comfort and, when it comes to change, it is the heart of the matter. We always do what we always did because doing something new doesn't usually feel good. "New" may feel anything from slightly strange to agonizing, but these are all flavors of anxiety.

Yes, there are those among us who have come to savor some forms of anxiety - thrill-seekers for whom the physical spurts of adrenaline seem to stir pleasure centers in their brains and drive them to dangle off cliffs and scream cheerfully on roller coasters. But clearly that does not mean that these hardy spirits are exempt from all forms of anxiety. The fact is, none of us is exempt.

The invisible fence around each of our current lives is highly individual. That's why your best friend could mouth the words "I love you" to a strange man in a bar in a moment of high spirits, but has not been able to leave the man who bores and burdens her. (She can flirt with the thrill of freedom, but separation from a safe relationship paralyzes her.) That's why your mother-in-law is a powerhouse at her church but she'd starve before she ate in a restaurant alone. (When people know and respect her, she's energized, but without that social support she struggles with unaccountable shame.) That's why your brother can make cold calls but he won't enjoy a party full of strangers. (He has numbed himself to telephone rejection through repeated exposure, but face-to-face interpersonal risk overwhelms him.)

OK, but so what? You can go through life quite happily without eating alone or being bored by a roomful of strangers. And frankly there's a lot to be said for a safe, reliable relationship. If it costs you thrills, well, freedom has a high price, too. All of these reservations are perfectly reasonable. Remember, there is no more inherent value in pushing the envelope than there is in finding satisfaction with the status quo. In fact, it's probably more spiritually challenging, more emotionally demanding to find satisfaction where you are than to keep moving from source to source looking for a hit of pleasure. In this sense, the ability to establish a long-term, stable comfort zone and to continue to find satisfaction in it is a mark of emotional maturity.

To a point. Right up to the point of pain. Right up to the dead end. Right up to the moment when you see clearly that there is something you want and it's on the other side of the fence. Between where you are and what you want is the invisible fence of anxiety. How do you scale it? Well, maybe you won't have to. Sometimes all that's required is going along for the ride.

The Tides of Change

When what you want to experience or the person you want to become is outside your comfort zone, you will be, at least temporarily, stuck. How to exert that titanic effort of will, how to summon the sheer grit required to face anxiety when you could relax into a comfortable state of tedium? Quite often, you won't have to summon that force from within. Life itself exerts that force on us.

When your life first runs aground, you will probably linger, waiting for the tide of events to move you forward. We wait for love to find us; wait in hope that the killer boss will resign or that more money will make the work more interesting; wait for the marriage to improve when the financial stress eases or the baby sleeps through the night; wait and push fiercely for someone else to change and so make us happier.

Sometimes outside events do solve our problems or at least change them for a new set. People do meet and fall in love and everything really does change. Sometimes the boss leaves, morale soars, and, thank God, you stuck it out. Sometimes the alcoholic spouse dries out, the selfish one has an emotional awakening. If your timing is good, if you're lucky or necessary to someone else's comfort, then the flow of life - in the form of graduation, marriage, childbirth, promotion, a geographic move, an empty nest, or mandatory retirement - will move you along its river, flinging you from your comfort zone into new circumstances.

True, some of us resist these developmental tides, refusing the promotion, turning away from romantic commitment or parenthood or even a new home or a career change. When we say no to these new platforms, we do so for good and bad reasons. But at some point or other most of us say yes to some of them and then our choice forces us from our comfort zones and through the invisible fence of anxiety.

The forces that propel us from our nests are not all developmental and certainly not all positive. Every American alive on September 11, 2001, experienced the destruction of our national comfort zone with savage abruptness, and so suffered the grief and fear and rage that always accompanies ruthless change. That was a historic expulsion from safety into something cold and hard, and we will struggle for some time, maybe forever, as we create a new national comfort zone in which to pledge allegiance.

© 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.