(Update 10/12/22: An extended version of this essay was published on Medium here)
I tend to be a stickler for precise language, especially when being imprecise either hurts people or stops them from moving towards their goals. My current pet peeve is the abundant imprecise language in the personal growth field. A common theme of personal growth is getting out of your comfort zone. There’s a lot of growth messaging that describes the growth landscape like this:
In this post, I wanted to provide some more precise language about what I think it should *feel* like to get out of the comfort zone, with the hope that it will help you grow sustainably, over the long term.
Now you can’t really grow if you’re deep in your comfort zone all the time. I’ll give the productivity gurus that. But what the standard messaging misses is how to think about the area outside of the comfort zone. Not knowing what’s outside the comfort zone leads to something I’m calling “the effort trap.”
The crux of the effort trap is that if you only focus on the amount of effort you are putting into the activity you’re doing to try to grow, you either:
* push way too hard and then burn out or hurt yourself, because more effort means more good
or
* you never start because you *know* it has to be hard. And doing hard stuff is stupid when naps and ice cream are amazing.
I’ve fallen into this trap again and again over the years. In the past, if I wanted to start building better life habits I’d tell myself that I’m going to write everyday and journal and exercise and go vegan and chant affirmations in the mirror and wake up at 4 am and summon a positivity demon each day in a rite involving the blood of a millionare, the mindset of local children, and the tears of Jeff Bezos.
And I would. For a few days. Maybe a week. But then I’d be very tired and everything would hurt and the demon was just a little *too* positive for that early in the morning. So I’d stop, probably buy too much sushi as reward for trying, and go about my life.
So how do you escape the effort trap?
For me, the way to escape was to slow down and to incorporate mindfulness, to add in extra information about what I was doing so that I focused on something other than effort. My current favorite way to think about this comes from Jill Miller’s book The Roll Model.
The Roll Model introduces Jill’s system for self massage by rolling with specially designed balls, providing “A step-by-step guide to erase pain, improve mobility, and live better in your body.” I really enjoyed her book and got a lot out of her methods, so if you’re trying to get in better touch with your body check out her site.
In the Roll Model, Jill differentiates between pain, or intolerable discomfort, and healthy or tolerable discomfort. She writes,
“Pain is a sensation designed to inform your body that it is injured or about to get injured. Because there are so many gradations of pain when rolling on the balls, it can be helpful to think of it as sensation that varies in intensity. Reserve the word pain for when you need to stop doing a particular activity. Use sensation and healthy discomfort to describe how rolling feels, and you will feel safer and be more apt to continue. In order to receive the therapeutic benefits and feel better, you must get comfortable with your discomfort.”
I’d encourage you to think the same way about extending your range of abilities as Jill describes rolling. As you start taking action, or even introspecting, in order to grow, this gives rise to a range of sensations. If you ignore these sensations it makes it very easy for the effort trap to take you out of the space of tolerable discomfort and into the space of pain. So instead of inside and outside the comfort zone, I think it’s better to look at the comfort zone like this:
As you go farther away from your comfort zone it takes more effort and it’s more likely that you accidentally find your way to the pain zone. From my experience, the way that you ensure that you can keep doing whatever you’re doing long enough for growth to happen is **to spend most of your time just at the edge of the comfort zone or with small amounts of tolerable discomfort**. In picture form, you want to spend most of your time here:
This gives you some form of stimulus so you can grow without the chance of burn out or needing the initial investment of massive amounts of effort. This is a big part about why James Clear’s Atomic Habits framework (which focuses on a single, small habit change at a time) is so useful. Adding in, for example, 5 minutes of writing a day is something that keeps you in the sweet spot, and with almost no chance of hitting the pain zone.
Outside of starting small, my number one suggestion for understanding your discomfort zone (and for just about anything else) is to go slow. As Jill Miller says,
“… ultimately *you* are the decider, and *you* must discern whether the discomfort you are experiencing is tolerable or intolerable.”
Give yourself some time to find out how you’re actually feeling. Tolerable discomfort changes both on a day to day basis and as you grow, so there’s no quick and easy way to find it. But I think you’ll find that the more you invest in understanding your own discomfort, the easier it is to avoid unnecessary pain and actually start becoming who you want to be.
