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One’s comfort zone refers to the set of environments and behaviours with which one is comfortable, without creating a sense of risk. A person’s personality can be described by his or her comfort zones. Highly successful persons may routinely step outside their comfort zones, to accomplish what they wish. A comfort zone is a type of mental conditioning that causes a person to create and operate mental boundaries. Such boundaries create an unfounded sense of security. Like inertia, a person who has established a comfort zone in a particular axis of his or her life, will tend to stay within that zone without stepping outside of it. To step outside a person’s comfort zone, they must experiment with new and different behaviours, and then experience the new and different responses that then occur within their environment.
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To step out of the comfort zone raises the anxiety level engendering a stress response, the result of which is an enhanced level of concentration and focus. White (2008) refers to this as the Optimal Performance Zone - a zone in which the performance of a person can be enhanced and in which their skills can be optimized. However, White (2008) also observes that if the work of Robert Yerkes (1907) is considered in which he reported ‘Anxiety improves performance until a certain optimum level of arousal has been reached. Beyond that point, performance deteriorates as higher levels of anxiety are attained’, if a person steps beyond the optimum performance zone they enter a “danger zone” in which performance will decline rapidly as higher levels of anxiety or discomfort occur.
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To step out of the comfort zone raises the anxiety level engendering a stress response, the result of which is an enhanced level of concentration and focus. White (2008) refers to this as the Optimal Performance Zone - a zone in which the performance of a person can be enhanced and in which their skills can be optimized. However, White (2008) also observes that if the work of Robert Yerkes (1907) is considered in which he reported ‘Anxiety improves performance until a certain optimum level of arousal has been reached. Beyond that point, performance deteriorates as higher levels of anxiety are attained’, if a person steps beyond the optimum performance zone they enter a “danger zone” in which performance will decline rapidly as higher levels of anxiety or discomfort occur.
Returning from Derrick Jensen’s talk at UVM. I was going to try to resist swearing on this site in case children were reading, but I think I’m going to give up on that. Derrick’s talk was a bit of a mind fuck. There are so many things to think about, I feel like I need to integrate them all into my platform. I also need to sleep so I’ll leave just one tidbit tonight, which I came across while wikipeding sustainability and that is the quote above. I think this may be the most important thing for creating a sustainable society. Because everyone’s comfort zone is based on an unsustainable system everyone will have to leave their comfort zone eventually. So you might as well willfully leave your comfort zone and start helping build a better world than idly bask in your comfort zone until inevitability comes to drag you away kicking and screaming.
