Being in the comfort zone is, well, comfortable. It is often pleasant and it is always easy, however, the comfort zone might also be hindering your growth and development and impacting your life in a negative way in the long term. It might be time to leave it, and here are six reasons why it’s ruining your life.
1. You will not discover your true passion
If you stay in your comfort zone, you might get good at something, but will it be your true passion? More often than not, it won’t be. A true passion often requires you to take a risk and to gamble on the thing that matters. But your comfort zone will often prevent you from even finding out what that thing actually is.
You might spend a long time without a meaning or a purpose, just focusing on comfort, and many people find that, in the end, that’s not enough to be happy and fulfilled.
2. It hinders your career
The second reason is that the comfort zone is sabotaging your growth. Perhaps you have not taken promotions or have not been offered on. Maybe you have been staying in the same place and in the same position, even if you know you could do better.
The comfort zone makes you afraid of moving forward and growing, and you will usually choose to stay put. This means that you never will get to receive bigger rewards and, if you are not careful, it might come to a point where you will become obsolete in your work. Growth and lateral changes are part of healthy career development, and the comfort zone leads to stagnation.
3. It reduces your creativity
The more a habit becomes ingrained, the more difficult it is to change it. If you spend a lot of time doing the same work time and again, it can hinder your creative habits, because non-creative work becomes a habit.
In addition to this, creativity is a skill, and when you leave a skill without practice for too long, it gets rusty. The comfort zone erodes your creativity, and it might take a while to get it back to snuff.
4. It undermines your confidence
When you stop facing challenges, you start losing confidence in your own abilities. You might feel that even if new opportunities appear, you are not capable of taking them on.
Challenges show us our ability and also evidence our weaknesses so that we can work out how to get better and step up to the next thing that comes our way. If it takes too long, we might not feel like we can take risks anymore and let even something that we want to pass by.
5. It gets you a reputation
Whether we like it or not, other people learn to view us in a certain way. The reputation we build might influence how we are perceived and the opportunities others bring our way.
When you are in your comfort zone all the time, others learn to view it as someone who doesn’t take risks and might not think of you when they consider a new project or chance. It might close doors in the short term and in the long term, where you will not be considered as someone who always grows and improves.
6. It makes you tune out of your life
The more you stay in your comfortable life, the less present, aware, and engaged you are likely to be. Things fall into a comfortable routine and, little by little, time begins to speed away and, before you know it, too much has passed for your liking.
A lack of novelty encourages our brains to turn on autopilot and stop paying attention. This means that your life can just go by as you observe it without actually enjoying it and being present for much of it. The situation is insidious and you won’t always notice it’s happening.
The comfort zone can ruin your life in different ways. The good news is that now that you are more aware, you can take steps to challenge yourself and grow continuously. Learn new things and seek out new experiences.
