What facing fear does is it connects the gap between feeling distressed, and becoming comfortable. Fear is one of the basic yet volatile human emotions. Like any other emotion, what it does is sends you a signal, regarding what to perceive in your immediate future or environment.
Fear is one of the most difficult emotions to comprehend, especially when you’re attempting to make changes in your life.
When you’re familiar with doing something in a particular way, it feels comfortable and safe. Even if it’s not particularly working, you continue to do so anyways.
What we enjoy is to be safe, feel safe. This feeling of calm is being in our comfort zone.
If you like to be alone and stay at home, you enjoy quiet and solitude rather than going out, this is your comfortable zone.
You like to plunk yourself down on the sofa with your cat and a glass of wine, as it feels the most relaxing to you.
You No Longer Feel Safe
But then, you decide you would like to meet new people, make more friends, find a romantic partner, or start networking.
What you realize is staying home every Friday night, isn’t going to help you get what you want.
What you’re forced to do is get out of your comfort zone, take a risk, by going out to a few parties, a few clubs, and become more sociable.
Moving Out Of The Comfort Zone
The first feeling when stepping outside your comfort zone is discomfort, experiencing degrees of fear, which is normal and you expect it.
Realize it’s impossible to move forward, expand your horizons, improve yourself without initially feeling fear.
Fear is an emotion that throws hazard flags in your path, giving you warning signals of alert, telling you of potential danger or disaster.
What fear does is alerts you to prepare yourself, and get ready for the unexpected.
As a result, what’s been said is “feel the fear and do it anyways,” if you want to improve the standard of your life.
Discomfort Or Distress
What you need to know is the difference between being uncomfortable and feeling distressed, and react accordingly.
Anytime you step outside of your comfort zone and do something new, what you feel is discomfort.
The good news is this discomfort is normal and should be expected, telling you should be able to tolerate this new action.
Once you feel comfortable and start moving forward, you’re then ready to expand on it.
Setting New Horizons
These new parameters of the expanded comfort zone you’ve set, will now follow you around everywhere you go, under every circumstance.
Each time you happen to step outside of it, and if you’re able to tolerate and overcome the initial discomfort again, what you’re allowing is your comfort zone to expand.
Expanding your comfort zone should be the goal, if what you’re wanting to do is worth it.
You can do this to expand your life experiences, learn new things, improve your life from what it currently is, start a new business.
Experiencing Discomfort In Your Life
A good healthy dose of discomfort is anticipating a level of anxiety, which may help in actually improving your ability to perform better.
This level and feeling of discomfort however, should be tolerable.
When you’re feeling discomfort, you should also still feel excited, and something you’re looking forward to doing. Anxiety can become an issue once you begin to feel too overwhelmed.
This high degree of anxiety, will then get in the way of you doing something you’re really wanting to do, by impairing your ability, by you getting scared.
Becoming Too Overwhelmed
For instance, you think you’ve got a great singing voice, as you sing in the shower every morning proves it.
What you’re wanting is to sing in front of a crowd at karaoke night, but every time you try, your anxiety starts to overwhelm you.
You get nervous to the point you completely freeze, begin to shake, and go into a cold sweat.
This high anxiety level is preventing you from stepping out of your comfort zone. What all this discomfort does is makes you feel consumed and defeated.
Feeling extreme fear will overtake you if you attempt to take further action, so once you feel this type of discomfort, then don’t do it.
The belief you’re wanting to succeed, may not be strong enough for you to follow through.
Then, in the future, these similar negative beliefs will come flowing back to you, if you attempt to do similar things, and you’ll most likely fail again.
From Feeling Discomfort To Feeling Distressed
Feeling distress is the end result of you focusing more on what could potentially go wrong rather than what could go right, once you attempt to follow through with the task.
What stepping out, doing something that’s unfamiliar can do is make you feel a tinge of healthy discomfort. That feeling also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
If this is the case, and especially if you think it’ll bring you closer to something you really want to do, then go for it.
Once the anxiety begins to shift towards feeling distress, then try to refocus your thoughts on all of the positive reasons why you’re wanting to do something.
If that doesn’t work, then you may of stepped too far out of your comfort zone, or too suddenly.
You may then need to take a step back, until the distress level lowers to a more tolerable level.
Feel The Fear
If the discomfort level feels more than feeling distressed, yet you feel uncomfortable, then go ahead and do it, especially if you’re looking forward to it.
Distress is more of a warning signal which makes you feel bad, something that turns your stomach queasy.
The negative feelings aren’t able to overcome the positive ones, while there’s a lack of focus because of the anxiety you feel.