The Science behind Relentless
Breakthroughs
Life isn’t supposed to be comfortable all the
time. While most of us crave a degree of stability, a life without challenges
robs you of your fighting spirit and motivation.
Without discomfort, there can be no growth.
In a rapidly-changing world, stagnation is the first step towards obscurity and
mediocrity. There’s a science behind experiencing the right amount of struggle
to spur growth.
The best state: optimal anxiety
Your comfort zone exists so that you have a safe space
from which to operate most of the time. In your comfort zone, you know what to
do and how to behave, and there are routines and patterns that you follow to
reduce stress. People in their comfort zone are generally happier than those
who live in a state of heightened anxiety most of the time.
Clearly, stability is something to aspire to,
but if things are too comfortable, people tend to become complacent. They may
not work as hard to achieve their goals, and they may even lose their ambition
altogether.
If you can reach a state of optimal anxiety,
then you can enjoy some time in your comfort zone while still feeling pressure
to succeed. Optimal anxiety allows you to experience the burst of energy and
heightened state of awareness that you need to take on a challenge.
The Harvard experiment on stress levels
We’ve known this for over a century. In 1908, two Harvard
psychologists, Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, sought to explain different
levels of performance. People in a state of comfort could often maintain a
steady performance level, but those with high-stress levels experienced
decreased productivity. People who wanted to experience growth had to endure
some anxiety.1
When our stress levels elevate slightly, we
enter into a state of optimal anxiety. This sweet spot, just outside of our
comfort zone, is the place where we can improve our performance and make
greater gains in our work.
How to
reach a state of optimal anxiety
Choose things that are 50% familiar to you
Things that are too commonplace, and things
that are way beyond your current understanding won’t keep your attention.
Without a doubt, your eyes have glazed over as you listened to someone give a
technical lecture on a subject with which you are unfamiliar. You’d be equally
disinterested listening to someone repeat the same story over and over. When
something is 50% familiar and 50% new, it is more likely to keep you
interested.
Educators think about striking this balance
between familiar and novel all the time. Developmental psychologist, Lev
Vygotsky, calls this area in which we are challenged to learn but not
overwhelmed as the “Zone of Proximal Development.”2 In
the Zone of Proximal Development, you have enough context to understand the
basics, but you also have room to grow.
Think about when you had to learn math in
elementary school. If your teachers tried to teach you trigonometry in
pre-school, you would not have been successful. Trigonometry is too difficult
to complete without understanding basic math concepts first. It is more likely
that they taught you the words and symbols associated with numbers and left the
discussion of trig for your high school years.
Break things into baby steps
You might wonder how you’ll ever learn
anything if you are stuck choosing things that are about 50% familiar to you
because there are a lot of things that you don’t know. True, when you are
trying to learn things, there are more unknowns than knowns, but narrowing the
scope of your question can help.
Writers encounter this overwhelm all the
time. Imagine that you want to write a book, but you’ve never written before.
The concept of writing a book is so foreign that you may not even know where to
begin. There’s a lot that you don’t know, and it’s going to obstruct your
ability to see what you do know.
If you’ve hardly written more than a few
paragraphs since high school, it is unreasonable to think that you can
accomplish the Herculean task of writing a book without some steps in between.
Break it down by focusing on writing one paragraph, a chapter, or a page. The
more you practice, the more you can expect from yourself each day.
Make it a continuous process: Scare yourself
every day
Learning must be gradual and continuous.
Choose something that exists just outside of your comfort zone every day, and
work to understand it. Whatever that unfamiliar thing is, keep breaking it down
until you find something you are 50% familiar with. At that point, you can work
to tackle the project.
Perhaps you want to be able to host a group
of friends at your home for dinner, but you are afraid you’ll ruin their
evening. Instead of embarassing yourself or causing too much stress by inviting
over ten of your best friends, break the task down into smaller steps.
Start by trying out the recipes you want to
make for your friends. Chances are, you already have some idea about how to
cook, and you just need to build confidence and experiment with cooking times
and menus. Then, practice by having one or two of your closest friends over.
When you feel good about this step, you could invite others over for a dinner
party.
People have to tackle big goals all the time.
Learning to drive a car, understanding a complex concept in school, and giving
speeches can all be accomplished by breaking the goal into smaller steps.
Mark down your worries during the process and
review them later
When you’re stepping out of your comfort
zone, your brain is going to try to protect you by giving you lots of things to
worry about. The torrent of “what ifs” can hold you back from making real
progress.
Instead of letting those thoughts own you,
write them down. After you’ve stepped out of your comfort zone for the day,
review what you wrote. You’ll find that most of the things you worried about
didn’t happen. In the future, you’ll be able to recognize that most of your
fears are unfounded.
Keep track of your tiny achievements every
day
Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to
achieve the end result that we forget to recognize the small accomplishments we
make every day. Any accomplishment–regardless of how great or small it
is–activates the reward centers in our brains.
If your goal is to exercise five days per
week, keep track of your work outs every day. When you see how much you’re
doing, it can motivate you to do more. When work seems so overwhelming that you
are prone to procrastination, try taking note of each time you begin a project
early instead of waiting until the deadline.
Every time you catalog a success, your brain
releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine.3Dopamine
triggers that feeling of achievement and pride and energizes us to keep moving
forward with our goals. Since your brain loves to be rewarded with a hit of
dopamine, it will motivate you to replicate your actions.
Make room to grow every day
Busting out of your comfort zone is more than just a
means to achieve your dreams. Finding your optimal level of anxiety affects
everything from the amount of motivation that you feel to the neurotransmitters
in your brain. A fear of the unknown is just an opportunity to break what you
need to learn into accessible steps.
Brian Lee
http://www.lifehack.org/622354/the-science-behind-comfort-zone?ck_subscriber_id=168781672
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