Comfort and Panic zones

Zone of comfort is an area which almost all of us create and tend to create. Here's a literal meaning of comfort:

a state of ease and satisfaction of bodily wants, with freedom from pain and anxiety.

Everybody loves to be comfortable, most importantly many treat that comfort is the best thing to have in life. But, it is indeed not. One has to go thru the pain to understand what comfort means, hence the more pains we go thru, the more we'll realize what comfort is all about. To understand what sweet is, one should have understood what bitter means. While sweet experiences give you the pleasure, bitter experiences will make you realize the importance of pleasure. The bitter experiences could all be collated under what we call as zone of panic. Unless we are comfortable at handling panic zone situations, we'll not be flexible at handling any situation.

Consider the following diagram, each of (a) and (b) depicts two poles between which a net is tied.

Consider you to be the ball in the figure. When you restrict yourself as in fig (a), you'll be in the net and your area of comfort will be limited to a small region. The rest of it will be panic, i.e., if you are placed in the region of panic, you'll soon move/tend to move towards the zone which you are comfortable in. Ball will come to the state of equilibrium, meaning we'll come back to comfort zone. Now consider fig (b), the only difference here is that the poles are wide apart and the net sagging isn't there. Here, since we expanded our thoughts by going beyond the region of comfort, the ball could comfortably be placed in any of the places on the net and hence it'll not roll back and forth. This represents state of zero panic, that is panic zone has been eliminated completely. The state is considered stable. If we relate this to our lives, we get perturbed/disturbed by circumstances around us and feel unstable. If we positively react to the negativity around us, very soon we'll realize that we have expanded our zone of comfort and equally reduced zone of panic.

One final thought, the real test of character of a person is not in the comfort zone, but is only in panic zone!