The magnetic power of the comfort zone is such that few of us escape its pull.

"Over and over we will return to the same theme: Comfort is pleasure plus safety, satisfaction colored with security. There are intense satisfactions - deeply honest relationships, sexual thrills, athletic feats, great goals - which can only be delivered in the absence of security. These satisfactions can only be achieved beyond the boundaries of one's comfort zone, though, and that is the point. Comfort is charismatic precisely because it is safe - and therein lies its power. But safety limits the amount of satisfaction any experience can deliver - and therein lies its painful limitation.

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Forward is too dangerous. Staying here is too sad. Stuck.

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But pure and passionate desire itself, the real unadulterated stuff, is the uncut heroin of the soul.

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I've worked with patients who have told me, after a job interview, that the work seemed tedious yet took the job, burrowed in, and struggled with the question of how to move on. I've seen patients go off to graduate school at the urging of well-intentioned families and flounder miserably because they knew from the start they had no interest in the program.

When people know at the outset that their paths lead nowhere, why take them anyway?

Because it's easy, because it's comfortable, because easy and comfortable leave us insulated from pain, fear, and anxiety. Because once you give in to easy and comfortable, it's as if you are in the grip of a giant suction force pulling you back to familiar turf, regardless of what you know to contrary. Because it's simpler to erase your knowing - with fantasy, avoidance, denial, or blame - than to pay attention to painful truths.

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recognizing work as a comfort trap generally is not the unfulfilled hope of advancement but the lulling numbness of familiarity. Many jobs offer at least the illusion of indefinite security, with clear rewards and predictable workload. We know the people, we know the place, we know the parking lot. It's a brain groove - five days a week, move through these tasks, decide between the tuna and the burger for lunch, distract yourself with enough office intrigue to make the day interesting, drive home. Push a little in the busy times, space out a little when you can, prefer the busy times actually and move on to the next day.

What's wrong with this picture? Absolutely nothing, as long as, in addition to the lulling sense of security, you also have a tolerable degree of personal satisfaction delivered with your tuna.

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There's just no getting around that when a decision challenges your comfort zone. If you act, something makes you anxious; if you stay put, something is lost.

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So, swallow the hard truth that there is no one right choice and then go one step further. Recognize that you will make the best choice you can, given who you are and what your circumstances are at this moment in your life. Will you regret it later? Maybe, if you are the sort who is given to regret. But that future review changes nothing. The choice is on today's table, regarding today's comfort zone. Everything you are to this point is all you can bring to your decision.

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you'll probably always do what you always did, unless you make a focused and conscious leap to do something different.

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now that you see you're the kind of person who is brave and worthy of more, you can allow that more concrete vision to appear. And so the loop continues. Those who stretch improve their capacity to stretch more, to see more toward which to reach, and so to improve their grasp.

The rest stay put.

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By comparison, what's new will seem at best an awkward fit. After all, if you are going some place you've never been, by definition you'll have to take a road you've never traveled. It can't feel as safe as the roads you've known. But it will get you where you are hoping to go after you've won the fight with yourself.

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When you do take that awful step into the cold, believe that you will come to tolerate, then relish, finally glory in your next destination. Because you will, you know, and it will be worth it.

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The thing is, you are us. All of us, at least at one time or another. The magnetic power of the comfort zone is such that few of us escape its pull. We all linger, complaining, confused, or deadened. We are waiting, without necessarily knowing we are waiting. Waiting for an emotional earthquake, for rescue, for relief. We are waiting for something to happen, despising the truth that requires so much from us - that we are the something that has to happen."

-- THE COMFORT TRAP OR, WHAT IF YOU'RE RIDING A DEAD HORSE?, Judith Sills, Ph.D.