COMFORT ZONE Vs FREEDOM

Staying in your comfort zone is staying with what is familiar. You activate the same neurology and chemistry, the same thoughts and feelings that keep you in that state of being. It is a cycle that perpetuates the same familiar behaviours, actions, decisions and therefore thoughts and feeling over and over. It is your conditioning.

Life, however, is dynamic and change is the constant. If change is that which challenges your comfort zone as it so often is and you resist, the result is internal chaos as well as external disorder.

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”    Lao Tzu – Philosopher

To evolve you will go through and must go through, challenges to your comfort zone; you will go through and must go through what can be perceived as periods of building \ construction \ birth \ growth \ syntropy \ order as well as perceived periods of destruction \ stagnation \ death \ entropy disorder.

Learning occurs by association as information is processed synaptically – linear, neuronal pathways and ephaptically – non-linear, electro-magnetic exchanges. Associative memories, when reinforced over a period of time, result in positive or negative perceptions that recycle whenever triggered and will run your life through emotional reactions; your high’s and low’s. You become conditioned.

Your conditioning becomes what you know, is automatic and often outside of your awareness – your comfort zone. You may not like being there (or you might and you just want to stay there and resist anything that challenges you) but it is familiar and predictable; in a nano-second and before you know it, you revert to familiar behaviour, actions etc.

“There are risks and costs to action…But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.” John F. Kennedy – President, USA

Emotions distort perceptions, distort thoughts and you feel the discomfort throughout your body. Such distortions affect your cognitive ability to make clear, wise and effective decisions as blood flows away from the decision-making centre of your brain. This negatively affects your output, your personal performance and the quality of your interactions.

The stronger your conditioned thinking, feeling, decisions, behaviours, actions are the less conscious control you have. Your automatic sub-conscious programming is running. This is what you live daily.

Ask yourself these quality questions:  How do I want to live? How do I want my life to be - right now?

Suggestions:

·        Observe your High’s & Low’s – make a note of when they occur; under what circumstances?

·        Observe your behaviour – make a note of whether you perceive it to be grandiose or passive\submissive and under what conditions.

·        Observe your actions – note whether you are reacting, or perhaps avoiding and not taking any action or whether you are taking conscious action.

·        Listen to your language and the words you use consistently – they define your experiences and give you an insight into the meanings you have assigned to those experiences.

A pattern will emerge that gives information about your comfort zone.

Commit to taking time every day to sit in quiet reflection and appreciation. Persist. Silence the ego, the analytical Mind.

“At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.”    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1749-1832 - Writer and Statesman

This will nudge you towards making active changes towards a new way of thinking and being. It is the first step.

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”               Dolly Parton - Singer, Songwriter, and Entrepreneur

“It takes effort to contemplate new possibilities beyond known choices. But that effort is the ‘pattern interrupt’…”                  Joe Dispenza

Lilly Fitzgerald

YOU, MOSTLY YOU, can make a DIFFERENCE TO YOUR LIFE!!!

Anxiety attacks are created when YOU have trained YOUR Mind to be aware, to be vigilant, to be on the look out for and be prepared for an ANTICIPATED STRESSFUL experience. 

This is what fight \ flight \ freeze is about. 

We were never designed to remain in that state of being, in that state of Mind, for prolonged periods of time. Yet for many, that is the state of play.

It is often the very thought of these stressful experiences that creates the anxiety rather than any event or experience itself! That in itself tells you how powerful your thinking is and can be. Keep that in the forefront of your Mind. Interesting isn't it, the expression 'forefront of your Mind'? The forefront of your Mind - your frontal lobes - is the operating system of your body!

So why is it wise to keep the sentence "that in itself tells you how powerful your thinking is and can be" in the forefront of your Mind? Read on.

Have you ever experienced, what you considered to be an 'over-the-top' reaction to a certain event or situation, either by you or someone else?

The 'over-the-topness' of the reaction is evidence that your brain (or the brain of someone who is reacting in an 'over-the-top' way), alerted by thoughts, has activated familiar inner chemistry and has sent it cascading throughout your body. "You feel the thoughts" ; you physically experience them throughout your body!

Those thoughts are often a memory of a perceived traumatic \ fearful \ extremely sad etc

event or experience of the past that created the chemicals you are experiencing now, in the first place. 

By association, feelings - triggered by thoughts, therefore emotions, therefore the resulting inner chemical mix that has been repeated over and over in your life - seem to be an automatic response - the automatic response being the same synaptic connections firing over and over and hence the brain releases the same chemicals over and over - which then becomes a familiar pattern for you. That is why you literally feel the thoughts through the emotions (chemical responses) throughout your body.

Hence, your brain has become "neurologically hard-wired as well as chemically dependent" over the years, to the emotions experienced by the initial perceived stressful experience and when they are triggered by thoughts and by association, it is as if you are reliving that same experience over again internally, in your Mind and throughout your body. 

This is a physical manifestation of a habitual pattern of thinking. 

This is the power your Mind has. 

That being the case, you can utilize that same power to break the habitual pattern of thinking and therefore feeling. 

Remember that. Know that. 

Each and every person is empowered to alter habits. It is knowing this information, understanding it and the acting on it that enables a different pattern to emerge and evolve.

Use this information as a stepping stone towards creating a different response (as opposed to reacting to a particular situation!). Become empowered!

For you!

Lilly Fitzgerald