life begins outside of your comfort zone

Hello you lovely lot,

As you can tell by the title of this post, today we’re going to be talking about comfort zones – more importantly anxiety, and how much I’m trying to get rid of it.

Now, I could go all serious on you and write a deep insightful post about anxiety and the way in which it’s affected my life and yada yada, but I wanted to keep this one a little more upbeat. I’m actually feeling super happy and inspired right now (whenever Zoe uploads a vlog I get so motivated and happy) so that’s the current situation right now. In this vlog she recently uploaded she literally does a 7 minute intro talking about anxiety which I always find so helpful because it really allows me to kind of sit down with myself and think about the same things too. She speaks about a quote from The Greatest Showman that has really stuck with her, and it’s “comfort is the enemy of progress.”

Comfort is the enemy of progress.

COMFORT IS THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS.

Okay, you get the idea. I’ll stop shouting.

Anyway, this whole thing is weird because recently I’ve actually been making myself just get a grip on life, basically. Like I said, I don’t want to turn this post all serious but long story short, anxiety stops me from doing everything. Everything. There’s so many things I’ve wanted to do in life that I haven’t because my stomach feels like it’s going to fall out of my mouth and my brain is screaming at me NO NO NO NO. I feel like I’ve had anxiety since I came out the freaking womb, I don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t have it – I didn’t even know it wasn’t normal until I realised that everyone else didn’t feel the same way and in fact, my brain was just being super unkind to me. Thanks brain.

Lately, as Shia Labeouf would so beautifully put it, I’ve been learning to just do it. Stop thinking about it, stop building it up in your head and just do it. The less time you have to think, the less time you have to worry and freak yourself out about the whole thing. 99.9% of the things that I’m scared out of my mind for always end up being completely fine once they’re over and then I just sit there thinking to myself…that whole thing was fine…I just worked myself up for a week and couldn’t physically eat anything because I was so nervous and the whole thing has literally just turned out fine. It was fine. I enjoyed it. I didn’t die, nothing bad happened and I actually enjoyed it, in fact, I want to go back and do it again.

So why was I so worried??

Screw you brain, you are not going to rule my life anymore and make me feel like I’m literally going to die doing anything outside of my comfort zone.

You know what comfort is? Boring. There’s two types of comfort – physical comfort where we’re snuggled up in bed with our pets surrounded by blankets and pillows watching our favourite movie and knowing there’s no where else we’d rather be. We like that kind of comfort.

The second type of comfort is the comfort we don’t like, which is staying in the same job, the same place, not wearing what we want to, not doing the things we want to and instead doing the same thing every single day because we’re so terrified of stepping outside of our comfort zone in case the sky falls in on us and we end up somehow magically dying and forever regretting the choice we made, which, spoiler alert – is never going to happen. 

Stepping outside of your comfort zone is the best thing you can do for yourself and for your own personal progress – you won’t know until you try it. There’s a quote that says “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got” and that pretty much sums it all up right there, if you want to carry on living an unfulfilled, monotonous and repetitive life, keep doing what you’re doing! If you want to actually feel alive and like you’re living – step outside of your comfort zone! Dip your toe in the water and see how it feels – don’t think about it, just do it. I promise you won’t regret it.

Life begins outside of your comfort zone, make sure you don’t miss it.

All my love,

Chloe .xx