by Mary Hrovat
Last year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I chose several values to focus on during the year. One of these values was comfort and ease. Well, 2025 was an anxious and uncomfortable year in the U.S., and I’m not sure how much I actually did to make my life more comfortable. But I began to learn about my relationship to comfort, and to see that I simultaneously long for it and distrust it as an indulgence. Lately I’ve been trying to reconcile that tension.
When I thought about my ambivalent views of comfort, I started to pay more attention to the ways that we as a culture denigrate comfort. One example of a negative view is the pop psychology advice about getting out of your comfort zone. The proponents of this advice describe the comfort zone as a place of stasis, idleness, or insufficient effort. The idea is that leaving this zone—by doing something that’s new to you, difficult, or otherwise challenging—is crucial to learning and growth.
I’ve always been leery of this advice. I’ve had a vague sense that the comfort zone was a concept borrowed from the corporate world and then applied in other contexts where it might be inappropriate. In addition, I tend to associate it with a focus on performance, that is, human activity that’s evaluated according to some measure—performance on a task or job, say, or athletic or musical performance. These characteristics alone make it less than compelling to me.
I’m also wary of the word growth, even in the phrase personal growth, when the context is that you should push yourself to grow. People sometimes need to rest, or tend to their own physical needs or those of others. Pleasure and enjoyment are vital as ends in themselves. Life is about more than growth.
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So I’ve been trying to learn why people believe that you need to leave the comfort zone in order to grow. The scientific basis of the concept is a curve called the inverse-U curve or the Yerkes–Dodson curve. The area under the center of the curve is thought to represent a zone of optimal stress with respect to some type of human activity or performance. That’s supposedly where you do your best work. The comfort zone, under the left slope of the curve, is thought to be a region of insufficient stress in which people are bored or stuck. Under the right-hand slope, there’s an area of too much stress, in which people begin to perform poorly or shut down. The idea is that to act most effectively, we need to be in the zone of optimal stress.
The comfort zone is sometimes presented as being surrounded by three other concentric zones. The first zone outside of the comfort zone is the fear zone. If you make it through that, then you might proceed to the learning and growth zones. The name fear zone suggests that fear is the most important thing you experience upon leaving the comfort zone, which strikes me as a needlessly discouraging view of life. Learning and growth can be approached with an attitude of curiosity, interest, excitement, affinity, or even love. These feelings are certainly compatible with uncertainty and trepidation, but I wasn’t sure why the model apparently assumes that fear is predominant.
I don’t know how seriously this four-stage model is taken in therapeutic or academic circles, but it seems like a lot to infer from the YD curve. I was curious about where that curve came from; initially I knew only that it’s ultimately derived from the results of a 1908 study of dancing mice (not circus performers but a particularly active species of mice). More on that in a bit.
I also couldn’t see why comfort was thought to be inimical to learning and personal growth, or to taking effective action. We have other ways of talking about balancing security and risk, about feeling both drawn to and averse to change, about choosing how much effort to give to various parts of our lives. My initial research didn’t clarify what value, if any, the comfort zone idea added to these discussions.
But my strongest resistance to the idea of leaving my comfort zone arises from the fact that I’ve generally found comfort to be elusive. I’ve spent much of my life anxious, awash in cortisol and shame. A.K. White, in From Comfort Zone to Performance Management, defined the comfort zone as an anxiety-neutral condition; when I first read that phrase, it sounded heavenly to me. Moreover, being in familiar surroundings with adequate control over my time and space is a necessary condition for immersing myself fully in reading, writing, and taking pictures—activities that nourish me and give me space for creativity.
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I’ve also been learning about comfort from a completely different angle. A couple of years ago, in my early 60s, I learned that I was autistic; I think I probably also have ADHD. I’ve been reading and listening to other neurodivergent people, especially those, like me, who didn’t know that they’re autistic or have ADHD until well into adulthood. I’m also learning from therapists who work with people like me, as well as people with other disabilities and/or energy-limiting conditions (chronic illness, for example). There’s a lot of overlap between these groups, for various reasons.
We autistic people generally have sensory and/or emotional sensitivities, and our brains process things differently from neurotypical brains. The world isn’t built with people like us in mind. The negative effects are cumulative and generally painful. Many of us learn at a very early age that we must ignore or work around our sensitivities and differences as best we can, because there’s little that anyone is willing to do to ameliorate or accommodate them. Sometimes people don’t even believe that things are as difficult for us as we say they are. My reactions have been questioned so often that I mistrust and second-guess myself. I feel estranged from my instincts.
The world is often overwhelming for autistic people. Our nervous systems generally react more strongly to input and take longer to return to equilibrium. It makes sense to me that I do best in environments that are constrained in such a way that I can trust that I won’t be pushed too far out of equilibrium. Consequently, I live a life that may look narrow or restricted to others.
I find that it’s easier to eat the same things every day, and to stick to familiar routines or routes. I sometimes listen to beloved music over and over; I re-read or re-watch old stories. I’m fond of familiar things because they provide predictable and reliable pleasure. In addition, sticking to what I know in some areas frees up energy for things I’d like to do. (In the parlance of spoon theory, I spend fewer spoons making decisions or overthinking what to do, and thus have more spoons available for other things.) A common piece of advice for getting out of your comfort zone is to change your habits or do everyday things differently. As an autistic person with ADHD, I have a complicated relationship to regular routines, but the good habits that I’ve been able to form are lifelines that I don’t think I can afford to discard.
In the context of neurodivergence and other forms of disability, the terms regulated and dysregulated are used to describe whether your body and mind are stable, comfortable, and not stressed. You don’t really regulate your nervous system so much as give it the conditions in which it feels safe. This may involve spending time alone working on things you love, getting sufficient sleep, and doing your best to manage environmental factors (e.g., temperature, light, and sound) for maximum comfort.
This approach is the opposite of what the comfort zone advice tells us. It’s tremendously appealing to me, and it makes intuitive sense. It’s consistent with what I know about the times I’m at my best, and I have no reason to distrust it. But to the part of me that has grown accustomed to pushing through and ignoring my own needs, it sometimes seems too good to be true. I think I must be weak and self-indulgent for wanting to apply this idea to my daily life. As one way to address this problem, I went in search of information about the research on which advice about leaving your comfort zone is based.
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Now we return to those dancing mice. I was fortunate to happen upon the paper Cold Comfort Firm: Lean Organisation and the Empirical Mirage of the Comfort Zone, by Martin Corbett. Corbett is an organizational psychologist. The title of the paper refers to a management trend that began in the 1990s, where lean organizations were characterized by efficiency and a reduction in waste. (I’m tempted to put waste in quotation marks.)
Some managers in lean organizations have apparently applied the concept of the comfort zone by stressing workers so as to improve their job performance. (I have so many questions and reservations about that.) Corbett’s paper examined three assumptions underlying this practice. Two of them are relevant to my own search: that comfort involves a limited set of behaviors and requires little physical or mental effort, and that when people leave their comfort zone, they can achieve optimal performance. He reported that there’s little evidence supporting the YD curve, citing a review of the literature. He couldn’t justify the manipulation of workers’ stress levels to improve their performance. If I’d learned only that, it would have been worth reading the paper.
But there was so much more. The origin story for the comfort zone is rather wild. The 1908 dancing mice paper, by Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, reported the results of a study of habit formation in mice. They administered electric shocks to the mice to train them on a task and measured the relationships between the strength of the shock, the difficulty of the task, and the speed with which the mice were trained. The curves they published for two levels of task difficulty don’t look much like the YD curve as it’s known today.
Yerkes and Dodson didn’t claim to have discovered a law in this work. However, in a 1957 paper, P.L. Broadhurst stated that Yerkes and Dodson had established the YD law, although, according to Corbett, Broadhurst’s initial formulation of the law was based on a misreading of the earlier paper. Broadhurst also reported an experiment that supposedly built upon the mouse experiment. Rats were held underwater for various lengths of time to examine the effect of the duration of submersion (motivation) on how fast they subsequently swam a specific distance (performance). (I wrote an indignant “FFS!” in the margin of my copy of Corbett’s paper at this point.) Note that the two parameters that Broadhurst studied don’t match those studied by Yerkes and Dodson. Broadhurst’s adaptation of the YD curve was adopted by other researchers and eventually idealized into the YD curve we know today, which has become broadly disseminated in textbooks.
It turns out that since at least 1965, psychologists have been suggesting that the YD law lacks validity. A 1994 paper by Karl Halvor Teigen refers to it as a law for all seasons, owing to the broad range of terms used to describe the variables. People have used the law to explain the effects of stress, arousal, motivation, drive, anxiety, and other factors on learning, performance, problem-solving, and so on. Teigen suggests that these differences indicate a fundamental lack of clarity about the terminology in the areas being studied. A blog post at the Learning Science website characterizes this law as a resilient myth.
I can’t comment knowledgeably on the validity of the YD law or the methods by which it was obtained, and I still haven’t learned how the YD curve percolated into pop psychology, but I learned enough that I’m willing to reject outright any advice based on it. There’s a lot to ponder about the fact that we think (or thought) that causing distress to animals and measuring their performance on an arbitrary task is not only appropriate but can form the basis of beliefs about human activity or motivation. I also wonder what the history of this law says about the self-correcting nature of science.
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Before I read Corbett’s paper, I thought that maybe advice about leaving your comfort zone had limited usefulness for some people, but that it was a bad fit for many of us. As dubious as I was about its value for me, I didn’t expect to find a paper that so thoroughly rejected its applicability to anyone. Corbett noted that although social scientists tend to view comfort as a state of complacency, older connotations suggest that comfort is a source of strength and support. (According to Etymonline, the word is derived from the Latin word fortis, or strong, through the Late Latin confortare, “to strengthen much.”) Corbett suggests that removing someone from their comfort zone is equivalent to depriving them of strength or courage.
This interpretation is very much in tune with what I’ve been learning about maintaining stability and capacity by incorporating comforting activities and practices into my life. The Substack post Joy Isn’t Something to Earn (written by Abby at One Life Lived Well) is full of good advice from an occupational therapist about ways to find comfort, ease, and joy in everyday life. I’ve been thinking about her statement that regulation supports capacity. I understand this to mean that regulation gives me whatever capacity is available to me, capacity to do the things I want to do and the things I need to do—to make and mend, to love, to tend, to appreciate my life and to do my best. The world pulls all of us away from comfort, especially these days. I think I’m finally ready to cherish and protect my comfort zone.
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With thanks to Cecelia Alexander and Ray Hrovat for the use of their photos (and much else besides).
I’m grateful to these writers for their work:
Cold Comfort Firm: Lean Organisation and the Empirical Mirage of the Comfort Zone, Martin Corbett (free download)
From Law to Folklore: Work Stress and the Yerkes-Dodson Law, Martin Corbett
Joy Isn’t Something to Earn, Substack post from Abby at One Life Lived Well
Tending To, Rather than Pushing Through, Patrice Riley
Spoon Theory for Autism and ADHD: The Neurodivergent Spoon Drawer, Megan Anna Neff
Although there are too many to list here, I’m also grateful to all of the writers and YouTubers I follow who cover life as a neurodivergent and/or disabled person.
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You can see more of my work at MaryHrovat.com.
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