Rob Dial explains why your brain treats unfamiliar things as threats, keeping you stuck in safe routines. He uses Benjamin Franklin's idea that many people die at 25 but aren't buried until 75. The fix: push past fear deliberately and often enough that your comfort zone expands like a plastic bag, not snaps back like a rubber band.
Chapters
I think that people need to understand comfort zones and why they exist and how to get rid of them. So like we were talking about earlier, thousands of years ago, we had to be afraid, we had to have fears, we had to have worry in order to keep us alive. We're inside of this cave and we know that we're alive inside of this cave, but we don't know if we step outside of this cave that we don't know, we're gonna still be alive. We don't. There could be a lion in the bush that could attack us. And so what happens is, if we were going to walk out of this cave, we would get a physical fear in our body saying, no, we probably should not do this. And we get that physical fear now. We don't have to have that physical fear anymore because there's no lions or anything like that outside that are going to attack us, most of us at least. So what we do is we fill our brains with other fears, surface level stuff, what people think of us being rejected, fear of success, all of those things. And we know that the comfort zone that we're in, our brain that wants to keep us alive knows that the comfort zone that we're in that we've been in for six months or years or 20 years or some people, 30 years, they've been in exact same spot. Benjamin Franklin said that people, most people die at 25, but they're not buried until 75, because they get to this comfort zone, they stay there forever. And the reason why is because we know in this comfort zone, our brain knows that we're alive. It knows that we are not going to die because we're in this comfort zone. And it has data that where we are now is alive. What we've done to get here, we're still alive. Now you know that if you want to make $100,000 this year and you've never made $100,000, you know that you're not going to die by making $100,000. But your brain, the stupid part of your brain that still exists, doesn't know that if you get outside of this comfort zone, if you get outside of this cave, that alliance is not going to attack you. It also doesn't know that you get outside of this comfort zone of and go and make $100,000, that you're not going to die on the way to getting there. But change or any type of unknown in your brain is automatically 100% every single threat. And so your brain wants to keep you alive. And so it wants you to stay inside of this cave just like we were cavemen. It doesn't want you to get outside of it. It doesn't want you to get outside of this comfort zone where you have to push yourself or work harder or work on yourself more, because it doesn't know, you know, consciously you're not going to die. But it doesn't know in that little teeny part of our brain, that animalistic, reptilian brain that we have, that we're not going to die when we leave that comfort zone. And so I think that if people can understand how their brain works and why comfort zones exist, they can sit there and, okay, I have this video. Like, I take my camera, and I remember when I was gonna post my first few videos, I was like, what are people gonna say? Like, why the imposter syndrome? Right? Like, I'm not as good as Tony Robbins. Why would somebody listen to me when there's Tony Robbins out there? And so there's that physical fear of, like, I'm about to post my first video, I'm about to put my first podcast or my first picture, whatever it is. What are people gonna say? What are people gonna think? And there's that fear, because I've never done it before. Physical, you know, the butterflies, and my arm here is kind of stand up where it's like, I don't know what's going to happen, but I could sit in that moment and go, why am I feeling this way? I think that people can understand why a comfort zone exists to keep us alive and realize that most of the time, we push ourselves out of our comfort zone, we're never going to die. Then things really start to change. So the way that I always used to say it was, your brain is not like a rubber band. Your brain is like a plastic bag. So a rubber band, you pull it and it goes back to the same size plastic bag. If you pull it, it will never go back to the same s. It will now be a little bit bigger than it was. If you pull it again, it will be a little bit bigger than it was. And so if you push yourself out of your comfort zone just a little bit more, this cave that you were stuck in, this comfort zone that you were stuck in, gets a little bit bigger. And now you have all of this stuff that you could do that you're more confident in because you came a little bit out of that cave because you came a little bit more. And so I think if you can understand how your comfort zone works, how it exists why it exists in our brains. You can look back as a thinker and say, why am I feeling this way? Do I like it? I don't. Alright, I'm going to do it anyways, Sam.
