Anxiety

You Are Capable of More Than You Think

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The comfort zone. It’s just so comfortable. But if you stay in yours you can say goodbye to growth, goodbye to further self-actualization. Staying within the parameters of what you already know provides the benefit of certainty but at a price.

You can think of existential anxiety as a monster who patrols the boundaries of your comfort zone, threatening you with annihilation if you try to step beyond these boundaries. It can be useful to realize that while the purpose of anxiety in nature was to protect your physical survival by making you painfully aware of physical threats, things have grown more complicated in the modern world, and much of the existential anxiety you feel is symbolic.

When you take a risk and move outside of your comfort zone in today’s world, you usually aren’t risking your physical body. When things go badly you don’t actually die, but you do have to deal with psychological or emotional distress that you would really rather not experience.

But in many cases it’s the unconscious association with physical annihilation that keeps you from taking risks, so the conscious realization that the annihilation in question is more likely than not symbolic, something like disappointment or shame, can help bolster your courage to move forward in spite of your fear. You are capable of more than you think, but you’ll never know if you never try. We aren’t recommending being cavalier with your body, but we are recommending becoming aware when it’s actually your psychological Self that is at stake, because you’ll quickly recover from failure in this realm. The simple act of stepping outside of your comfort zone, win, lose, or draw, will expand the boundaries of that comfort zone as you realize that the consequences of things going badly are not nearly as bad as you feared.

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