Comfort zone atrophy

A good friend of mine in college used to lift regularly, five times a week. Taking all those weights upon himself had really carved out his physique and given him some nice biceps. He used to be a pipsqueak in freshman year, and maybe that's one of the reasons he wanted to put on some mass. But then, after graduation, he gave up lifting for two months. Didn't have time. Guess what...he lost his muscles. He didn't lose them completely, of course. He wasn't back to his thin self or anything. He still had a nice physique. But he definitely did lose...what's the word...the edge.

I realized yesterday that this picture could be very much analogous to that strange perimeter around you called your comfort zone. What it does, how it grows, how it shrinks. How it expands when you work on it and contracts when you become lazy.

I think an example is called for. Take a person who is shy and feels self-conscious when he is in the midst of a throng of people. By exposing himself to social situations over and over again, he will gradually begin expanding his comfort zone. He'll feel more and more comfortable being around people. However, let's say he gives this up for 2-3 weeks or so. After this hiatus, he returns to the social scene. He'll find that the break has shrunk his comfort zone a bit. He doesn't have the same ease with people that he did before. Of course, it's not as bad as it was, say, two years ago, but he's lost the edge, and will have to work at it a bit to get it back. Just like my friend who lost a bit of his muscles, and needed to lift regularly to get them back.

The whole situation reminds me of a cord of elastic rubber. You pull at it, and it lengthens. You let it go, and it does shrinks, but not to its original length. In the same way, it seems the quiescent state of your comfort zone always lags a bit behind...what shall we call it...the active state? The stimulated state? The state in which you are expanding your comfort zone?

Anyway, this is just a theory borne out of hours of pondering useless crap. What do you think? Does it hold true?