Stress, Preference, and "Zones of Comfort"

Growing up with a mom who’s an educator and learning specialist gave me some initial instincts into the world of psychology and neurodevelopmental underpinnings to learning, and one of my favorite concepts that has stuck with me is how to define my “zones of comfort.” The basic premise is that we all experience three zones: our safety zone, risk zone, and danger zone. In our safety zone, everything is comfortable, and you may even consider it a kind of default mode. In contrast, the danger zone is a place where everything is uncomfortable, and you are constantly vigilant or even panicked. The risk zone is therefore the place in the middle where learning occurs, as it presents the supportive environment as well as the ability to explore and challenge oneself.

Starting to sound familiar? I thought so too! I found myself recently connecting these to our discussions of environmental preference and stress. In the comfort zone, we can think about this as an area in the environmental preference matrix that is low in preference and high in familiarity, likely being an environment with high coherence but reduced in legibility, complexity, and mystery. The danger zone is also a non-preferred environment but for opposite reasons; it is unfamiliar as well as incoherent, illegible, and containing elements of complexity and surprise, not mystery. The risk zone we can seek out as somewhere in the middle; it is a highly preferred environment through its familiarity as well as its balance of coherence, legibility, mystery, and complexity. We learn best here because it maximizes exploration and understanding while also aligning with our cognitive maps.

From a stress perspective, these zones also apply. The comfort zone is a place of very little internal or external stress, perhaps being at home or on vacation. The danger zone once again would be in stark contrast as a place where external and/or internal stress levels are high; in this zone, we are much more likely to exhibit stress responses and be in a fight or flight or endurance mode while we remain there. Finally the risk zone presents a “normal” amount of stress through the regular demands of everyday life at work or school, which we could consider as motivational for learning and developing maps of the world. Moreover, we deal with different forms of cognitive confusion and non-preferred environments everyday, but the key difference between the risk and danger zone is our ability to control our time there as well as how quickly we can find clarity.

While most often these zones are best modeled for learning in school, I think they also have large implications for how we function throughout different environements. How often do you occupy each zone? Are there certain professions, cities, personal histories, etc., that push individuals into one zone more often than another? Through thinking about these questions, I believe we can also understand the sources of stress in our lives that may lead to decreased health and mental capacity over time. As seen in the studies we have been reading for class and chapters in Humanscape, there are many seemingly visible and invisible sources of acute or chronic stress (i.e., abuse, job searching, noise, migration, illness) that could be keeping us for too long in the danger zone and therefore impacting our ability to make reasonable decisions. Perhaps it is exactly this state of chronic “endurance” that people know so well that directly affect our everyday lives; this only underscores the need for understanding ourselves and how we are connected to the world around us.

How do these “zones of comfort” appear in your everyday life and relate to your levels of stress and preferred environments?

References:
 http://www.nsrfharmony.org/system/files/protocols/zones_of_comfort_0.pdf
Humanscape Chapter 7 – Stress
Humanscape Chapter 6 – Preferred Environments
Kaplan, S. (1987). Aesthetics, affect, and cognition: Environmental preference from an evolutionary perspective. Environment and Behavior 19(1), 3-32.