Some people have very wide comfort zones – in psychological terms we might call that resiliency. Those people can handle a lot and nothing much phases them. Others have very narrow comfort zones, the slightest bump or challenging circumstance will send them into a tizzy. Drama is the norm for them rather than the exception.
The triggering of the cooling or heating systems (at either end of our comfort zone) is called “coping behavior” – and our coping behaviors come in a wide range of flavors. Eating, alcohol, drugs, smoking, exercise (I wouldn’t mind cultivating that one…but it’s too late now). Eating is my coping drug of choice. I’m lucky…
“When I get stressed I…” is a great sentence to finish for ourselves in that it helps us understand best how we work, and why we sometimes find ourselves repeating the same kinds of unhelpful behavior over and over, even when we “know better”. So, our mind processes a challenge, or difficulty, or stress, and our coping behavior kicks in.
Then, if one of those coping behaviors is extreme, unhelpful (drugs, alcohol, smoking for example) and possibly addictive – we might want to change or drop that behavior but, time after time, we have found ourselves unsuccessful at eliminating the behavior from our life. Here’s a thought as to why…
We’re focusing on the behavior, not the triggers. Our solution doesn’t come with trying to eliminate or focus on our coping behaviors, once set we will pretty much use whatever coping behavior has worked for us in the past when we reach our stress threshold – Dr. Phil writes, “Life is managed, not cured.” People who are alcoholics will always be alcoholics – but the alcoholism can be managed. We have to know and believe that. Our solution comes from working to increase our comfort zone range so it becomes harder and harder to trigger those coping behaviors. Like learning anger management techniques, so it becomes more difficult to reach the frustration level where frustration erupts into anger…
So – framed a slightly different way - every person has a personal threshold for what they can handle coming at them from their environment, based on their personal map of reality. When a person’s map (their concept of who they are and how they relate to the rest of the universe) cannot handle its environment, stress is created and the person begins to deal with that stress by exhibiting various coping mechanisms or strategies - learned, developed during childhood. That’s right – we learn these coping behaviors early in life, mostly from the role models and care-givers we are entrusted to. Parents take note. Your kids are watching how you handle stuff and learning themselves how to do it based on your example. A scary thought!
Aside from the coping behaviors mentioned above, we can include anger, depression, anxiety, fear (and greater and lesser degrees of these), isolation, and thousands of others. You know what yours are…and it’s helpful to surface them to conscious attention. “Am I hungry, or am I really stressed” is a question I might ask myself a thousand times a day…
All dysfunctional feelings and behaviors are really coping mechanisms designed to deal with the stress of being pushed past this threshold, and therefore the “cure" for dysfunctional feelings and behaviors is to raise that threshold. [Bill Harris]
Dysfunctional feelings and behaviors are not caused by the environment or other people regardless of how it seems. People with a high threshold for what they can handle coming at them from the world remain happy, peaceful, and centered even when they are around difficult people or in difficult situations. When people suffer trauma in their childhood, this threshold does not mature in the same way it would have had the trauma not happened. These people have a lower threshold than "normal" people who did not experience any trauma, or who did not have as much. This means interaction with their environment pushes them past their threshold (which is lower) much more easily, and they are caught in dysfunctional feelings and behaviors more often.
My personal favorite method for increasing one’s threshold, or comfort zone is meditation. It is the goal of meditation to raise one’s threshold, which then causes dysfunctional feelings and behaviors to gradually disappear, because the threshold eventually becomes so high very little can cause a person to be pushed beyond the point where these feelings and behaviors are triggered. Meditation can be practiced anywhere, by anyone. Consider how the Principle of Threshold effects your life…consider that if you have something you want to change, it is certainly possible for you to do it – focus on creating resiliency… and watch the episodes of negative or dysfunctional coping behavior fade away…
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