Breaking Through Your Own Comfort Zone

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What I mean by this is when someone pushes you to challenge your beliefs, you put up a mental barrier and you become defensive. I'm able to see my own barriers, mostly. Sometimes someone else has to point it out to me, because I don't realize that I'm unconciously justifying myself by even lying a bit to *myself*. I don't lie. That's how I see myself. I'm blunt and I don't lie. Yet I still do this thing of denial, unconciously, when faced with one of my barriers. A friend of mine pointed it out to me today when I was doing it. I found it really peculiar.

I think this applies to everyone.

My latest barrier, I've discovered, is losing weight and actually being afraid of becoming slim. Really.

I'm almost there, maybe 15-20lbs to go. But there's something that scares me about it, and I end up binge eating.

The only conclusions my friend and I could draw, was that once slim, it would mean I'd have to step out of my comfort zone. I would draw more attention to myself from other people (I do already), and I'm *thinking* it would be the end of a lifelong goal for me, which is also a big change, because I'm so used to wanting it. It took me several years to lose a few stone (roughly 80lbs), and for some reason, there's a part of me dreading to become slim. What's going on?

My main questions though are - how to face your own barriers? That, and how to see them (all?) in the first place? Is there any way to see them without being challenged first? I would reckon it'd be better to discover them one by one, naturally because it would be quite scary otherwise.

Challenging others is tougher, and you would think I'd be able to figure this out about challenging myself. I have to a degree...facing the fear is one way.

This doesnt really belong in the PPR.
Its more about psychology.

It does sound like your afraid of (and are subconsciously sabotaging) achieving slimness.
And their are myriad possible motives you could have for that unconscious sabotaging.

Not sure what you want us to focus on about this.

I think you're right. I'll ask the mods to move it to an appropriate forum.

I have to say I found this problem as well. When I went from a 36 waist to 30, finally had some sort of abs and better skin/hair/clothes I attracted a lot of attention. When I wasn't drunk and obnoxious I simply couldn't handle the pressure of being looked at or spoken about.

Many have the same problem in other areas of their lives such as business. Success attracts its own problems outside of added responsibilities. Being successful means more people know who you are, talk to you, see you as a go-to person, and so on. For a recluse or socially awkward person this is very difficult, and so the ego may even try to self-sabotage the success of the individual to protect it from the harm it perceives to exist.

I guess I posted this in PPR because apart from L&D, this is the forum where I see a lot of people criticizing others for doing x and y, when they themselves do exactly the same thing, and they just don't see it.

As was asked in my main questions on this topic - how do you see your own barriers? How do you know you're not doing the same thing as one of those people I mentioned above?

That makes sense. My friend did ask me if I felt more exposed now, and I said yes. I don't like the attention. I don't like it on that dating site either, I've been avoiding messages for days.

To answer your broader question - I know sometimes I'm making mistakes I myself would criticise in others but if I do I either just don't care or admit to it if caught out. Life is just too short to micro manage every action you make or constantly police the ones others make, too.

I was very much a SJW back when I joined this site and most likely would have stayed that way had I not pushed comfort zones. spiderpig said it best in another thread about the human ego:

I do like that quote an awful lot. Spiderpig has some bizarre, and very interesting things to contribute. I think a lot of interesting and wise things can come from some sometimes bizarre thinking. That's actually a big compliment to Spiderpig, and umm...me.

Develop an overwhelming fear of hypocrisy, and ruthlessly apply it to yourself. Same thing with the Golden Rule; mentally review unpleasant interactions you've had, and make a real effort to strip any excuses about why you might have said or done something and think about how you'd react to someone else saying or doing the same thing, as honestly as you can. If you can manage, try and notice when an idea or argument makes you uncomfortable in a way you can't rationally explain, especially if it's about something you think is important, and try and work out if the discomfort is due to a sacred principle of yours being threatened, and whether that principle should remain sacred. It's difficult, unpleasant, and may make you neurotic, but it's how I maintain some semblance of self awareness and try to avoid cognitive dissonance.

People on PPR debate ideas, and dont go into their personal lives that much in the way you're doing in this thread (or the way that the same folks might get personal on other subforums on WP).

I dont know what the issue of rhetorical hypocrisy in a debating club like PPR has to do with you losing weight. Dont quite get why you are merging those two topics together.

But yes-folks often do sabotage themselves in life, and fear success.

If you get a drivers license it frees you to do new things, and gives you opportunities, but it also means folks expect more of you (not to mention you have to pay car insurance).

Same with anything else in life.

Life isnt about solving problems. Life is about deciding which kind of problems that you wanna have.


If you slim down and look better than the good news is other women will be threatened by you and men will hit on you. The bad news is that other women will be threatened by you, and men will hit on you (I am just guessing, dont know if those are your issues,or not, but they might be for someone). Everythings a trade off. If I were you I would embrace having the problems of being slim, or of being promoted in a job, or of getting a driver's license, or of whathever other positive thing comes your way. If you need to go on the retreat (examine why you feel the need to do that) you can always retreat later on. Try advancing first.

She's actually really pretty.

Regarding losing weight/being slim.

It's pretty common to get freaked out as the achievement of a goal, particuarly one long-sought, approaches. What if the goal doesn't change anything? What if it does? What are you going to do without the/a goal? What role did the goal not being achieved play in your life? etc.

The primary desire (or perhaps meta-desire), I think, is to go on desiring. To desire or want or work/move toward is drive, is lifeforce and motivation. Take that away, and things get scary and/or weird. Thus the impending achievement of a goal can make one feel, rather than having completed or gained something (the thing wanted), that we are about to lose something (the wanting).

I agree with the person above who said "Life is just too short to micro manage every action you make or constantly police the ones others make, too."

We all have hypocrisies, big or small. It's human nature because nobody's perfect even when ardently trying to be. Seriously.

And we all give advice we can't necessarily follow through on in our own lives.

That still doesn't actually mean it's not valid advice, again because we're all human and we probably know the "best" thing to do but because of our issues it's not easy for us ourselves to do what someone else might actually be able to successfully implement.

That's actually quite a beautiful thing, in a way.

I'm divorced thus some people would say, sheesh, don't YOU be giving anyone relationship advice, yours failed! And yet -- perhaps it's BECAUSE mine failed that I learned a couple of things NOT to do.

And maybe I would still fail not to do those things, but by sharing what I think I found out with someone else, it might actually help them.

There's nothing wrong with that.

As for pushing personal comfort zones, I've done that ALL my life and learned that there is also value in finally KNOWING what you want and what you believe, and actually no longer letting someone else try to change your mind.

There is a good side and a bad side to always letting someone else change your mind. You can call it allowing yourself to have your beliefs healthily challenged ------- but it can also be allowing yourself to compromise what you worked hard to arrive at as good for you.

I'm not trying to pull the age card here, but when I was 28 it was still appropriate for me to let this be an ongoing process.

But at my age now, I KNOW what I want, believe, like, prefer, desire, feel like, am like......and there's nothing wrong with having arrived at those conclusions and not letting someone else try to tell me to change my mind.

BirdInFlight, it's not that I'm trying to "better" myself, I'm past all that. I don't believe in good and bad people, BS to that and their judgements, people are too black and white about that sort of thing. I'm looking at my own views about myself and other people, and my own "bad" side which I don't believe is bad. Looking at this stuff is scary to other people, but I kind of look at myself sometimes and am curious about how I tick, and why I do things that don't make sense to me. It's that I actually want to be challenged. I want to grow. I want to know my strengths and weaknesses and the only way I can do that is to look deep down inside. I love learning. I'm not doing it for anyone but myself.

I think me saying personal stuff on here may have taken some aback, but I did it on purpose because I wanted to look hard at that part of me. I want to be "harsh" on myself. Experience tells me that the more ideas I get out from my mind into the open, the more ideas arrive. I absolutely need to explore myself, it is a want from me only. There is no-one else driving it but my own deep curiosity.

Nothing wrong with that at all, in fact I've done the same thing all my life too. I've spent more of my energy looking deep down inside myself; I've always done what you describe doing. I have done my own challenging of myself and my growing -- I said that in my post.

It's just that something in your OP seemed to suggest the rest of us maybe don't do enough, and I'm saying that I've done in fact tons of it myself.

But that also there comes a time in life where some opinions are established in oneself -- which doesn't mean one has stopped growing or challenging, just that certain things do come to a natural position after a lifetime of doing exactly what you're doing and what I've done for even longer.

Huh? I was focusing on just myself, no-one else. I honestly don't suggest or hint things, there's nothing between the lines of the words I say. It confuses a lot of people.

It wasn't a topic I was trying to press on people, and I didn't say that I was any better or worse than other people for wanting to do this, just simply that I wanted to.