The Unpleasant
Human beings, also animals and other creatures feel attracted by pleasure, by pleasant situations where they simply feel good. On the other hand, they try to avoid everything what is unpleasant. The unpleasant things – ideas, feelings, situations – have a great limiting effect. It is what we call the comfort zone. In its core, there is highest pleasure while moving towards its borders, everything becomes more and more unpleasant and challenging. When the border is reached, then the challenge is so unpleasant that it is not taken.
When we examine such situations in life, then it is somehow funny how easily we are stopped in our good intentions. For example, you want to take a walk to get some fresh air and to release stress but as soon as you see that it is raining or that it is cold outside, you stop and get back on your couch.
Especially interesting is the power of thoughts or ideas which cause directly corresponding emotions and result in a corresponding, analogue behavior. Imagine that a friend talks to you and invites you to a walk in nature. This sounds good so far. But then he says that he wants to climb the mountain nearby. Then you directly get the picture in your mind where you see yourself completely exhausted, sweating like hell, carrying a heavy backpack and this vision already makes you feel like collapsing. The negative idea makes you feel bad and looking for an excuse to do not have to take part in this trip. You block yourself mentally, then emotionally and you simply stay in your comfort zone. And so you will never know what you are going to miss this day.
It is interesting that once, we go beyond the borders of our comfort zone, we make new and positive experiences. The first thing we learn is that the unpleasant things are not as terrible as we might have imagined. And then we make the experience that it has vitalizing, positive effects to take a “challenge”. We gain energy. And in third place, we empower ourselves. We expand our comfort zone, the borders. This means that we become more flexible, more powerful, more self-confident and we can easier face new challenges as we have made many experiences already that we are successful, even if problems occur.
When we become aware about these things, then we see also that we often behave like if it is a question of life or death or if we have to face the greatest risks. But in fact it is just cold weather or some rain or just this unpleasant feeling which comes up when we think about something. The small things have a great blocking effect. And sometimes really challenging situations make us feel awake and attract us to take part. Humans are often quite strange and interesting to examine.
