expanding comfort zone: big new thing vs breaking down / fighting against an established (subconscious) process

• typically expanding comfort zone is big new thing. example(s) of big new thing
• what is breaking out of / expanding comfort zone
• discomfort
• desire
• perceived benefit to the risk / perceived potential for downside
• breaking a habbit has very similar features
• draw parallels use examples
• compare and contrast difficulties (energy / effort involved - duration of it)
• kind of a sepctrum, for example approaching women or public speaking feel big and new and also take a long time to fully aclimate to

Typically when you think about expanding your comfortzone, is it doing a large, emotionally challenging, one time thing? What are the elememnts of an activity that make it qualify as comfort zone stretching or expanding? Maybe it just has to feel uncomfortable, but that alone probably wouldn't get someone to want to do it. The activity also needs to be desireable - it needs to have potential reward. And on the flip side, the thing that makes it uncomfortable in the first place is likely that there is potential risk of downside in the event of failure or perceived failure.

But what if you think about breaking a habbit or forming a new habbit as comfort zone expansion? It seems to share a lot of these characteristics. For example, say you want to work out every day. Or, maybe you work out, but you always do it in the evening after work and you want to start doing it first thing in the morning. In either case, you risk failing to break the old habbit or to form the new habbit, which is the perceived failure. You are probably trying the new thing because there is benefit or potential benefit. And, making the leap to change or ingrain a habbit will almost certainly feel uncomfortable at first. In fact, altering a habbit is likely to be more difficult than doing a one-time activity that is outside of your comfort zone. It would be closer to expanding your comfortzone in an area where you need to really practice to make the expansion count. For example, public speaking or dating are probably going to take many more individual attempts to become comfortable than will riding a roller coaster or rock climbing.

It might be interesting to take techniques that apply to one area and directly or, by generalizing, inderectly apply those techniques to the other area: forming a habbit versus expanding your comfort zone.