One man, one mission. To rid the world of chronic anxiety once and for all, the anxiety guy Dennis Simpsick shares his personal transformation from living a life filled with overwhelming worry to becoming a full-fledged positivity machine.

A leading authority in generalizing anxiety, Dennis gets to the truth of your mental health challenges and sets you on a path to transforming each and every area of your life.

Here he is, the one and only, the anxiety guy.

Warriors, I welcome you to episode number 290. You're listening to the anxiety guy podcast and this podcast episode is brought to you by the Inner Circle program to heal your past traumas, to shift your core beliefs and make peace with that inner child within you.

Visit the anxiety guy dot com today and learn more about the Inner Circle program.

Today, I want to talk about comfort zones. You know, when we talk about comfort zones, we many times don't truly understand them, especially within the context of healing anxiety.

First of all, let's understand that all positive progress takes place outside of our comfort zones, outside of our comfort zones. What does this mean?

Well, what this means is that your approach and your mindset when it comes to that feeling of vulnerability must change.

Because at the moment, what you're really doing is you're taking a step into a cold lake of water. You got your feet in it and then you scatter back to shore.

And when you scatter back to shore, you perceive the situation as if you actually went swimming in the lake, but you didn't swim, you just put your feet in the lake.

So instead of just putting your feet in the lake, before you go into the lake, you have to re-perceive what it's going to be like to swim in that lake.

So what you have to do is you have to focus on all the benefits of swimming in that cold lake of water. Well, it's great for circulation.

Right? Your muscles get stronger, your cardiovascular system improves, so many benefits to swimming in that cold lake of water.

But the truth is that right now, you're only focused on all the things that could go wrong while you go swimming in that cold lake of water.

So all you do is you put your feet in there and you scatter back to your comfort zones. We can't have this. We just can't.

Now, I want you to understand your comfort zones a little deeper today. You have different kinds of comfort zones.

First of all, you have mental comfort zones. Oh my goodness. I bet you didn't realize you had mental comfort zones. I didn't when I was suffering.

These mental comfort zones have everything to do with thinking. And the truth is that, as I've mentioned in previous podcast episodes, we have to separate the idea of replaying and thinking.

Replaying certain thoughts over and over and over again and consciously thinking, consciously thinking is connected to change.

Replaying the same thoughts is preserving past ideas and belief systems. So we have a mental comfort zone. We have an emotional comfort zone.

And in this emotional comfort zone, it's connected to a way of feeling. Many times anxiety suffers, are so comfortable in their discomfort.

They're comfortable in their misery. They're comfortable in their anxiousness. They start identifying with it. In fact, other people start identifying with that as well.

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