Skating in the Comfort Zone
The strength of staying upright
Many of my earliest memories are of being a ‘rink rat’ — hanging around ice arenas and traveling the Midwest for my brothers’ hockey tournaments. I’m told I was 6-weeks-old when I first attended a game. I have no idea how old I was when I learned to skate — young enough that it has simply always been part of me. Like a kid who grew up in a multilingual family and learned languages at an early age such that she can forever speak with native ease — my body is fluent in ice skating. It soothes me. I have a recurring dream that I am stepping onto a fresh sheet of ice, exhaust lingers in the crisp air from the Zamboni having just resurfaced it, and no one else is around. In the solitude, I glide endlessly around the oval filled with Zen-like peace. It’s the equivalent of an alpine skier carving first tracks at sunrise on a powder morning.
My brothers are 8-12 years older than I am, so I was still young when we quit going to rinks after they left for college and moved on to other things. Inspired by the introduction of women’s hockey in the 1998 Olympics, I briefly returned to skating after a long hiatus. I even played several seasons on a co-ed team and a women’s team, which were options that hadn’t been available when I was younger. Getting back into it, I decided to take a skating skills class to reawaken my muscle memory. The instructor had the requisite gaps in his smile to lend credibility to his status as a retired pro player. What he lacked in sophistication and dentition, he more than made up for in grace on the ice and motivational wisdom. He told us he was rooting for us to fall — staying upright meant we were staying too safe — if we wanted to improve, we had to push beyond the limit of our abilities, which meant wiping out once in a while. He ran us through drills, turning tight circles and figure-of-8s, crossing over left and right as fast as we could. He finished the session with quad-burning suicide sprints from goal line to blue line to red line to blue line and back. It was exhilarating. I fell a lot.
A phrase he shouted repeatedly still pops into my head whenever I’m anxious or facing a challenge: “Skate outside your comfort zone!” I give myself little pep talks to remember that falling isn’t failure, it can be a sign of progress. But the reality is, I frequently feel anxious and challenged, and the terrain outside the comfort zone, is, well, uncomfortable. Falling hurts. Increasingly, I’ve begun to wonder where the pressure to improve comes from and why there seems to be a societal expectation to strive. A quick internet search of “comfort zone” brings up dozens of articles, several of which reference the “Yerkes-Dodson law” correlating anxiety or “mental arousal” with performance. Based on a 1908 study by Harvard-educated psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, this “law” is depicted as a bell curve. At low and high levels of stress, performance is low, but in the middle of the curve, moderate arousal results in peak performance. Supporters of this idea claim there is a point of “optimal anxiety” where we are best able to function.
If you click the link to the original 1908 article, you find that the actual study had to do with how quickly mice learned visual discrimination through negative feedback. The researchers constructed a large box containing two passageways, one white, one black. The black passageway was electrified, so when the mice entered this area, they got shocked. Yerkes and Dodson set the electrical charge at low, medium, and high, and then counted how many repetitions it took for the mice to avoid the black box with 100% consistency. The medium shock required the fewest runs. This study is problematic on many levels,¹ yet a century later, self-help gurus² and proponents of positive psychology³ overlook these details to argue that learning necessarily requires moving beyond our comfort zones.
I recognize the importance of working toward expertise, particularly in professional domains, and I know our biggest growth often comes through difficult and even painful experiences. But I also believe I can function and learn quite well when I am comfortable — I glean a lot sitting on the couch with a purring cat in my lap, a mug of tea in one hand, and a beautifully crafted book in the other. With so much stress and anxiety in the world right now, it’s not a stretch to say we have become like mice trapped in a maze that arbitrarily shocks us. Rather than seeing the comfort zone as a place of stagnancy and complacence, there is something to be gained from resting within it. From the Latin: com = with + forte = strength, courage — comfort can be reframed as our station of strength and courage or embraced in its modern definition of “contented well-being.”
Squawky joints and deteriorating discs have kept me off the ice for 13 years now. This summer, I finally conceded my game days are over and gave away all my hockey gear, except I didn’t let go of the skates. This winter, I will head to a rink where I intend to stay upright as I skate. Without falling, without anxiety, I may not improve or learn anything new, but I’m seeking sensations I can only find in the center of my comfort zone: calm, confidence, contentment.
¹ Not only the dubious leap of extrapolating human behavior from a study that terrorizes mice, but the association of the color black with negative reinforcement foreshadowed Robert Yerkes’ later propagation of racialist theories as a leader in the eugenics movement.
² https://lifehacker.com/the-science-of-breaking-out-of-your-comfort-zone-and-w-656426705
