The worst addiction in today’s world is Comfort. I don’t mean Comfort as in laying in bed all cozy with your pillows and comforter blanket snuggling a stuffed elephant. I am talking about an individual’s nervous system settings that accommodate familiarity.

 What this means is that we tend to be comfortable with what’s familiar, whether it’s good or bad.

An example is the fact that most people forget how to relax (without a drug). The nervous system has been stuck in fight or flight so long that if they were to decompress and feel real relaxation and natural rest and shift into the parasympathetic nervous response if feels so unfamiliar we often force it back to fight or flight because that’s the baseline, our preferred/familiar setting.

One moment we can be sitting on the beach saying how nice it is, and then all the News headlines we’ve been scrolling through pops into our head and we’re right back in fight or flight worrying about the safety of our future. Nothing else triggered the intrusive thought other than an unfamiliar homeostasis and the discomfort that comes with it. We call it intrusive but rarely adjust the behavior or repeated action that allowed the content into our mind in the first place.

There are scientific terms for it: Homeostasis / Psychological Homeostasis, Trauma Bonding to Familiar States, Allostatic Load / Allostasis, Conditioned Nervous System Responses, Learned Helplessness, State-Dependent Identity, and Comfort Zone.

With time, Addicts can get comfortable enough without our drug-of-choice, but we must also get comfortable with all the other shifts in lifestyle, internal chemistry, identity, personality, drug-substitute impulses, thought management, and new emotional states that can’t be muted so easily. These are the things that lead the addict back, not some little trigger we walked past. The trigger only engaged the explosion because the gun was never emptied, and that requires changing many other things in our life other than picking up our favorite comforter.

Some want to be rich but feel uncomfortable doing what rich people do, or did, to get there: uncomfortable in a room full of rich people, uncomfortable with how they talk, what they talk about, being coachable, the gamble, the faith and the failure, the vibe in general. Same with those who want to be a real man: leading, modeling righteousness, confrontation and gentleness, high-level impulse control, patience, responsibility, selflessness, delayed gratification, discernment, being coached by God.

This segways into raising good kids. Most hope for raising good kids but it requires more than making money, providing, and correcting. They wish for their kids to “Listen” not realizing that kids never listen, but they are always watching . . . you. So, what the kids often learn is that conformity to a toxic environment is the “flex”, when it actually requires all of the elements I listed above that were skipped (because those are uncomfortable and extra work that mandates the parent change). Then the parents find out that the bare minimum wasn’t as easy as they thought, usually in the teen years when they see the fruit has spoiled.

This is the reason that growing with God is such a turn-off. Besides the fact that many of us had not used our Higher Power or even believed we had another mode of operation other than our ego, God is a wild card, a total mystery. We don’t know what we’re going to get when we roll with God, and we will be challenged beyond your comfort zones. Much like a sports coach, He will improve you by pushing you past what feels familiar and comfortable. When the athlete feels like they are done, they don’t have anything left in the tank, the coach says, “Alright, Jeff. Now give me two more!”

This is often rejected because of predictability. Something like abuse feels safer because you already know what’s going on, what’s going to happen. Something better, healthier, wholesome is scarier because it’s unknown.

So, people get sober and then realize there’s some fine print that comes with the deal. They hoped that getting rid of the symptom would somehow fix everything else, “Once I quit using, everything else will fall into place,” but it’s the other way around. They somehow wanted the war to be over with one big battle not realizing it’s all the little battles that win the war.

The old saying “doing things over and over and expecting different results” means you quit the drug and nothing else. You went through the recovery steps and failed to apply it anywhere other than drug use. We say we quit our addiction but continue going about life in the same ways, which are just a bunch of little comfort zones. “This area of my life feels uncomfortable, but I can get some comfort in my phone.”

It might look a little different on paper, but we still attract the same people, stay trapped in the same job, same thought patterns, perspective, beliefs, speech, safety nets, and minor vices. Only one thing changed out of a hundred, all pulling on each other to fill the gaps of discomfort. It might be time to cut ties with everything and learn how to be comfortable with discomfort.