Your comfort zone is making you weak
Avoiding discomfort breeds fragility
Six years ago, I was on nine prescription medications. Anxiety, depression, sleep, focus, pain. I had a pill for everything and I thought this meant I was handling my problems. I was also drinking most nights and smoking weed every day, which I framed as “winding down” or “taking the edge off.” My life was organized around the removal of discomfort, and I was genuinely confused about why I felt so fragile all the time.
The answer seems obvious now, but it took me years to see it. I was fragile because I had systematically eliminated every opportunity to become strong.
This isn’t a story about grit or grinding harder, and I’m not interested in the hustle-porn version of this conversation, where suffering becomes a personality trait and rest is for the weak. That framing misses the point entirely. What I’m talking about is simpler and more uncomfortable: our bodies and minds adapt to the demands we place on them, and when we stop placing demands on them, we lose the capacity to meet demands at all.
The human system is anti-fragile by design. Muscles grow when they’re challenged. Bones strengthen under load. The immune system learns through exposure. Confidence develops when you do hard things and survive them. This is basic biology, and yet we’ve built entire lives around circumventing it. We treat every friction as a problem to be solved, and every discomfort as a signal that something has gone wrong, when often the discomfort is the mechanism by which we become capable of handling more.
I think about this now whenever I’m tempted to make my life easier in ways that would actually make me weaker. The question I’ve learned to ask is whether I’m removing an obstacle or removing an opportunity. Sometimes those are the same thing, and sometimes they are very much not.
