It’s not always a win to ‘get out of your comfort zone’ and go to a social thing when you don’t feel like it. One of the skills I’ve honed in my recovery from burnout has been getting less used to getting out of my comfort zone.
This is a personal article that comes mainly from my own experience of reducing and adapting my social life to make it healthier for me. It’s a response to the external and internal minimising or misunderstanding of what it’s like to try to meet social expectations or attend things that are meant to be fun, but can end up being stressful and exhausting instead.
I’m aware that many autistic people are actually longing for more social invitations; wanting social connection but not knowing how to get it. Whilst this article isn’t coming from that place, I just want to acknowledge that contrast and if this is your experience, I think that many of the principles here will apply to you too.
How do I get out of my comfort zone if I’ve never really been in it?
If you’re autistic, the idea of even having a comfort zone can be novel. In this case, growth comes not from pushing out of your comfort zone, but from discovering and cultivating the possibility of comfort. Then learning to experience that kind of safety as a new baseline.
Autistic people spend immense amounts of energy monitoring and adjusting in social situations. What could just be a relaxing or fun situation for someone else, is an intensive process of decoding, figuring out and compensating for us.
We are more prone to orient to what other people need and expect, reducing the risk of rejection or conflict through compensation and masking. Whilst this process is often an essential survival skill, it leads to a disconnection from the felt sense of “this is who I am, this is what I need, these are my preferences”.
It can be quite a revelation for an autistic person to start to orient around their own comfort, rather than desperately trying to make sure that other people are comfortable around them.
It takes time to start deciphering what you really want and need, but it’s the foundational step, since there are so many other factors to contend with in a social setting too.
The extra cost of socialising for autistic people
There’s another bit of well-meaning advice I’ve heard when it comes to socialising. “Just get yourself there and see if you like it – you can always leave so there’s nothing to lose!”
I totally get where this is coming from, and I can see why it could be good advice for some. But if you’re autistic, you actually could have quite a lot to lose.
We already talked about the processing and masking toll. When you add the sensory and executive functioning aspects into the mix, it’s easy to get pretty overstimulated.
That, in turn, can make it tricky to know when it’s time to leave. If you have alexithymia or differences in how you process bodily cues, then it’s already tricky ground. But when you’re also feeling overwhelmed, you can easily lose the capacity to sense and take action on your boundaries.
The result can be hours, days or weeks of exhaustion afterwards. Perhaps a meltdown or shutdown, potentially impacting your ability to get on with work or other plans in the following weeks.
I’m not saying all of this to be negative, because it’s not the only version at all. But I do think it’s important to understand that it’s not as straightforward as people think.
Most of all, I’m saying this so that you can feel validated if you struggle with this. I know I’ve been hard on myself for finding it so difficult, and I’ve seen it with many of my clients too. You’re not just being negative or complaining more than other people – you’re genuinely having a qualitatively different experience.
In that context, hopefully you can give yourself a bit of a break. Take the comfy moments where you can get them, even if it does mean staying home or maintaining connection with fewer people.
The PDA paradox, and the need for connection
Having laid out the importance of finding your comfort zone, I’m now going to add another layer of complexity.
Because when you’re dealing with demand avoidance, you might actually be rebelling against any social event, regardless of what you need.
PDA is often referred to as ‘pathological demand avoidance’, although many prefer to call it a ‘persistent desire for autonomy’. I won’t go into the details here (that’s for another article), but it effectively means you experience things as demands, and this creates a sense of shut down and overwhelm.
In this case, you could strongly resist going to something, even if it’s something you want to go to and have the capacity for in theory.
There’s immense value in social connection, and in not letting your life get smaller than you want it to be. So surely if you want to go, you should push past your comfort zone after all?
The skill here is in listening and deciphering, rather than ‘pushing through’. In untangling the threads and learning the language of your own needs.
Learning your own needs and safely experimenting
The autistic experience of socialising is complex, and I’m afraid there’s no straightforward approach to making it easier.
But there is a possibility of having clear boundaries, more fluency in your own needs, and a greater capacity for socialising as a result. Not because it’s obligatory to have a certain amount of social time, but in the interests of you being able to build the kind of social life that you want – however big or small that might be.
In my own life and in coaching sessions with clients, this trajectory comes from exploring many threads, rather than finding a formula or ‘strategy’.
Some of the commonly supportive threads:
- Letting yourself need less social time than other people (and removing the self-judgement about it).
- Unpicking the sense of obligation and social demand if it’s driving your decisions.
- Learning how your body tells you what it needs (and actually letting that drive your decisions).
- Noting the impact for you before, during and after different social situations (where you get refuelled and where you get drained).
Naming the internal rules you don’t want to break (e.g. it’s not ok to let people down, you should enjoy parties, you can’t leave early).
Working with these kinds of themes, you can start orienting towards your own comfort zone. Building your capacity for social time, whilst strengthening the boundaries that protect your energy.
The core piece is really finding out what comfort and safety can feel like for you, and dropping the expectation (yours or other people’s) that socialising will look the same for you as it does for others.
It can be liberating to figure out the kind of social life that genuinely is comfortable and joyful for you. Not the one that’s meant to be fun. The one that actually is.