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The best things in life are often waiting for you at the exit ramp of your comfort zone,” best-selling self-help book author Karen Salmansohn once said. Most of us are trapped in a daily routine, carefully crafted to offer us the comfort we need for everyday life. Wake up, have your coffee, brush your teeth, get dressed, drive to work, go home, have dinner, go to sleep. As its name suggests, the “comfort” zone is where we feel comfortable – it’s not a physical place, like our home, our neighborhood or our city but a familiar place in our mind surrounded by boundaries set by ourselves. As such, it’s hard to break out of – especially if you don’t really want to. But why?

Even the smallest things

As a child, I enjoyed going to the local arcade to play pinball, Space Invaders, and slot machines. Being young and adventurous, I often fed one of the two fruit machines of the establishment with coins, and sometimes I even got lucky. While I never exaggerated, I sometimes found myself winning enough to fund not only my playtime but those of my friends as well. My fascination for slot machines has remained unchained as I grew up but, in time, I created boundaries that didn’t allow it to be carried on to my “adult” life.

As a person who uses the internet a lot, I soon discovered www.wintingo.com. Wintingo is a place with an amazing variety of my favorite casual game – online slot machines. It is a place where you can either play them free for as long as you want or register an account and play them for “real”. This means that the entertainment value of the games at Wintingo is combined with a true chance to get lucky and actually win real money in the process. A lot like when I played fruit machines in my childhood’s arcade – only online. Alas, playing for real at the Wintingo was outside my comfort zone, so it never became more than a distant craving I never stopped cramming into the back of my mind – although the temptation was always there, it never became a reality.

Why is breaking out of your comfort zone so hard?

The simple definition of the “comfort zone” is a place in your mind and life with benefits – low anxiety, regular happiness, low stress. The worst thing about it is that to get out of it, you need to try and succeed: if you fail, you’ll get the idea that pushing the boundaries is bad for you, causing you to withdraw even more. Make no mistake: staying in your comfort zone is not a bad thing, it’s only counterproductive. It’s basically natural to try to find a place in your mind and life that’s without stress and anxiety – it’s something most of us crave for.

The problem is, most of those staying well inside their boundaries deny themselves some of the greatest, most memorable experiences in their lives – no matter if it’s winning a jackpot at the Wintingo, going skinny dipping in the moonlight or even hitchhiking a thousand miles to spend a few days on the seaside.