“Make yourself comfortable” is one of those lovely little phrases we use without really thinking about it.
We say it when someone arrives at our home.
“Take your shoes off. Put your feet up. Help yourself to something from the fridge.”
What we really mean is: you are safe here, you belong here, you can relax.
Yet we have a slightly complicated relationship with comfort. We’re constantly warned – both by the internet and our bosses, usually – not to become too comfortable.
Get out of your comfort zone. Push yourself. Disrupt. Reinvent.
Growth, apparently, is always waiting just beyond the edge of the familiar and is always to be pursued.
There’s some truth in that. Too much comfort can tip you into complacency, and a routine can easily turn into a rut.
But I’ve been wondering whether we’ve been a little unfair to comfort. Perhaps it isn’t the opposite of change. Perhaps it’s one of the things that makes change possible.
Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, writes about “romancing the ordinary”: deliberately noticing and creating pleasure in the small, repetitive things that make up a life.
So rather than pursuing the big holiday or the milestone birthday, I’m trying to be more present with a simple cup of coffee.
My workday usually begins with one, made by Owen in our office canteen.
There’s nothing remarkable about that – millions of people begin their day this way – except that Owen knows my order after what must be thousands of coffees: a tall Americano, soy milk.
“Good morning, Owen.”
“Good morning.”
And then the coffee appears. In that tiny exchange, I arrive, not just at work, but in my day.
That’s what rituals do for us. They locate us. Here I am. This is my place. This is how I begin.
Psychologist Wendy Wood has spent much of her career studying why some behaviours stick and others don’t.
Her research shows that our most repeated actions become tightly bound to context – a place, a time, a preceding cue – until we no longer have to decide to do them.
The setting itself carries us into the behaviour. Interestingly, when she and her colleagues looked at what shifts entrenched habits, changing the environment did more work than resolving to behave differently ever could.
This sounds mechanical until you think about your own life. The chair you always sit in, for example. Mine, in an open-plan office, is seat 007 (I kid you not).
There’s the walk after dinner, and the garden checked before breakfast. There’s the call to a friend on the drive home, or the route you always cycle.
These aren’t meaningless routines. They’re small pieces of architecture holding a life together.
One of my most reliable sources of comfort comes with four legs and an unreasonable interest in smells I’d rather not investigate.
Walking my dogs in the same park, on the same paths, is one of the rituals of my life – and to them, apparently, a new universe every day.
There’s that tentative moment when two dogs meet: the little bounce, the play bark, and off they go.
Watching them reminds me that familiarity and novelty aren’t opposites. You can walk the same path every day, and still discover something new.
In South Africa, this is especially easy, thanks to our wide skies, weather that beckons us outdoors, and an easy friendliness between strangers.
A greeting. A joke. A barista who remembers your order. These are small acts that say: I see you.
Comfort, in other words, is connection, and connection doesn’t always require intimacy. Sometimes it just requires you to notice it.
We tend to imagine that becoming “change-fit” means getting better at discomfort. And some of it does.
Change asks us to tolerate uncertainty, to be a beginner again, sometimes to grieve what was, while moving towards what we can’t yet see.
But no athlete trains continuously. Effort needs recovery; stretch needs somewhere to return to. Top athletes schedule rest and downtime into their training programmes.
The same is true psychologically. Change-fitness isn’t about living permanently outside our comfort zones. It’s about getting better at moving between comfort and stretch. Think of it as Anchor, Stretch, Return.
Anchor: know the things that steady you – your rituals, your people, your places.
Stretch: step deliberately into something less certain – have the conversation, try the new thing, take the road you don’t normally take.
Return: come back to something that reminds you who you are. Then go again.
That return is important. Because when everything is changing at once, we spend enormous energy trying to orient ourselves.
Small rituals reduce some of that effort. They’re like the punctuation marks in an unpredictable life.
Of course, we still need to watch ourselves. The same routine that once nourished us can eventually numb us.
Comfort becomes dangerous when its real purpose is avoidance, when “this is how I’ve always done it” becomes the answer to every new possibility.
We often describe personal change through dramatic moments – the leap, the ending, the brave decision.
But our ability to navigate those moments is mostly built somewhere far less dramatic, on ordinary mornings, in familiar parks, over cups of coffee, during dog walks.
In these tiny rituals, we reconnect with ourselves, other people and the world around us.
So yes, stretch yourself. Challenge yourself. Occasionally scare yourself.
But also learn the equally important art of making yourself comfortable. Greet the person who makes your coffee by name. Walk the familiar path. Look at the sky.
Sometimes, the smallest things we do repeatedly are the things that hold us steady when the bigger things begin to move.