We’ve all had the experience of losing our composure in the face of intense stress. Maybe you got defensive and lashed out at your partner during an argument. Or maybe you froze during a big presentation and couldn’t find the words you’d been rehearsing for weeks. These reactions happen because the nervous system goes into protection mode when it feels threatened, even if we’re not in any real danger.
As I’ve grappled with these experiences myself, a model I named Emotional Challenge Zones emerged in my imagination. This framework is my riff on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (teachers, you’ll recognize this), and it has helped me understand what’s happening in my body and mind when I’m stressed. Plus, it’s oriented me to how I can build my capacity to be solid when I’m under immense pressure.
At the center of this model is the Comfort Zone. This is where we feel safe, secure and calm. Nothing difficult is happening, and we can feel relaxed. The Comfort Zone also requires us to compartmentalize our awareness about injustice and harm happening to others elsewhere or ourselves at other times. This lets us sink into a feeling of safety.
The outer layer of the model is the Dysregulation Zone. This is where we feel threatened. Even if we’re not in physical danger, our nervous system—sometimes even without our conscious awareness—has decided we need to make defensive maneuvers. These generally happen automatically. The hindbrain hijacks our system, and we go into heightened protection mode.
There are four primary defensive moves that happen when we find ourselves in the Dysregulation Zone. One option is to fight. Sometimes this is physical, where we are literally fending off an assault, but more often we lash out emotionally and verbally. A second defensive pattern is to flee. This doesn’t usually involve actually running away, but it does include how we shut down a conversation or generally avoid conflictual topics. The third mode is to freeze. This happens when the brain glitches in the middle of a hard conversation and we are at a total loss of words. Or we might suddenly feel very tired, like our brain is in a brownout. Afterwards, when we’re calmer and the frontal lobes of our brain are back online, we think of all of the things we wish we’d said in the moment. The fourth defensive maneuver is to fawn, where we do whatever we can to keep the peace, to go along to get along. When we are fawning (or flocking), we are afraid of being rejected by our group, so we people-please, betraying ourselves to avoid being exiled.
In the Dysregulation Zone, we are emotionally overwhelmed and can’t function, but in the Comfort Zone we’re too bubble wrapped to face big stressors, so that’s where the Disruption Zone is needed. Life is full of painful experiences, difficult conversations, important feedback that’s hard to hear, and meaningful callings that require us to step into the fray with centered courage. In the Disruption Zone, we are stepping into a challenge on purpose. We are willing to be emotionally unsettled for the greater good and for the growth we are seeking. In the Disruption Zone, we are anchored to our values, our community, our integrity, our faith, or something else that helps us feel grounded—thereby disrupting the threat response—and avoid defaulting into defensiveness. This is where we stay settled in our body and mind while we do hard things.
Unfortunately, for many of us, our Disruption Zone is underdeveloped—so when we’re challenged, we quickly flip into the Dysregulation Zone.
An example of this now is our nation’s political dysfunction. Those of us with strong political leanings, me included, can have passionate conversations within our echo chambers, where we’re in the Comfort Zone, because our ideas aren’t being challenged, and we’re not talking with people who see the world differently from us. In partisan politics, when trying to interact across our divides, many of us have skinny little disruption zone, so we quickly flip to dysregulation. Family dinners are ruined when the fight mode gets triggered, or we can’t be authentic with each other because lots of hot topics get relegated to the “we don’t talk about that” category. The image below shows how the visual model of the Emotional Challenge Zones can help us see why we get derailed.
You can play with this model in other realms too. Consider the widths of each of your Emotional Challenge Zones while you’re facing stress at work or at home. Where is your capacity for disruption more developed and less developed?
But the real question is: How can we use these insights about Emotional Challenge Zones to do better? We need to expand our Disruption Zones. To do this, we need to anchor ourselves in the values and people who make us willing to step out of our Comfort Zones on purpose. While you stretch emotionally, focus on settling your body to disarm the threat alarm in your nervous system. Find some “good trouble” and challenge yourself to be authentic, compassionate, curious and courageous during hard conversations. Doing this over and over, builds the capacity within your nervous system to face life’s difficulties and difficult opportunities with a grounded engagement. And by expanding your Disruption Zone in this way, you will become calmer and more impactful in your life.
photo credit: Marek Studzinski
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For a deeper dive into this content, here is the recording of a talk I offered recently regarding Emotional Resilience and Activism for Safe Illinois, a gun violence prevention organization.
