3 basic levels of comfort

Our choices for seeking comfort are as varied as the people seeking it.

There are two categories of source: Comfort from within and comfort from “out there.” Out there seeking can and does have a lot of perilous aspects, including addiction. Here is an opportunity to take a closer look. The following is an excerpt from my book, Finding True Inner Comfort, More being, less doing, Copywrite 2019, Don W. Jones. Permission granted for use on this blog.

We have three basic levels of comfort-seeking behavior that are related to seeking “out there.” These three stages are not distinctive and have no real lines of division. I divide them here for explanation purposes only. In reality, one blends into the other as the energy levels blur the lines away. They are:

• Survival Comfort-seeking

• Distraction Comfort-seeking

• Automatic Comfort-seeking

All three have important common characteristics. The seeking nature of them includes the fact that we are shopping for adjusters, refreshers, rewarders, and restoration fixes. As you can see in the Sun’s rays of the Life Source illustration, the many outer aspects of life are about being driven by our human needs to seek satisfaction in the outer world of people, places, and things.

These three types of comfort-seeking actions are in contrast to finding true inner comfort, which is that process of finding natural inner well-being. By focusing our energies inward, and using natural tools to do so, we have a real chance at uncovering lasting inner comfort. Learning how to recognize the character of these out-there degrees of satisfaction assists in making more helpful choices in life. Let’s take a closer look.

Survival Comfort-seeking

From having our diapers changed to satisfying hunger, we seek comfort for whatever our bodies, minds, and souls dictate. Most of these actions protect us, shield us or otherwise make for our existence. Survival Comfort-seeking seems pretty natural and ultimately essential; for humans this a very pronounced aspect of life. People seek warmth from the cold, coolness in the heat. Although we enjoy our alone times, we seek the pleasure and warmth of friends and family in times of joy, sorrow, and play. It creates a life with more productivity, satisfaction, love, longevity; and all the while it feels good. For people, this is survival. Natural as all this is, something troublesome nonetheless creeps into the human experience.

Distraction Comfort-seeking

It does not take long for us to learn that if we are in emotional pain we can take our minds off the pain with distractions. Perhaps the distraction is eating a lot of what we find tasty, watching a marathon of TV shows, endless flipping through social media, or maybe playing a video game over and over just to win that next game.

There are romantic embraces and one-night stands. Sports have become a billion-dollar business as an exciting distraction from everyday life and it has become everyday life for many. The list of distractions is endless and most of them are harmless – in moderation. Some distraction behaviors, however, have the potential to become problematic because moderation loses its ability to reward for long.

Automatic Comfort-seeking

As one would expect, this might lead to habit-forming and mindless distractions that morph the energy into an automatic mode. Distractions that start to become obsessive are ways we get ourselves into real trouble. Almost any distraction behavior can reach higher intensity and greater frequency while acquiring emotion-charged urgency. The amount of time and energy spent in trying to achieve that form of comfort begins to interfere with our lives, becoming a burden itself.

While the repeated efforts become ingrained in our minds and bodies we develop a tolerance. With the tolerance comes dissatisfaction with the old requirements. We need more of the same or something new to satisfy. This new upset is distressing, thus triggering the demanding desire for more of the things from out-there; things that no longer put us at ease. We pursue them anyway because we believe this pursuit might satisfy us since it once did. This is the nature of how Distraction Comfort-seeking becomes problematic and automatic.

Certain external chemicals and internal sensations have addictive characteristics of their own. Tolerance is becoming dissatisfied with an external and temporary nice feeling. Selective foods impact the brain and body chemistry differently than others. Fatty, salty, and sweet foods have a satisfaction level that is so great they are used as key ingredients in “comfort foods.” At some point we eat for pleasure instead of nutrition in an automatic way. Either way, our mindless or conscious automatic pursuits have the tendency to take over our sound thinking.

What of another type of hunger; when we feel empty on an emotional level inside? Some people say it feels as if they have a hole in their soul. After years of suffering with the feeling of emptiness, we might find a false sense of comfort in a bottle of alcohol or pills. It is easy for repeated use of those artificial and temporary satisfactions to become automatic abuse of those substances. And we may or may not care that some substances have physical and/or psychological addictive qualities in their very chemical nature.

Automatic Comfort-seeking is not limited to substances. We can become obsessed with gambling, sex, relationships, pornography, electronic games, social media, shopping—the list goes on. We become addicted to the pleasant feelings caused by the chemicals produced for us in our bodies as we engage in those activities.

Automatic Comforting That Is Addiction

Some Automatic Comfort-seeking is called addiction. When we are in physical or emotional pain we seek comfort. We often take being soothed beyond what is purposeful and therapeutic. We might start our pain reduction with ice. We soak, elevate, stretch, bandage, and otherwise treat our physical pains. Narcotics are powerful pain killers. They serve an important purpose in hospitals, where many procedures require some form of pain relief. People have learned, however, that if the pain-killing medication is good in the hospital, it can also be good in the home. The pleasing aspects of home bring even more sweetness. That narcotics are addictive in nature does not seem to bother most people until they or their loved ones become addicted to that medication. The American opiate addiction epidemic too often gets its start from simple pain management that became Automatic Comfort-seeking. It reaches a point where it is called addiction. This has led to an alarming number of opiate overdoses. For their own gain, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, law makers, and drug dealers have learned to capitalize on this pain and to the addicts” avoidance of withdrawal sickness.

Thoughts and Beliefs

Another kind of Automatic Comfort-seeking has to do with our very thoughts, beliefs, and resulting behaviors that are unsound, irrational, self-deprecating or negative in nature. At the top of the list of these tendencies is the notion that “I am not good enough” or “Something’s missing in me.” Beliefs such as these tend to make us seek out and find confirmations that our beliefs are correct. This type of Automatic Comfort-seeking is about being right. It is as if we are saying, “See, here is more evidence that I am not good enough – I couldn’t even learn those dance steps.” We don’t like these beliefs, but we stay with them because they are familiar and therefore reassuring in a twisted sort of way. They become our “stories.” Most of the time, we don’t even remember we have the beliefs that perpetuate those stories.

Examples of the damage done by self-defeating beliefs are endless. Staying in an abusive relationship falls into this category. We know we should leave the relationship, but we stay because leaving would be scarier than staying with what is familiar. Not going to college because it might be too hard is another example. Finding fault in a string of lovers so that we have good reason to avoid commitment altogether is another. For all Automatic Comfort-seeking behaviors there reaches a point where we realize that there seems to be “never enough.” And “never enough” makes us dis-eased.

True Inner Comfort

Reversing the direction of our efforts, then, is the path to take for finding the lasting and true satisfaction we seek. I discovered this notion many years ago in my own bumpy travels in life and in my work with patients and clients. Furthermore, I learned many important strategies for changing the direction of my seeking from out-there sources to actually finding satisfaction inside myself. These processes helped me “be” me and feel mentally at ease. The new tools allowed me to reduce the endless “doing” that was based on seeking gratification in people, places, and things. It let my fear-based ego settle down.

Approaches to living that create a “being” state rather than a “doing” one is about finding true inner comfort. Of course, while in a “being” state we end up doing things, but only as a result of being. This form of healthy “doing” results from living from the inside out.

Sometimes, looking inside seems counterintuitive. If we feel a lack of love, it only makes logical sense that we must not have any love. Therefore, seeking it outside ourselves in someone else seems the way to go. But love found in someone else is not satisfying when we are trying to take love from them. Eventually the love is exposed for what it really is – neediness. Even though we may feel a lack of love, it does not mean that we do not have love within our being. That lack feeling is based on an illusion. Love often is hidden under unsound beliefs that deny that it is there. Revealing the truth that love is part of our being allows us the opportunity to experience the feeling of love in ourselves, for ourselves, and ultimately for others – amazing if we only know to look inward.

This blog post was written by Don Jones, Behavioral Health Counselor IV at OhioGuidestone.