Speaker A: Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast.
Speaker B: We’re here to bring you helpful information from leading experts and give you effective tools and support. I’m Jason Grygla, a licensed counselor and founder of Techie for Life, a specialized mentoring program for neurodiverse young adults.
Speaker A: And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parents parents to our own atypical young Adults.
Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast. I’m Jason Grygla and I’m going to speak to you today about something that has crystallized quite a bit for me recently. The relationship between development and being comfortable is an important one and understanding the factors and principles that surround that is critical to me being a healthy mentor, parent, father, husband, person.
I think I spoke recently in a podcast about being curious. And curiosity is the enemy of comfortable because the mind is always spinning and wanting and searching and growing which is out of our comfort zone. And one of the things that we know for development to occur is that we have to be out of our comfort zone but not overwhelmed. Otherwise the brain goes from higher brain growth to lower brain fight or flight paralysis. And it’s interesting because being comfortable is also lower brain. I just want to be comfortable all the time. And if we push ourselves out of our comfort zone we’re getting into our upper brain and striving and growing and intentionally forcing ourselves to be more, learn more, do more, and that’s the upper brain. But then if we go too far, then we fall off the other side which becomes fight or flight paralysis because we’re in crisis mode and we don’t want people to be destroyed. We don’t want to be so uncomfortable that we’re in terror panic mode. Our physical bodies are hurt to a point of destruction instead of growth.
When we learn about astronauts in space, for example, their physical bodies, their muscles start to atrophy if they don’t constantly work and build them up and force them to be doing. And their bone densities go down because they’re not constantly in the gravity of Earth. And if they’re not constantly pushing the body to grow and to face hard, then they literally atrophy. And that’s true with our brains as well. If we don’t use our neuropathways, they shrink an atrophy which is good news for bad behaviors and addictions because when we walk away from those behaviors, then those neuropathways can shrink down. There’s evidence that they never leave, but they do shrink if they’re not in use.
And so when I as a parent or someone who loves and cares about someone feels fear, concern or pain from watching my loved one go through suffering or pain or sorrow or destruction, I struggle. And I wouldn’t have fear if I didn’t care. And so only the things that I care about or love comes with the fear. And fears are thoughts and the what ifs and we want to avoid anything that could go wrong pain, suffering, destruction. And so because we love we can have fears and because we have fears we want to revert to comfortable avoiding fears and problems and hard. And there’s this constant battle between the upper and lower brain.
When I watch parents who have given their children comfortable their whole life start to struggle and be in pain because their child doesn’t have resilience, doesn’t have the wherewithal to push forward or fortitude to do hard things and press forward. I think, wow, they are now going to go through a lot more pain and suffering because they wanted their child to be comfortable instead of growing and developing to avoid the very situation that sometimes we as parents create.
So as parents wanting our children to be comfortable because we love them is such a temptation and a horrible parenting plan. I think most of us want our children to grow and we think that if they’re comfortable, they’ll do it naturally and many of us do, some don’t. Those who have neuro divergent brains having an even harder time being self starting and moving forward. Or maybe it’s just because they’re already so overwhelmed with the things they have to manage and balance that they’re already at their peak at their tipping point. And so growth and development out of their comfort zone is probably too much in general for many of those who have nerve urgent brains. And so their lower brain or their survival self is staying comfortable. Comfortable I want to see comfortable, I need replenishing, I need nurturing and comfortable is in that space.
So there’s the two sides to being comfortable. One is I don’t grow. Two and we need it is I need to refuel, I need to recuperate and fill my vessel so that I have more offer myself in the world than others. And a lot of our students literally exhaust all of their resources, emotions and energy quickly because they’re imagining things, they’re stressing about things, they’re trying so hard. So being comfortable is a balance between out of their comfort zone but not overwhelmed. But also if that’s the goal we’ve missed it. But if the goal is to manage that razor’s edge, which we can’t do perfectly but we can get close, a lot of times we end up maximizing success between growth.
We’ve talked a lot about how children need an environment that creates discomfort for them to want things. Otherwise they don’t develop. If they don’t want that item, they’re never going to learn to crawl to get it. If they aren’t hungry then they’re never going to try and get someone’s attention to say food or water or drink. And so our growth and development has always been based on being out of our comfort zone. And I feel badly because doing hard things up front is hard in the beginning and then because we build the skills and the growth and the neural pathways necessary to be resilient and the wherewithal then life gets easier and easier.
But if we avoid the hard things up front life gets harder and harder over time in a way that’s actually destructive. And I want to avoid destructive growth and even then that’s not even a right thing. There’s no such thing as destructive growth. When we build our muscles, our muscles literally have to tear our grow back stronger and our neuropathways have to be forced out of their path to create new ones. And I think that is painful and it’s not destructive because it’s not long lasting. It’s not a sustainable destruction. It’s a temporary pain for growth to reoccur. And our bones are constantly rewriting themselves with calcium and rebuilding to be stronger or lighter so that we can have this conservation of energy which is our natural state.
I love the higher thinking when we seek to be comforted, not to be comfortable. And that’s a good thing for me to know and it’s a good thing for those we love to understand that balance. Because comfortable means stuck. It can mean fun, it can mean pleasurable. It can also mean no growth and it often does. And that’s why children from families who are really wealthy often struggle because their parents are able to give them everything that they want instead of everything that they need. And the lower brain wants the upper brain can decide need and I think the lower brain does as well to some extent. I need shelter. I’m cold, I’m freezing. My body wants shelter, I need air, I’ll do anything to get it. That’s a very basic animalistic lower level need.
When we talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs when we get to the higher levels of sustainable feel good we go way beyond comfortable and pleasures and fun and get into sustainable enriching deep in the soul types of feel good that we consider joy. And that’s our relationship with ourselves. How we like ourselves, how we interact and treat ourselves how we think about ourselves and how we interact and treat others that comes with attachments and joy. And so when we are comforted that requires a partnership whether it’s with others or God, it’s fine.
Relationships, intimacy, attachment, we know comes with joy. And that’s a much deeper, probably subtle feel good than the intense pleasures that we’re used to. And so comfortable can be pleasurable but it’s rarely sustainable. Comfortable, if sustained leads to stuckness and even reverting. One thing we know about relationships is that if they aren’t moving forwards and growing they’re actually sliding backwards. There’s no such thing as a plateaued relationship. If you think you’re plateaued, you’re actually losing ground slowly and you don’t realize it. So you’re either constantly pumping it up like a raft that has a hole in it or bounce house that needs constant fuel or it’s shrinking. And that’s true with our neural pathways in our brain. Our muscles our relationships with our self and others.
Joy comes from being comforted, which means there’s something to be comforted about, which means there’s probably discomfort, which means there’s some pain and some hard. And there’s a few things that are painful and hard and hurting that are worth it and others that are destructive in the longer term sense. And the things that are destructive, there are things that isolate us from ourself and disconnect us from our emotions, from our relationship with ourselves and things that isolate us from others. Things that make us look down and stop being curious, being outwardly focused, having a balance. Things that take us off balance and just knock us on our butts. And we stop being the original, meant to be us. The parts of us that are on our best game.
We all know who we are when we’re at our best and it feels amazing. And cocaine can copy that for a minute. From all reports, I’ve never tried it. There are drugs that make us feel that euphoric high, but those are unsustainable, which is why they’re addictive because we keep seeking the easy road and the corner cutting. So destructive feel good is unsustainable. It hurts our body and our mind and our soul. And I want us to have the good types of discomfort which includes doing hard up fronts and having it be better long term. And it’s not that lifting weights gets easier, it’s that we get more comfortable going through the process. We build the stamina, we build the expectancy. We understand more. We’re more accepting when we choose to love deeply and be close and vulnerable to others, we risk the pain and hurt of being hurt by them or losing them or things going wrong. And I think that’s a part of the acceptable discomfort pain that we go through to have a higher level of living.
And we all know the difference between tears of joy, tears of sadness because we are hurting and then tears of depression and despair where hopelessness abounds in its darkness and stuckness. So that’s kind of the difference of someone who’s living their life to the fullest and someone who’s just scratching the surface. And it comes down to this idea that we should all be comfortable. And I want you to understand there’s so much more for us and our loved ones than being comfortable. As a matter of fact, it does us and them a great debt service. And when they fight for comfortable, it’s our job to give them what they need. Not what they want. Not what they want unless they’re actually rounding.
Now, if they think they’re drowning, but they’re not you might have to take a step back and get them into a higher brain state. Or sometimes while they’re drowning in their mind, you might just have to hold them and hug them and say, I’m right here. I’m right here. It’s okay. You’re not drowning. We’ve got this. We’re going to do it together. Let me comfort you. And the attachment that comes from that is amazing. The best relationships are those who go through discomfort and conquer those together. And that is a deep sustaining feel good that nobody can take away from you.
So avoid comfort unless you need replenishing and nurturing and then don’t talk about it like it’s comfort. What you’re really doing is self nurturing and taking a break back, letting someone else maybe take the front line for a minute while you get a breather so that you can go back up and fight again and then get back up and fight and it gets easier and better and you get better skills and everything works to good and gets better. That’s my message for today. I know I’m philosophizing a lot, and the sadness that I see in parents eyes when their child has always been made comfortable comes with a huge price down the road when they don’t have a life and they haven’t learned to create things that are better than being comfortable. And that’s what we want for them.
So good luck. Seek for being comforted in relationships and stay curious and working and everything will be better. Thanks. We’ll talk to you soon.
Speaker A: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Autism and Neurodiversity with Jason and Debbie. If you want to learn more about our work, come visit us at JasonDebbie.com. That’s Jasondebbie.com.
