The research on the functionality of comfort zones at The Unicist Research Institute was triggered by the need to simplify the approach to human behavior in the social, familiar, and business fields. It allowed defining the functionalist principles and the binary actions needed to understand and manage according to people’s comfort zones.
Comfort zones define the meaning of life of individuals and establish their place in the world. They become evident when individuals manage conflicts, as the comfort zone provides their safety framework.
Comfort zones, along with the concepts people hold in their minds, are stored in episodic, procedural, and semantic long-term memories. These form the habits, customs, and ethics of individuals and establish the patterns of actions and thought processes that individuals use when they are in their comfort zones.
A comfort zone is a safe place where people can be themselves without the stress produced by environmental influences. Adaptive processes are circumstances where people influence the environment while being influenced by it.
The comfort zones of adults are defined by their capacities, beliefs, and life experiences. Everyone unconsciously builds a comfort zone where there is no stress. In other words, the comfort zone is a place where individuals are in control of the environment and do not need to exert additional influence.
The unicist ontology defines a comfort zone as a safe place where individuals have the freedom to be who they think they are and have the freedom to do what they want to do. There are two “versions” of an individual’s comfort zone: one that serves as a bridge to the real world and another that serves as a bridge to a parallel world. It must be considered that most of the fallacies people build are based on the need to maintain a comfort zone within a parallel reality.
When an external stimulus introduces something new, the comfort zone becomes endangered. This presents two alternatives:
- The individual can expand their comfort zone by integrating the proposed innovation.
- The individual avoids acknowledging the external stimuli, driven by innovation blindness.
Therefore, to introduce improvements in processes, it is necessary to understand the existing comfort zone and find a way to minimize the expansion of the comfort zone.
The unicist ontology of the comfort zone, real-world influence, and the need to enter a parallel world allows for the development of a strategy to influence people without breaking their space in the world.
The Unicist Ontology of Comfort Zones
There are two types of comfort zones: functional comfort zones and stagnated comfort zones. Functional comfort zones foster individuals’ evolution based on their unsatisfied needs, while stagnated comfort zones establish a parallel world to ensure that an individual doesn’t need to adapt to the environment.
The Unicist Functionalist Principles of Comfort Zones
The functionalist principles that define the functionality of functional comfort zones are as follows:
Purpose:
The purpose is to provide a safe place in the world that offers an environment where an individual can adapt and evolve.
Active Function:
The active function is represented by the inner freedom people have to be aware of their possibilities and liabilities.
Energy Conservation Function:
The energy conservation function is the inner freedom people have to develop adaptive actions where individuals contribute to the environment and benefit from their counterparts.
The Gravitational Force:
The gravitational force is defined by the unsatisfied needs of individuals that drive their evolution and establish common ground with people who have similar needs.
The Catalyst:
The catalyst is defined by the ideals of individuals that arise from unsatisfied needs and drive the actions of individuals.
Unicist Binary Actions
The binary actions that make comfort zones work are:
UBA1a: Beliefs
The catalysts of the comfort zone are people’s beliefs, which are established by the concepts stored in their minds and triggered by conceptual short-term memory.
UBA1b: Preconcepts
Comfort zones function when the preconcepts in people’s minds are adaptive to a specific environment.
UBA4a: Concepts
The comfort zone fosters evolution when people have conscious concepts in their minds that can be used and adapted to changing circumstances.
UBA4b: Actions
Comfort zones may generate functional or dysfunctional actions. Unilateral actions are dysfunctional, while binary actions are those needed to expand possibilities and ensure results.
Synthesis
A personal functional comfort zone is a safe place where individuals establish their roles to adapt to an environment and evolve. These comfort zones are defined by the conceptual mindsets people use in specific fields of action. They provide the framework for the roles people adopt in various aspects of life, dealing with basic human needs for security, freedom, expansion, and contraction.
The concepts or mental models that individuals hold define their comfort zones. These mental models are essentially the assumptions, generalizations, or images that people carry in their minds about themselves, other people, institutions, and every aspect of the world. They help individuals interpret and navigate their daily lives by providing a framework for understanding experiences and anticipating outcomes.
The conceptual mindset of an individual acts as a blueprint or “recipe for life,” shaping how they perceive the world, make decisions, and interact with their environment. This mindset encompasses beliefs, values, assumptions, and expectations, all of which determine what individuals consider to be normal or acceptable.
The Unicist Research Institute