Imagine you are at a party and you are having fun. Then, suddenly you feel you don’t fit in. Your ego just gave you a little reminder: “you are shy and boring”. It warned you to be cautious because people can notice and reject you. You quickly look for cues in the environment and of course, you find them. A girl is yawning and you stop talking to protect yourself from derision.

This might seem an extreme case, but in most circumstances, our ego makes a rapid appraisal of how we need to behave not to get hurt. It can be at a job interview, a first date, an animated discussion with our partner, a public event we are attending to.

In social psychology, the term ego refers to the self, the part of our identity that consciously defines the content of our self-concept, that is, the internal representation we created about who we are. I will refer here to the first definition of ego contained in the APA dictionary of psychology, and not to the meaning ego has in psychoanalytic theory (the Freudian Ego, Id, Superego).

In other words, the ego is the thinking part of the self that describes us with a list of attributes. The ego is our mind that perceives the self we think we are. The ego comes into play to make sense of reality, to explain what feelings, thoughts, behaviors are appropriate for the mental image we created of ourselves.

In a TED talk, Prof. Thomas Metzinger, philosopher, and cognitive scientist illustrates his book “The Ego Tunnel” ( Metzinger, 2014). He discusses the self using the terms ego and self interchangeably. He argues that what we believe is our own identity, the self, is essentially the content of a model created by our brain, a representational process we put in place to build up a robust experience of being someone. Whatever it is the content of the self-concept we created, it is experienced as something we own: my body, my feelings, my thoughts. To support his theory, he refers to the famous rubber hand illusion published by Botvinick (1998). He shows a woman who experiences a fake hand as part of herself and even feels a sensation of touch on it. From this illusion, Metzinger concludes that the self doesn’t exist and that our first-person perspective is just an illusion.

I wouldn’t go so far and suggest that the self-image our brain constructed is purely an illusion. The perception we have of our ego is the narrative of our life with its own achievements and projects. However, I believe that the rubber hand illusion indicates that our brain, sometimes, can misrepresent the nature of the self we think we are. I believe that similarly to the perception of our body, our brain can play tricks on us also when it comes to our own thoughts. After all, the brain controls our thoughts as much as it controls our body.

I know, it’s scary to even consider our brain plays tricks on us but it does to make sense of reality.

Consider the Checker shadow optical illusion designed by Edward H. Adelson (1995). The squares labeled as A and B appear in different colors when they are actually exactly the same color. This optical illusion is created by the way our brain understands contrast and shadow. But, even when we became aware of the trick and come to realize that the squares are the same color, our visual system can’t avoid but make a perceptive error. Our perception, consisting of sensation plus a good deal of interpretation, is the attempt of the self to make sense of reality. It is handy to have a coherent schema of who we are and what is reality, but this schema is far from being an impeccable and complete picture of reality. We continuously make perceptive mistakes that go unnoticed.

Despite the clear evidence of fallibility, we still entirely identify with our own self-concept and do not realize the limits of our own thoughts. As we take part in social interactions, we learn to protect and enhance our own ego as if our whole life totally depends on it. We believe that our drives and emotions must suit our self-concept.

We keep saying things like:
“I can’t make myself vulnerable to people because they can disappoint me”
“I can’t invite that guy because he might reject me”
“I can’t expose myself to people at that meeting, they might laugh at me”

In all these instances, we unconsciously distinguish between the “I” subject and the “me” object. To protect “me” (the ego, the self-concept), “I” need to fit in, look good, be accepted or I will get hurt.

In all these instances, the same thoughts we make to protect our ego can cause confinement in our comfort zone. We actually stick to our self-image to claim a legitimate spot in that zone.

The comfort zone is defined by the management theorist Alasdair White (2009) as a “behavioral state within which a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviors to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk”. Other definitions have been used, all pointing to the limits imposed by this behavioral state on our personal growth.

In our comfort zone, we feel safe and secure. Our emotions and feelings suit the representation our brain created about who we are, and, because we are not challenging our self-concept, we don’t feel stressed. But, that’s exactly when defending our ego causes us more troubles: we set limits to ourselves and we stop growing.

Most of the time, what holds us back is the frame of our mind, rather than a real lack of competence.

Addictive behaviors might be a good example of comfort zones.
“I have been a smoker my whole life, I won’t be able to stop.”
“I know I am obsessed with shopping, but that’s who I am.”

Addictive behaviors can be seen as coping strategies our ego put in place to defend us from nastier reality of life. When we defend our addictions, we live in the denial of short-term instant gratification. We think we are taking care of ourselves but we are only delaying more pain. We hold onto the perception our self-concept is immutable and we just have to accept it. We are actually just limiting our potential.

Addictive behaviors are only one example of comfort zone. Every time we hold back from crossing our limits, with the alibi that we can’t change, we are turning down the possibility that something amazing will happen to us.