Imagine that you've lived in a room your entire life.
The room is dark, cramped, and uncomfortable, but you know where everything is. Then someone opens the door to a brighter room.
Most people think that you'd run toward it, but often the first instinct is to stay put, because even darkness feels safe when it's familiar. I resonate with this metaphor more than I'd like to admit.
At first, I didn't understand it, but the longer I studied it, the more I saw it happening in my own life. It was like looking into a mirror with my eyes squinted and slowly opening them.
It made me uncomfortable once I fully opened my eyes to it, but you can't put out a fire in a house if you don't know where it's located.
The metaphorical rooms that I kept myself chapped in still had me in an emotional chokehold, and I noticed myself wanting to go back to them every now and then. I won't get too into detail, but my childhood consisted of some pretty gnarly abuse.
This had gone on for most of my childhood until the cops came to remove me from the home. Because it had gone on for so long, it was my normal.
I knew that I was uncomfortable in the home, and that I didn't want to be there, but I didn't think that I would be able to leave. For the longest time, I genuinely thought that I was trapped there.
It's kind of like when a baby elephant is tied to a rope so that it can't go anywhere.
The elephant knows from a young age that it can't just leave, but as it grows bigger and it gains the strength to leave, and the rope isn't actually holding it back anymore, it still believes that it's stuck.
The rope isn't restricting the elephant anymore, but because of this built belief that it wasn't strong enough before, the elephant still thinks that it is stuck there. It was more of a mental block than anything.
I had the same type of mental block with the situation that I was in as a child. I knew that I didn't want to be in the living situation that I was in and that it was preventing me from becoming the person that I wanted to be.
I even remembered telling DCFS workers that came to the house that I felt like a pine tree that had been planted in the gap between the sidewalk, just like the little crack that has the tiniest bit of dirt where weeds normally grow.
And that no matter how much sunlight or water I got, I was not able to truly grow because it was the wrong environment. The feeling that I needed to be somewhere else got so strong that I reached out for help and was able to leave.
While it sounds like a miracle, and the turning point in my life, leaving was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I wasn't just leaving a bad situation, I was leaving everything that I'd ever known.
The first couple of months after I had left, I felt so confused and frustrated. I had finally gotten out of the metaphorically stuffy and dark room to go to the brighter one. So why was I even more uncomfortable than before I left the home?
In order to explain why this happens, we're going to need to go back in time about 50,000 years ago. As a caveman, your brain's number one job is survival, not happiness. Every time something dangerous happens, your brain pays very close attention.
For example, you eat red berries and get sick. A tiger jumps out near a certain river. You hear rustling in the bushes before being attacked.
Those scary experiences trigger stress hormones and make the brain say, this is important in all caps. Remember this.
The brain strengthens connections between neurons or neural pathways, if you will, so that the next time you encounter something similar, you react faster. Emotion acts like a highlighter pen for our memory.
On a normal day, your brain goes, probably not important, but on a terrifying day, your brain goes store every detail. This is why people often remember frightening experiences from years ago, but forget what they ate last Tuesday.
Now, imagine a caveman finds a cave that's safe. Nothing bad happens there. Night after night he survives, his brain starts creating another message.
Known equals safer than unknown. Not because the cave is perfect, but because it's comfortable simply because he has survived there before.
From an evolutionary perspective, exploring something unknown could mean predators, poisonous plants, hostile tribes, falling off cliffs. So the brain develops a bias. Familiar danger is often preferred over unknown risk.
Modern humans still have those ancient brain systems. Sometimes people stay in unhealthy relationships, toxic family dynamics, and jobs. They have destructive habits, not because they enjoy them, but because their nervous system recognizes them.
Your brain thinks, I know how to survive this, even if it's painful. Meanwhile, something healthier feels uncertain. The ancient survival brain says, unknown equals potentially dangerous.
When experiences repeat, the neurons involved fire together repeatedly. A common phrase in neuroscience is that neurons that fire together, wire together. The more often a pathway is used, the stronger and faster it becomes.
The more the brain accesses it, the more automatic the responses feel. This is why familiar patterns can feel almost magnetic. A caveman who survived 10 nights in the dangerous cave was more likely to stay there than wander into an unknown forest.
His brain wasn't thinking, where will I be happiest? It was asking, where have I survived before? Thousands of years later, our brains are still asking the same question.
Sometimes, we mistake familiarity for safety because survival pathways were built long before we learned what healthy actually feels like. Our brains are amazing because they're always trying to keep us safe, which is a huge blessing.
Sometimes the brain gets in our way because of that, though. A lot of the reason this happens is because we're in modern times with caveman coping skills.
Like, if I'm talking in front of more than three people, my heart starts to race like I'm being chased by a bear. There's no bear in sight, but my brain sees something that has risk and is trying to keep me safe by sending out an alarm.
Even though our brains are trying to protect us, it doesn't always feel that way.
Going back to the metaphorically stuffy room that I mentioned in the first part of this episode, when you first step toward the bright room, the light hurts your eyes. You can't see clearly and everything feels unfamiliar.
You lose the confidence that came from knowing every inch of the dark room. For a moment, the dark room actually feels safer. Not because it is safer, but because it's familiar.
You don't usually sprint into the bright room. You start by standing in the doorway. You let your eyes adjust.
You spend a little more time in the light each day, and eventually, what once felt blinding starts to feel normal.
Then one day, you look back at the dark room and realize, I thought I was comfortable in there, but I was actually just adapted to the darkness.
The dark room represents old Covey mechanisms, toxic relationships, anxiety, habits, negative self-beliefs. The bright room represents healthy relationships, boundaries, self-worth, new opportunities.
The challenge is that your nervous system doesn't automatically label those things as good and labels them as unfamiliar, and unfamiliar can feel scary. And trust me, I understand that more than anything. But the dark room costs you things.
At first, the dark room feels protective. It shields from uncertainty, risk, rejection, failure, and disappointment. But it also shields you from connection, confidence, new experiences, joy, and opportunities.
The dark room doesn't just keep bad things out. It keeps good things out too. Think about it.
The way a plant can survive in a dark room for a while, but it can't truly thrive there. Humans are similar. We need challenge, connection, purpose, and growth.
Without them, we often become stuck, even if we feel temporarily safe. Another way to look at it is to imagine two people.
One stays in the dark room forever, the other leaves the dark room, and occasionally gets uncomfortable, makes mistakes, and feels afraid. Ten years later, the first person has avoided many risks. The second person has built a life.
The goal isn't to avoid all pain. The goal is to choose the kind of pain that leads somewhere. The dark room has a pain.
I feel trapped. The bright room has a pain. I'm scared because this is new.
One pain keeps you stuck, the other pain helps you grow. The danger of the dark room isn't that it's dark. It's that after a while, your eyes adjust and you forget that there was ever a brighter place to go.
The longer you stay, the more normal the darkness feels. Leaving isn't important because the dark room is uncomfortable.
Leaving is important because there's an entire life waiting in the light that you'll never see if you stay where you've learned to survive.