I live in La Petite-Nation. Lakes, forest, long winters, neighbours you can't see from the house. If you wanted to design a place to hide from the world without technically hiding, you couldn't do much better.
And I do hide. Not dramatically. I just stay in. The house, the few places I know, the people who already know me. I call it the bubble. It's warm in there. It's also been getting smaller.
So how do you get out of your comfort zone when you have anxiety? The plain answer, the one I wish someone had said to me without a motivational speech attached: in small, planned steps, repeated until they're boring, with recovery time built in after. Not one big brave leap. The leap is how I usually end up back in the bubble for a month.
What the bubble actually is
Call it a place if you want. Really it's the set of things that don't scare me.
When the bubble is big, it includes the grocery store, the post office, a phone call to someone I don't know, a dinner with a few people. When it's small, it's the house. Sometimes it's one room and a screen.
Fear of going out is part of it. So is something harder to explain, which is a fear of getting close to people. I can run a room. I've done it for decades, in boardrooms and at parties. But building real rapport, the kind where someone actually knows you, scares me more than any crowd. The bubble keeps both of those out.
And the bubble isn't just mine. We build it at home, together, without meaning to. It's comfortable for both of us. That's what makes it so hard to push on.
Why it keeps shrinking
Here's the trap. Every time I cancel something, I feel better. Instantly. That relief is real, and it's the best feeling in the whole cycle.
Then, later, I feel a bit smaller. The next thing seems a bit bigger. And the bubble shrinks by one more errand.
HereToHelp BC, a Canadian mental health info site, describes problem anxiety as stronger and longer-lasting than normal anxiety, and says it can stop people from doing their usual activities. Some people, they note, do everything they can to avoid what they fear. That's the bubble in two sentences.
For me there's an extra layer. I have ASD, diagnosed only at 50. Going out scares me, and on top of that it's expensive. Autistica says around 9 in 10 autistic people process sensory information differently. Noise, lights, crowds, small talk: it all costs energy, even when nothing goes wrong. So part of my staying in is fear, and part of it is a perfectly reasonable reaction to how much a trip into town costs me.
Sorting out which is which has helped. The fear part, I push on. The cost part, I plan around.
How I actually push out
Nothing heroic. These are the things that work for me.
One thing, not five. My old pattern was to start strong. Huge energy, a full week planned, yes to everything. Then the crash, and then the bubble for a month. So now it's one outing. Small enough that I'll actually do it.
Small means small. Some days the step is driving to the village and back, with no plan to talk to anyone. That counts. If it feels too easy to bother with, it's probably the right size.
Plan the exit before I go. Knowing how and when I can leave makes it much easier to arrive. A set time. My own car.
Nothing after. I don't schedule anything for the rest of that day. When I can be "on" for three hours at an event and then need days to recover, the recovery has to be part of the plan from the start.
Repeat it until it's boring. The second time is easier than the first. The fifth time is just Tuesday. Then the bubble has one more room in it, and I pick the next thing.
Watch the cancel reflex. When I feel the urge to cancel, I ask whether I'm tired or scared. If tired, I reschedule for real, with a date. If scared, I go, even for twenty minutes.
The people part is harder
Going out to the post office is one thing. Letting someone in is another.
I've got the social skills on paper. What I don't have is many close relationships nearby, and I know the bubble is part of why. There's an old habit of mine too, of leaving before I can be rejected. It fits very nicely inside a bubble. Nobody can leave you if nobody gets close.
I don't have a neat fix for this one. What I'm trying is the same method, smaller: one person, one coffee, and then another one a few weeks later, instead of disappearing after the first. I write more about this in Close friends, just none close by and Leaving before being left.
When it's time to get help
If the bubble has shrunk to your house, or to one room, that's more than a comfort zone. It might be agoraphobia, which can start later in life, and it's very treatable. I wrote about it in Agoraphobia after 40 and Why I got scared to leave the house.
HereToHelp says that for anxiety disorders, psychotherapy is often the first treatment recommended, and that your family doctor is a good place to start. In Québec you can also call 811 or contact your CLSC, and public mental health services are free. For French-language groups, Phobies-Zéro runs self-help groups for anxiety and panic, including online ones, and Relief offers self-management workshops for anxiety.
Online groups are a decent first step when going out is the problem. Which is a bit funny, but it works.