As to psychological well-being, the comfort zone is frequently perceived as a haven, a familiar location where individuals feel calm and peaceful. Pushing beyond this psychological state might have benefits. 

The comfort zone can be understood as a behavioral metaphor. Within a comfort zone, an individual takes on a state of minimal anxiety without a perception of risk, responding predictably to deliver a consistent level of performance. These include behaviors that people do commonly, find relaxing, or that take them away from high-stress situations. Engaging in the same manner over time leads to a predictable and familiar zone of comfort. As creatures of habit, we become dependent on these routines that we know we can complete well to feel secure. However, by stepping outside of our comfort zone, we learn about our ability to handle new situations and control risks, leading to greater self-confidence, and lower levels of anxiety. 

One study found that individuals who are more secure in stepping out of their comfort zone are more likely to be excited by and look forward to new experiences, feeling greater confidence in their ability to take them on. 

One behavior that demonstrates the benefits of stepping out of a comfort zone is learning to play a musical instrument. When we consider actions outside of our comfort zone, we must assess our desire to engage in that activity. By weighing the pros and cons, we evaluate how uncomfortable a situation may seem, and whether the danger of entering such an unknown situation will be worth the risk. 

Music offers a safe way to step out of your initial comfort zone because you can begin by practicing in an isolated setting, which offers a casual, safe way to build a new skill set. By picking up and practicing a new instrument, you have proven to yourself that you are capable of meeting an unfamiliar objective, thus decreasing anxiety.

Crossing paths with a wild boar (野猪) can pose fear and joy in equal measure. Despite 700 years of extinction in Britain, the species' own tenacity and illegal releases from the 1980s have now led to several populations emerging. However, with impacts on both people and the countryside, their right to exist in Britain is heavily debated.

However, the boar's habitat-regenerating actions that benefit other wildlife, even if they are unloved by many. The few boar in England are threatened again by poaching and culling. Why is more not being done to prevent their re-extinction?

Naturalist, writer and science communicator Chantal Lyons addresses all these complex issues and explains what it might take for us to coexist with wild boar in her new book, Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain's Wild Boar. In this extract, she explains the history of the wild boar in Britain.

Most of the last millennium was not kind to the wild boar of Europe. But they endured when so many other large animals did not, and their star is ascendant once more. Their population status is rated as "Least Concern" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which reports that the species now has one of the vastest geographical distributions of all land animals, partly thanks to humans.

And so, with hindsight, the return of wild boar to Britain was inevitable. If not intentional. There'd been mutterings among environmentalists for decades that the species should be reintroduced. The market got a taste for them.

More farms sprung up, buying in animals from the Continent, where they had never been extinct and the farming of them was already long established. By the early 1990s there were 40 registered breeders in the UK.

Despite thousands of years of trying, one of the qualities that has proven most challenging to breed out of the farmed pig is escapology. Life, as a certain fictional mathematician once said, finds a way. Our woodlands had been waiting for nearly 700 years. Answering whatever call was sounding in their brains, wild boar began to escape from the farms. Or, in some cases, seem to have been variously helped out by storm damage, animal rights activists, hard-up owners and shooters. Each freed individual was a spark. Something new, something hot and bright with potential. Not all those sparks took. But enough did.

The earliest tomatoes were little sour berries. They grew among low bushes in dry, sunny places in the Andes Mountains in South America. It was about 350 million years ago.

Tomato plants are relative to nightshade (茄属植物), which has poison. The leaves and stems of tomato plants have poison, but the berries are good to eat. The berries are red so that animals can find them easily and eat them. The animals carry the seeds to other places. That was how earliest tomato plants found new places to grow. Tomatoes are also relative to tobacco, chili peppers and potatoes.

When people first came to South America about 20,000 years ago, they ate these tiny wild tomatoes. Travelers brought a few kinds of wild tomato plants from the Andes to Central America. there the ancestors of the Maya began to far them. Nobody knows exactly when people began farming tomatoes, but it probably was much later than corn and beans, and it was surely before 500 BC. These Central American fanners bred tomatoes to be bigger and sweeter than the wild ones.

By the time Spanish explorers got to Tenochtitlan in Mexico in 1521 AD, the Aztec people ere eating a lot of tomatoes. made a sauce of chopped (剁碎的) tomatoes, onions, salt and chili peppers that was a lot like our salsa. The word "tomato" comes from their Nahuatl word "tomato".

Because tomatoes weren't farmed until pretty late, farmers further north had not yet been able to adapt heir growing season to working in North America. Even today, it's pretty hard to get your tomatoes ripe in the northern parts of North America before the growing season ends.