How to manage your emotions with the Window of Tolerance

0:02 A listener production. Hey everyone, it's me Kaz coming at you today with a solo episode. This is something we're going to be doing every second episode from now on. I'm going to bring you an idea that I think you will find really interesting and useful and relevant to your life. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the window of tolerance, which is essentially an idea that will help you to understand how you can more effectively manage your emotions and cope more effectively with life. And I just want to add that what we're talking about today is really general day to day life stress. If you realize that what you're experiencing is more extreme or you need more personal support, then obviously I would always recommend that you have a chat with your GP and get a referral to a psychologist if there are issues that you feel like you need more professional help to manage. So, the window of tolerance is a term that is used to describe the optimal zone of arousal. So essentially, it is the zone in which you can handle stress on a day to day basis without going into overwhelm or shutting down. So doctor Dan Siegel is a psychiatrist who originally coined this term window of tolerance. And when you are within your personal window of tolerance, it means that you will experience all the normal ups and downs, and you can be busy and you can be stressed. But

1:33 when you are within that window, you are emotionally regulated, so you can handle what is coming your way. You have the capacity to think clearly, to consider possibilities, to come up with solutions to problems. Your body is fairly relaxed, your mind is alert, you can stay focused. So it is this optimal zone where you can handle what life throws at you. So what can happen is that on occasion you might go outside your window of tolerance. So you can either go into what we call hyper arousal, where you basically go into the fight or flight state.

2:15 That is where you are highly physiologically and emotionally aroused. This is where you become overwhelmed. So when you are in that hyper aroused state, when you've gone out say the top of the window, you've reached your upper limit and exited out the top of the window, then you might notice things like you become more angry and irritable, you might feel more anxious, you might experience panic, you become more emotionally reactive, and as we know, when you're in that fight or flight state, the way your body and brain responds is that essentially it shuts down your access to your prefrontal cortex, so this is the part of your brain that is required for thinking rationally and making good decisions and considering possibilities. Like you go into that intent, it's kind of threat response where you no longer have access to those higher level cortical functions of your brain, So you can become very rigid in your thinking, you can have trouble coming up with ideas and solutions, or you might experience racing thoughts anxious thoughts. The other possibility is that you can go into hypo arousal, which is the shutdown response or the collapse response. So often it's not that you go either out the top or out of the bottom of the window. Sometimes after a prolonged period of stress and overwhelm, then you can exceed your capacity to cope and then you can go down into hypo arousal. So that is more characterized by feeling numb,

3:47 low in energy, feeling hopeless, very lethargic. Low mood can look and feel like hopelessness can look and feel like depression. Physiological and emotional arousal is on the low end, and what you really need to do is to work on getting it back up into the optimal range. Whereas when you're in the hyper arousal zone, your job is to calm back down and come back down into the optimal range. So to give you an example of how this looks in real life, I'm thinking of a client who came to see me once, who was a young woman, working mother, had had one child, happy relationship, had a mortgage. Obviously, having a baby is a stressful experience, but she was coping with that fine. She had lots of support, lots of resources. Had the second baby, obviously that's an added stress.

4:40 Then what happened was her partner got a job which took him away a lot of the time, leaving her on her own to cope with these two kids. She was also working part time. There were some stresses at work to do with restructure, so this was also weighing on her. There was some uncertainty about the future of her job what that would mean for them financially. Meanwhile, she's managing all of this while a lot of the time being on her own with two little kids, not necessarily having the space to go out and get breaks, to spend time with friends, to do the things that she would normally do to look after her own self care. And so what happened over time with this layering of these stress aws with no reprieve really or only small breaks when her partner was home, that what she found over time was she thought she was coping, and she hit this point where she was experiencing heightened anxiety, almost like panic attacks. She was finding that she came to see me because she was concerned about she was lashing out at the kids, which was really unlike her. She'd basically exceeded her capacity to cope and she'd gone out into hyper arousal and hadn't even really noticed it was happening, because often what we do as humans is we just cope, We just deal with life, and we just get on with it, so busy with the doing and the coping that were not necessarily stopping and checking in with the little signs, and there probably had been multiple signs for her along the way that she was reaching her limit,

6:12 and so she didn't know she'd reached it. Until she hit boiling point, and then all of these behaviors started coming out, which was so unlike her, so uncharacteristic of her, and it was enough for her to stop, to see her GP and to go and seek some support. I think another really great example which many people will relate to, is what we all went through during the pandemic, and particularly if you lived in a part of the world where there were many lockdowns. And I was fortunate to be in Queensland where I didn't have a lot of lockdowns, But if you live in Melbourne, for example, you'd have had a whole different experience. But even if you take yourself all the way back to the beginning of the pandemic in twenty twenty, around March April, where we all went into an eight week lockdown, at that time, none of us really knew what was going on. We weren't sure how long this was going to go on for.

7:04 We didn't know how this was going to affect the financial markets, business, the economy, our jobs. So a lot of us were in quite a heightened state of arousal. And what happened was the longer that went on for people, the longer that we were in that elevated state. And if that meant that for you, you worked from home for longer, you and your partner both had to work from home, potentially in a really small space, if you had kids under your feet who couldn't access childcare, or you had to take on the role of being the homeschooling parent as well as managing your own work, and without any of the access to your regular outlets supports, the yoga class, the exercise class, socializing with friends, doing all of the things that you would normally do to keep yourself mentally and physically well. Then what a lot of people experienced was eventually perhaps they went into that anxiety experience. I know many people experienced anxiety for the first time in their lives. They had said to me that they had never experienced anxiety before, but suddenly they did.

8:15 They found themselves experiencing things that they were very unfamiliar with. But also you might recall and you may have experienced yourself. A lot of people experienced this utter exhaustion. It was this iso fatigue that people talked about, saying, I don't know why I'm so exhausted when I'm not doing anything. I literally haven't left my house, Why am I so exhausted? And that is a classic example of hypo arousal, when you've been stuck in that high per state for such a long time that your body and brain can't cope with that anymore, and so it protects itself by shutting down. And so you go into that collapse, almost like curling up into the fetal position, honestly, where you have no energy, no motivation, no interest. You struggle to do the most basic things, And that's a perfect example of going below your window of tolerance. The really important thing to know about the window of tolerance is that everybody's window is unique.

9:17 Everybody has a different width of their window, and so that is determined by things like just your genetics, your basic temperament, but also about your personal history, like if you have had a history of trauma, or if you've been exposed to chronic stress, if you've been in a situation or an environment where you've been really stressed for a really long time, or if you've experienced a significant trauma, then that can have the effect of narrowing your window. So what one person can comfortably cope with then might be too much for you. So there are certain personal factors and environmental factors that will impact the width of your window. The really important thing is to understand for yourself to have enough self awareness and the capacity for self regulation to be able to know within yourself when you are in danger of going outside of your window, so that you can do things to either help you to stay in your window or to help you to get back inside it if you go out. So on a day to day basis, we are going up and down.

10:29 Our mood, our energy, our emotions, everything's going up and down. We're riding this wave all day. We get busy and stress. We've got a deadline, we've got a run to catch the bus, we've got a meeting, have to do a presentation. We get a little bit stressed, and then we go home, we relax, we have lunch with friends, and things calm down. So we're going up and down in terms of our own personal level of stress every day. So for somebody with a wider window of tolerance, they can handle a lot of stress, a lot of disruption, you know, things not turning out well, maybe relationship conflicts, stress at work, and they can comfortably stay within that window of tolerance their stress. But they're able to effectively manage it. For another person who has a narrow window of tolerance, it might just be that one or two things go wrong and they've gone outside of the window of tolerance. Their capacity to cope is It's like their nervous system is just that little bit more sensitive and their capacity to cope is just a little bit lower. So a small thing, a small upset, might send one person outside the window of tolerance, and another person might just take that in their stride. I think there are a couple of different applications to this. One is what can I be doing as a routine activities in my life to ensure that

12:02 I stay inside my window of tolerance and to even over time widen that window. And we do have the capacity to widen our personal window. Even if you have had a history of chronic stress or trauma for whatever reason, you find yourself with quite a narrow window of tolerance, it is possible to widen that. So just daily self care activities, the things that we take for granted, like making sure that you're getting enough sleep, making sure that you're eating well and staying hydrated, staying off addictive substances. If you're winding down strategy is using alcohol or recreational drugs and just recognizing that all of that is potentially narrowing your window of tolerance. Meditation, things that you can do to help to come your nervous system, yoga, mindful movement, exercise, and again these are all there are some things that I guess are universally useful, but for you, whether you're a person who needs to go out and do a good cuttio vascular workout and get your heart rate going, or if you're somebody who really could use more of that soothing, meditative, mindful, slow movement like a yin yoga class.

13:17 Yein yoga perfect for regulating your nervous system. Highly recommend. But these are the things that you could be doing as part of your normal routine to help to regulate your nervous system to help you to be able to function effectively and stay within that window of tolerance. Then the other important thing to know is that if you have gone out, or if you are in danger of going out into hyper arousal, then what do you need to do to calm back down. The first thing, obviously, is that you need to recognize that that has happened or is in danger of happening. So you might notice that you're starting to get more anxious and agitated. Your muscles are feeling tense, your neck is tense, your jaws clenched, you are feeling more emotionally reactive. You're maybe crying, bursting into tears over the smallest thing like These are all indications that you are exceeding your capacity to cope. If there is something that is normally not a problem for you and now it's suddenly really irritating for you, then this is a sign that you've gone into hyper arousal.

14:21 So in that case, your job is to work on calming back down. So things that soothe your nervous system that help you to regulate your emotions, breathing, calling a supportive friend, just getting outside into nature, taking a break, walking away, taking some slow, deep breadths. We all know the things that help us to calm down our nervous system. Having a massage might be something that works for you. Patting a pet is a great one. Anything that helps you to stay grounded and brings you back into the present moment and helps to activate that parasympathetic nervous system, which is that calming down response if you go into the hypo arousal, which is more that shut down collapse response.

15:11 Couple of things to say about that. One is that it can be a temporary thing because you've been really stressed for a really long time. Basically your body and your brain gets to the point where it says, I can't do this anymore, and it sort of goes into that shutdown response where you feel very low energy. It could also be that if you have experienced significant trauma in the past and that you have perhaps had a pattern of dissociation, then you may more quickly go into that shutdown response. Some people will go into shutdown very quickly because it's a conditioned response because of early trauma, and we don't really have the time of the capacity to go into that right now. But it's important to know when you're in that low energy, low mood, filling lethargic, with drawing, socially, isolating yourself, perhaps not meeting your obligations in life, not showing up for school, not showing up for work, or not wanting to do the things that you would normally do, then you need to be activating some emotional and physiological arousal. So this is where you need to actually increase your energy. So some of the same activities, getting some exercise, getting out into nature, anything that gets you in touch with your body and stimulates your senses is very good for increasing physiological arousal. Things like maybe walking barefoot in the grass, or even things like putting your hand into plato or kneading bread or things that you do that are tactile can be really

16:41 good for increasing your energy and activating that engagement sniffing essential oils. Music can do it. I mean music can do it at both ends of the spectrum. Either calming, soothing music or upbeat music can be great for shifting your state, shifting your mood. I think that the really key thing here is to understand that you don't necessarily choose the width of your window like this is not a personal failing. If you find that you are more easily triggered into extreme responses of stress, and this is not necessarily your fault, there are definitely things that you can do to take responsibility for that once you understand how this works. But this is not a reason to be self critical or to get down on yourself. If you feel like there is something wrong with you, so many things can impact your window of tolerance. This is really important to understand to just give you that level of self awareness so that you can have some self compassion and also so that you can use those skills to self regulate, and so that you can notice those signs before you start. You'll know when you are edging towards the edge of your window. But before you let that go out of control, you can intervene and you can do things to bring you back down. And if you do find that it's too late and you've spiraled into stress or you've noticed that you've shut down, then you know that there are things that you can do.

18:13 You recognize what's happened, and there are things that you can actively do to get you back into that optimal zone so that you can continue to function, to have that not be a disaster, for that to be just a bump in the road, and then you just get back on track. I hope that you have found this idea of the window of tolerance useful. I know whenever I talk to people about it, they usually really they find this a really simple concept to grasp and it really helps them to better understand themselves and give them some tools that they can apply when they know that they are potentially not coping as well as they could be by all means. If there is something that I haven't explained to If you have more questions, send them into me. You can connect with me on instat cast Done underscore XO, or you can email me hello at castdone dot com. Let me know. Also if there are any other topics that you would like me to discuss.

19:10 I'll be here every second week to share with you an idea or a technique or a tool or a psychological concept that I hope you will find really interesting and relevant to your life. And don't forget. If you do love the podcast, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and please leave me a five star rating and a review that really helps to get the word out there, helps us to get into the ears of more listeners. And you can see all of my books and my online courses on my website. Castdone dot com. Can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Crappy to have you listener