The Importance of Understanding our Nervous System
Part Two - The Window of Tolerance
This is the second part about the importance of understanding our nervous system, so if you haven’t read part one, you can find it here.
Now, it might be blindingly obvious to you, but for me, it was a revelation that feelings are felt. I know that sounds silly, but as an over thinker, my go to response to any problem is to try and think my way out if it. So when grief led my nervous system into fight or flight response, I could feel the physical symptoms, but thought that just thinking or telling myself that I was safe would be enough to convince my body to behave. Now, as you may remember from last week, if your nervous system is in a flight, fight or freeze state, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, making it difficult to think or communicate clearly, be rational or remember details, so my initial approach was never going to work.
So, the only way to get back into our window of tolerance has to be somatic. Our nervous systems have to feel safe again and that comes from embodied experiences of safety.
Below is a list of some of the things I have found effective at either calming me down from a fight or flight nervous state or increasing my energy from a freeze nervous state to bring me back into my window of tolerance.
Breathe deeply
Hug a person or a pet
Snuggle under a blanket
Watch a sunrise or sunset
Get out in nature
Have a bath
Lie under a weighted blanket
Lie on an acupressure mat
Do Yoga or Pilates
Go for a walk
Lift weights
Listen to music
Sing
Dance
Cook
Arts and Crafts
Swim
Watch a candle flame
Meditation and mindfulness
Go on a glimmer hunt (see my post on Glimmers and Microjoys to find out more)
If you look back at this list you will notice that they are all things that awaken at least one of our senses. Activating our senses re-engages our parasympathetic nervous system and soothes our body which increases our capacity to regulate our stress responses and brings us back to our window of tolerance.
When we experience trauma or extreme stress our ability to tolerate discomfort lessens, and we find that things that used to be ok now trigger a stress response as our window of tolerance has become smaller. We can slowly widen our window of tolerance by both self regulation (using sensory resources such as those above) and by co regulation (using someone else who has a grounded nervous system to help us.)
Like Will Young in the quote I shared last week “Most of my days are spent making sure my nervous system knows that all is OK.” This is important, as if I’m not in my window of tolerance, I lose my ability to communicate effectively, complete complex tasks, be competent and think clearly, which are all crucial for me to do my job. And if you remember the other C’s, I’d say that being curious, creative, calm and content are just as important as they help me live a fun and interesting life.
My challenge now, and the challenge for anyone who is working on growing their window of tolerance, is how to identify those experiences that may take us out of our window of tolerance, and knowing how far we can push ourselves so that we don’t return to a fight, flight or freeze state for a prolonged period, unable to return to our window of tolerance.
So that’s why, since learning more about the nervous system and how it responds to stress, my approach to growth and my business has changed. I want to stretch myself but have to recognise that I don’t currently have the emotional capacity to take on some of the higher pressure situations and clients that I used to love. I now like to think of my window of tolerance as my comfort zone, and I know that I’m not ready to leave it yet. Aundi Kolber writes in her book Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things--and Experience True Flourishing;
When we experience discomfort, we experience something that is challenging or hard, but we remain connected to our window of tolerance. Alternately, harm can be thought of more like an injury; moving far beyond discomfort and requiring us to tap into only survival energy. Neurobiologically, I would define harm as requiring us to go into a stress/ trauma response (completely leaving our window of tolerance) to navigate it—typically without support for it to be processed through our bodies….. The paradox of being human is that we need discomfort to grow; but it must occur at a pace and in a way that our bodies can tolerate.
Thankfully, I made the right decision last week about what my emotional capacity could handle as I got up on stage at the HR Dept Annual Conference to talk about Bethany and the charity Grief Encounter without leaving my window of tolerance. I was really pleased when it was then announced that they raised more money than at any previous conference.
Photo of the rabbits I spotted on a nature walk around the hotel grounds to help ground me over the conference.