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The Thais Gibson Podcast
3 Steps to Improve Your Window Of Tolerance & Regulate Your Nervous System | Fearful Avoidant
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If you go from I need you so badly and you can't wait to get closer to somebody and experience that depth and connection to all of a sudden feeling within maybe a few hours like get away from me. I literally need space so badly and I need to push you away to feel okay, that's not you being crazy, that's your window of tolerance basically being too narrow to hold long term sustainable connection. And in today's video, I'm going to break down for you what the window of tolerance actually is. How this is impacting our nervous system and how our subconscious mind has been conditioned to essentially influence how the rest of our nervous system is responding on a regular basis and how you can widen your window to become more secure and more regulated. Let's talk about this idea of window of tolerance first. What does this actually mean? Now the concept of the window of tolerance was work done by Dr. Daniel Siegel, who talked a lot and sort of built on polyvagal theory and the work of Dr. Stephen Porges. And really you can think of the window of tolerance as basically being this optimal arousal zone. It's the place where you're nervous system can still feel stress, emotion and intensity, but be able to stay regulated and present simultaneously. Inside this window of tolerance, or inside this window, if you will, you can think clearly, your emotions don't necessarily overwhelm you, and you can stay connected to both yourself and others. But outside of the window, and we can imagine the windows right here we have hyperarousal and hypoarousal. So above the window is hyperarousal, beneath the window is hypoarousal. And you can think of it this way. Hyperarousal is when you feel anxiety, panic, rage, frustration, racing thoughts, have a hard time relaxing, feeling wired. And this is also known as sympathetic nervous system mode. You spend too much time in fight, flight or fawn and you feel really wired and distressed. Underneath the window of tolerance is hypoarousal. Or sometimes you'll hear this from a polyvagal theory perspective, being referred to as dorsal vagal. Can imagine here that this is the place that our nervous system shuts down. I like to think of dorsal vagal shutdown mode as being literally a place where we have evolved and adapted as human beings to go into energy conservation. If you imagine theoretically that you're out trying to survive in the wild and you're trying to hunt and forage, and you haven't had food in a couple of days and it's starting to get cold, you might sort of crunch up into a ball and stay really still and try to conserve calories and conserve your energy and really go inward. And that is when you are in this dorsal vagal shutdown mode within the window of tolerance. You'll also sometimes hear this referred to as ventral vagal. And we're just talking about different theories of the nervous system right now. The work of Dr. Daniel Siegel versus Peter Levine and Dr. Steven Porges. There's different theories on this, but they're all saying similar things. So if you look at this ventral vagal mode, that is also our window of tolerance, we feel open and sociable and we feel connected. And we're able to stay in this place of feeling our emotions and being present simultaneously. What ends up happening is the more we go through chronic trauma and stress, it narrows our window. Because essentially what happens, if you will, is when we go through stressful experiences in our conditioning throughout our lives, we store these things as perceptions subconsciously. So, for example, if you go through a lot of trauma growing up around betrayal, then you might make that mean, I cannot trust people. And so as an adult, you're carrying these pre existing formed perceptions at a subconscious level. This is your conditioning. You have this fear of not being able to trust. And the moment you see somebody do something that's untrustworthy or you see somebody be incongruent, maybe they tell a story one day and that story changes slightly another day where a secure person who hasn't been through as much betrayal trauma might be like, oh, they just forgot that detail of their story before and they don't think much of it. Or if they notice something was off, they would just say, oh, but why did the story change from the day before? And they wouldn't be jumping to conclusions. If you have a really narrowed window of tolerance, a lot of the time it's because what's happening is your subconscious mind has these stored painful beliefs from your conditioning. And then it triggers one of those beliefs like, oh, the story changed. That must mean that they're about to betray me. And then you project these big fears of being betrayed. And as soon as you start thinking and believing those stories, those thoughts, those belief systems, you start feeling stressful emotion, which is made up of neurochemical reactions like cortisol or norepinephrine. And that then signals to the rest of your nervous system that it's time to brace for a threat. So the more painful stored perceptions you have because of past trauma, the more your nervous system jumps into either sympathetic nervous system mode, where you're in Fight, flight, or fun, where you're trying to literally mobilize for a threat, or into this dorsal vehicle shutdown mode where you're literally retreating and shutting down. And so the more your conditioning is affecting you and being triggered, the more your window of tolerance is narrowing on a regular basis. And this is where you're going to constantly feel dysregulated. Increasing your window of tolerance allows you to have an easier time moving through stressful events. And generally this is done in two ways. And this is something we talk about so much in the personal development school. We go through not just how to rewire your core wounds so that you don't have these perceptions constantly firing off at a subconscious level that then gives signals to your nervous system that it's now time to brace for a threat. But also we talk about how to actually improve vagal tone and how to do things like somatic processing and nervous system regulation so we can come back to center. And these are two of our major pillars when it comes to becoming securely attached. I just wanted to pop in here and let you know we are doing a seven day free trial to the All Access membership pass at pds, which means you get access to literally everything inside of the school. And this includes the four live webinars I do with our students every single week. And on top of that, you get access to all of our different courses. We have over 55 different courses on relationships, communication, boundaries, emotional mastery, guilt and shame, Learning your needs. So many different facets that are really important to master our lives and feel really good about our lives going forward. And last but not least, there's a daily community event. We have trained facilitators and coaches who are in there doing that work, showing up to support you on your journey every single day. Please join me on the other side, come check it out, see if it's a fit for you. I'd love to see you there. Go ahead and sign up by clicking the link in the description box below. I'm going to give you a few steps if you just want to do a small exercise that helps at a high level here to increase your window of tolerance. Step one is, in order to really increase our window of tolerance, we have to be able to identify what nervous system state we are in. So again, you can sort of think of it this way, that we're in hyperarousal or sympathetic or hypoarousal dorsal vagals or the same thing. They're just being described slightly differently based on what school of thought you believe. In, and then within the window of tolerance, which is that ventral vagal nervous system mode, we feel open and comfortable and safe and sociable. And if you find yourself being outside of the window, you want to decide, okay, am I in sympathetic or am I in this dorsal vagal shutdown mode? And then what you want to be able to do is essentially move through what you're experiencing to be a threat to your nervous system. And then, you know, in, in greater ways, you want to eventually rewire those wounds from your conditioning. Like that fear of being betrayed or the fear of being abandoned or trapped that are causing your nervous system to run amok in the first place. Okay. So I want you to think of it this way, okay. Before I finish going through some steps. You'll often see in mammals, you know, in, in so many different species, that when there is a threat that appears for a mammal and they are forced to run from that threat and then they get safe. So let's, for example, a gazelle is being chased by a lion. That gazelle is able to run away and escape from the lion. There's enough distance. Well, what ends up happening is when they see the lion, they mobilize for a threat, right? So every single cell in their body is like recruited for fight or flight. And the survival response is in full swing. It is fully expressing itself. You see the lion, you know you're going to be chased. The gazelle's nervous system goes into this high arousal state. And then when there's this resolution and the gazelle gets away, you'll see this with pretty much every mammal when the external threat is over, that the gazelle discharges this threat response. Okay. So they often do things like shake, right? You'll often see them quiver and shake. You even see this in dogs. You know, my dear little puppy before, well, he wasn't a puppy anymore. He was like 15 and a half. But before he passed away, you know, I would see this all the time. If he got scared by something like thunder or lightning, he would jump and then he would shake it off, right? You've probably seen this in so many different animals before. What the shaking is actually doing is it's actually helping to re regulate your nervous system. You may see this sort of really intense shaking or quivering take place. And that's actually to discharge excess cortisol in the body. That's to actually have this sort of completion dynamic where we're completing the cycle or completing that survival response where there's this massive surge of survival energy and then it gets flushed through to really complete that cycle of stress. So there's this arousal, then there's this action of running away, and then there's this discharging of whatever intense energy and cortisol is coursing throughout the mammal's body afterwards to return back to baseline. So imagine that after the threat happens, there is a burning off the excess cortisol through shaking. And then we get to return to our baseline, and it signals to our body, okay, we are safe. The threat has resolved, we are okay. But because human beings have such a highly developed neocortex, much more so than other animals, we often suppress this body's cycle of completion. You see this in things like people not wanting to cry in front of other people and embarrass themselves. And so you can imagine that in a way, because our neocortex is like, no, no, no, you can't do these things. You can't shake in front of people. And we have this sort of judgmental version of ourselves. It congests that natural response that your nervous system would move through. What we can do is after we experience intense emotion, or if you're in the heat of this, okay, where you experience intense emotion, you're triggered. We want to remember that the reason we're triggered is often because of our conditioning. Okay. We can have, of course, actual threats that are triggering us, like somebody breaking into your house, God forbid. And yes, your body's going to mobilize for survival in that type of case. But so much of what we experience on a regular basis is because of a wound that we have at a subconscious level being triggered that then activates the rest of our nervous system. So I want you to think of it this way. When you have an intense recession response like this, and let's say we're specifically talking from sympathetic nervous system, you're in this hyper arousal. One of the first things that you want to do is you want to try to anchor yourself for a moment, Try to actually notice what's happening in your body. Try to actually notice what you're experiencing, what your emotions feel like really go into witnessing what's happening in your body for a moment so you're becoming fully present with yourself. Too often we have a stress response and then we mildly dissociate. Right? Like, think of all the times you've been stressed, and the first thing you do is you go right into scrolling on social media when you feel stress and avoiding or ignoring yourself, rather than actually witnessing what's taking place inside of your body and noticing those reactions so that's the first thing that often happens. And rather than dissociating, we're going to practice noticing what's happening in our body and trying to observe the emotions. If you feel a little bit anxious, let's say that somebody gave you critical feedback and maybe it's your boss at work. Step one, you're going to actually try to recognize, okay, I'm in this hyper arousal moment. What am I actually feeling in my body? What impulse do I sense? Sense here? Do I sense a tightening? Do I sense a clenching in my jaw or shoulders or back? Do I start shrinking away and pulling away? What is happening physiologically? Maybe you feel butterflies in your stomach and sort of a pulsing energy. Try to observe the sensations in your body. Okay, that's step one. You ideally want to do this for about 60 to 90 seconds. So we actually want to practice being present, staying attuned to ourselves. And it's a really powerful anchor to ground us and to keep us in a place where we're able to say, you know what, this is stressful, but I'm still here with myself. I'm not abandoning myself, I'm attuning to myself. Step two, we then want to let a small piece of that sensation be expressed safely. So if you're feeling anger, for example, you might press down on something or squeeze something to get some of that emotion out. If you are feeling this need to run like this flight response starting to take place, maybe you stand up and you just walk around for a minute and shake out your arms and legs. And what we're doing is allowing our body to actually express a reaction. That's allowing us to burn off any excess cortisol and start shifting through, completing this survival response. And then what you want to do in step three here is, ideally, the more you're doing this, you want to try to stay in contact with yourself. So notice after 60 to 90 seconds of doing this in these, step one and two, each coming back and just noticing what it feels like to be in your body again. What do you notice in the room? Try to ground and anchor yourself to what's around you. Maybe you see a tree outside and you, you just notice the colors of the tree. Maybe you notice what it feels like to be sitting in your chair or to wiggle your toes and be in your body. And what you're doing here is you're allowing yourself to move through this cycle. If you then still feel more stress, you can repeat these steps again. You can come back to noticing sensations in your body. Practice Being with those sensations for 60 to 90 seconds, then express a small amount of what's left in those sensations. So you're sort of completing that stress response cycle, followed by grounding and anchoring yourself back in your body once again. And as you move through doing this a couple of times, you should feel like you're actually coming out of this sympathetic nervous system mode, back to your window of tolerance, and you're actually improving vagal tone. So the more you are able to do this, the more you'll start to see that you can control your nervous system a little bit more at will than you thought. But it does require that we move through those three steps. Now, I want to finish out by just saying something really important here. You can do all of the nervous system work in the world, but if those core wounds still exist at a subconscious level, and they're still forming your perceptions and your interaction, and they're a fundamental part of your conditioning, then you will still over and over again get stressed by things like feel betrayed, abandoned, not good enough, unworthy, unloved. A lot of these big core triggers people have, they'll get fired off, they'll get triggered by people in your external environment, and then you'll go to do your nervous system work. And that will help, but it's not actually solving the root. So ideally, what we are making sure that we do is do core wound rewiring work along with doing exercises that allow us to complete a stress response cycle and improve bagel tone. But if we do one without the other, often we're not necessarily getting the entire full picture. And it's part of why. These are two of our major five pillars to rewire your attachment style. Because understanding the different pillars for how to actually rewire is exactly what helps us become fully securely attached. That is it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please like share and subscribe to this channel. I put daily videos out here. Let me know if you've had these experiences before, how this has impacted you and I will see you next time.