To the window (of tolerance) to the wall - this reference only works if your ears have spent any time around Lil’ Jon and his penchant for dancing wide, but for those of you amongst us who are less into rap music than you are trauma-based psychoeducation – this one’s still for you. The Window of Tolerance, or “WoT”, as it’s abbreviated, is a term that refers to what we can (you guessed it) tolerate day to day, without feeling overwhelmed, out of control or completely demotivated and disengaged. It’s become quite a popular phrase within (but not limited to) trauma intervention and education, as we use it a fair bit to explain how a person might have found themselves with a new set of sensory experiences after something has happened that’s invariably changed them.
WoT is it? We all have a window we’re working with and different things kick us in to and out of it depending on what we’re used to, what’s been happening, where we’re at in our hormone cycle (yes that’s actually a thing) and what we have the capacity for.
It is very normal to “fall out” your window, there’s no shame in it and mostly it’s about understanding yourself, and the reasons as to why it’s happened – especially if you’re not expecting it, it’s happening a lot or you’re not understanding why it’s happening at all. Sometimes slipping out of the window is really easy to make sense of, like one criticism too many after a hard day at work on a complete lack of sleep and zero coffee in the pot. It’s not a Sherlock moment to know on those days we’re all a few spoons short for the pudding of life that no amount of “you’ve got this!” will replenish. Other times though, it becomes a bit more of a slog to understand what’s changed for us and why we’ve been able to handle our day-to-day life tasks on a Tuesday, but find ourselves crumbling come Thursday morning. It can also be especially hard if we notice finding big things easy-breezy and small things mountainously painful. I worked with a pilot recently who had navigated a fairly hazardous emergency landing without even worrying about it, not an inch of him flinched. But when the same pilot off duty had to approach a person he liked (and without what we understood to be the impenetrable confidence of his uniform) the sweat was palpable and the internal monologue was rife. Instead of feeling like he could have a conversation as casually as he could land a plane, he was assessing every aspect of his approach with a microscope, and every detail was (quite unfairly) pulled apart until he was too anxious to have a conversation at all. Suddenly that marvelously wide window of tolerance he had in one important domain of his life had shrunk quite narrowly in another, and we spent the next two sessions in therapy normalising his nerves and getting some energy back in to his self-belief system.
This variability in window width obviously doesn’t have to just apply to pilots or people on the prowl for the potential love of their life (or a lover for a TBD amount of time, it’s up to you). The variability in what we can cope with can vary from bright lights, loud noises, unexpected questions, bad dreams or a compliment about something you’re normally extremely insecure about in private and can’t tell if you’re being mocked now someone else has said it in public. Triggers, can be anything.
We can fall either side of the window for a long time or a short time, and how far we fall can vary too. We might find ourselves briefly dipping out of it with some expected disappointment when the football team we live for loses an important game, for example. We spend a hot 45 minutes debriefing with the boys about how bad they played and whose fault it is, genuinely inflamed and barely audible through your own emotional processing. But then we might quickly fall back in to that window when the shock subsides, we’ve had some moral support and there’s a beer in hand as a consolation. That would be a fairly reasonable foray in and out the window, and typically in context tends to be a no-harm, no-foul situation for everyone involved in the experience. Other times, there’s a bit more of a lengthy stay outside the window, and the longer you’re there, the harder it can be sometimes to ricochet back in. There’s 2 ways we can go when we’re looking out the window, and we refer to these bi-directional routes as Hyper Arousal and Hypo Arousal.
Hyper arousal is the term we give to the side of the window anything that exists as a response that’s a bit more active, whether that’s physically, emotionally, verbally, behaviourally – in this “hyper” column we have experiences like hypervigilance, panic, anxiety, anger, agitation, aggression, mania and generally, over compensatory behaviours. Up here we have more of the fight and flight responses. In hyper arousal, we might find ourselves over active, over compensating and burning out, with little to no sense of recovery or rebound time if our lifestyle doesn’t actually allow for it.
Hypo arousal is the term we give to anything that’s a bit more internalised, compressed and often depressed – under compensatory, if you will. Down here we have more of the freeze and fawn responses, so we’re expecting some numbness, shut down, low motivation, avoidance, and withdrawal. These states ultimately affect our ability to process things, because the brain – specifically our front of house – the Pre Frontal Cortex, shuts shop, by shutting off and hinders our ability to think rationally, and be proactive.
…WoT’s Optimal?
Optimal is essentially our most effective functioning. When we’re in our window, we’re able to manage emotions, reflect, cope with challenges, process information, think rationally and make decisions with a reasonable amount of ease. Essentially, we feel able to deal with whatever’s coming at us and even if it’s not ideal, we’re still relatively fine about it, or at the very least – know we will be. All emotions exist in this lovely little window, so optimal functioning isn’t about being happy (as is often the misconception), it’s about functioning with the full and delightful smorgasbord of feelings that help us to experience the world and express that experience of it.
....How do you widen it?
The window can narrow and widen invariably across our lifetime naturally without any intentional effort one way or the other, as we’re shaped and reshaped regularly based on what we’re exposed to. Sometimes it becomes a personal and explicit endeavor to widen the parameters because we’ve recognised something in ourselves, or our lives, that we’d like to be different, or know it needs to be for whatever reason has become apparent. By and large, however, the motivation to widen our windows is largely based on 1. What we want for ourselves and 2. What we’re prepared to do to get it. If, for example, you have a fear of sharks and have no desire to widen that window (why would you when you can just stay out of the water?), then you might not bother trying to change anything at all and Shark Week on the discovery channel can be one viewer down and your life can palatially move on. If, however, your life sans sharks isn’t sans social anxiety and you’re starting to get lonely on land, you might start to feel more incentivised to work on the cause, so you can create a life you’re much happier in by way of social connection.
Working with what we’re used to, where we want to go, and what we have a capacity for trying tends to be a good strategy, so as not to push too far and feel very “once bitten, twice shy, third time why would I bother?”. Instead, to push just enough that we feel this discomfort, are willing to sit with it and can practice pushing the limits of that discomfort zone, until we reach the goal we set out with. Sometimes we call this behavioural activation, or exposure therapy – giving it a go for the sake of finding out what happens and if it’s as bad as we thought it’d be (more often than not, it’s not), and that method works really well for lots of people, lots of the time.
It’s not just feeling the fear and doing it anyway that can do the job though, so many things are known to widen our window, including some very basic things that are incredibly helpful in improving the brain and body’s baseline capacity, such as good sleep, a supportive diet, self-care, exercise and keeping the lines of communication open more broadly. All these things inform your central nervous system, and if you’re always falling short on them, you might always have a window more narrow than you’d like. Knowing what you’re doing that’s working against you, as well as whether you want to work with changing that, is actually an important part of the process.
If you’re thinking about what you can differentially add in to gain more control of what’s in and out your window, below tend to be a good set of skills to add to the repertoire, and for the most part, don’t require a huge amount of heavy lifting:
WoT Now?
Being aware of what your window is, why it might change, what might change it oppositely and whether that’s right for you is just another way of gaining self-control and autonomy, in a world that’s often a fair bit over stimulating and tricky to navigate at the best of times. We’re only growing as a global population and the real-world struggles of adulting aren’t limited to just paying your bills and avoiding dense traffic. Whether you feel like you need to work with your window because the view has disappeared, you want to experiment with your own central nervous system or you’re interested in understanding yourself better, it can be a helpful individual social experiment where at the very least, you’ve gained experience. If you find that you have an optimum and want to stay in alignment with that, you can just as easily practice adding things in to your optimal window as you can maintaining what’s already in it. It all becomes an exercise of awareness, understanding, adaption and evolution, which isn’t a bad way to spend your time if you’ve nothing else on.
WoT else?
If you know that your WoT is narrow and you want more depth or breadth in understanding why, what you can do and guidance throughout that process, therapy can be a great place to start, where that non-judgmental support protectively buffers the negative self-talk that can sometimes get in the way of DIY and self-help strategies. You can schedule in a session here, and make some notes in your free digital journal to bring to the session, that might help your therapist understand where you’re at, what you’ve noticed and what direction you’d like to move in.
Comments