The Practice That Changed Everything For Me

Avoidance used to be my specialty.  I had so much anxiety around food and exercise that I avoided anything that could potentially make me uncomfortable (which, as it turns out, was practically everything).  The unfortunate mistake of using avoidance as a coping mechanism is that while you may experience a hit of short-term relief, your brain uses these cumulative experiences as evidence that this thing IS dangerous and is to be avoided.  This results in increased future anxieties and the vicious cycle continues.

Learning about how the nervous system works and specifically the concept of the window of tolerance was an absolute game changer for me.  The secret was not in avoiding the discomfort, but learning specific ways to support myself through it was essential to my recovery.   It was not until I incorporated these practices into my daily life that I actually felt relief and hope that maybe things could be different for me.  I am so passionate about this work, I truly geek out on this information.  I wanted to start by sharing a basic understanding of the nervous system and how it tremendously impacts our day to day lives.

The autonomic nervous system regulates the involuntary physiological processes that our bodies do that we don’t even have to think about.  This includes things like heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion.  The autonomic nervous system is made up of three distinct divisions: sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric.  In this post I am only going to focus on the first two.

The sympathetic nervous system is activated during times of stress or when your body perceives danger.  This is your fight or flight response.  When activated, the sympathetic nervous system will enlarge your pupils, increase your heart rate, relax your airway muscles to improve oxygen delivery, slow down digestion and activate energy stores in your liver.  These effects help you in situations where you need to think and act quickly.  The focus here is survival.

The parasympathetic nervous system works in exact opposition.  When the threat is reduced and safety is perceived, this system will carry signals to the body to relax.  This is our rest and digest response.  It brings us down from the highly activated sympathetic state.

Together, these two anatomically distinct systems work to keep your body in balance.  The window of tolerance – that space in the middle – is a concept first defined by Dr. Dan Siegel.  It describes the optimal state in between where we are able to regulate our emotional state in healthy ways.  It is extremely difficult (or even impossible, I might argue) to be present and make choices that align with our values when we are above or below this baseline.  The goal is not to always stay within this window, but to be able to move back into it with ease and flexibility as we move throughout our days.

Prolonged stress or trauma will shrink (or in some cases, completely diminish) the window of tolerance.  Our ultimate goal here is to expand, even if only by .01%.  It is so important to follow the pace of the nervous system with this work because it perceives any type of change as a threat (yes, even if our current state is one of suffering).  Take the feedback your body is providing and proceed slowly.

We will all experience stressors in our everyday lives that will dysregulate us up into hyperarousal/sympathetic activation, or down into hypoarousal/parasympathetic activation. The aim then is to utilize strategies to bring us back into our window of tolerance so that we don’t stay stuck in an energy depleting and suboptimal state.

These primitive responses are necessary and have been crucial to our survival.  Think seeing a tiger and having to sprint away to stay alive.  The body perceives the threat, activates a response, and completes the cycle by releasing the energy through running away.  Thankfully, most of us no longer encounter tigers on a daily basis.  However, our modern stressors are so abundant and pervasive that we accumulate this energy without ever releasing and coming back to equilibrium.  This contributes to so many of our physical and emotional health problems.

A lot of us are spending most of our time in either hyperarousal, hypoarousal, or swinging back and forth in between the two.   We are trapped in a sympathetic state (this would look like symptoms of anxiety) or a parasympathetic state (this would look like symptoms of depression) without ever coming back to baseline.  The good news is that we can develop awareness and skills to widen our window of tolerance, which will help us feel more present and in control of our responses and choices.

Everybody is different.  That means what works for me won’t necessarily work for you.  Try these strategies out.  Pay attention to what helps you down regulate or up regulate back into that space where you feel calm and steady and can think clearly.

• Simple awareness of when you’re outside your window – what does it feel like for you?
• Mindfulness
• Grounding exercises (paying attention to what each of your senses are experiencing in the moment)
• Deep slow breathing (my favorite is 5-5-7 breathing where you inhale for 5 seconds, hold for 5 seconds, and then deeply exhale for 7 seconds)
• Adequate nutrition (your body perceives not eating enough as a threat!)
• Movement – anything that gets you out of your head and into your body
• Stomping/shaking/dancing
• Cold exposure
• Getting out in nature
• Building positive social connections
• Anything that helps soothe or calm your body during moments of discomfort

This work is truly life changing.  Nervous system regulation practices are one of my favorite things to work on with my clients during our coaching sessions.  Try experimenting and let me know how it goes!