From Reactivity to Responsivity - Understanding your window of tolerance for greater resilience and lasting change

One of the most helpful things I teach my clients when they first arrive (or not too long after) is what’s going on energetically when they’re experiencing big emotions. And to help them see how what’s happening emotionally or energetically tells a story of how they handle those emotions – how they cope.

In session this teaching moment comes about when my client is talking about situations that cause them to be flooded with emotion. Or when it happens in session; they’re talking about their life, and just by doing that they experience the big associated feelings. After I’ve helped them regulate back into feeling less overwhelmed (an important demonstration of coping), I relate their experiences within a framework called the Window of Tolerance.

Daniel Siegel describes the Window of Tolerance in his books (all excellent, although warning, he’s a big-brained neuroscientist, and uses words and anagrams that are sometimes too big-brained for me) so I reword and imagine the model to help me and my clients integrate it into our everyday lives. I typically use my white board and draw it using different coloured markers. It ends up as a big mess but it works to get the point across. Almost 100% of the time my clients feel a sense of relief, they get it, and they begin to use the imagery and language IN their lives and in session when they report back about events. It helps them re-imagine, and so re-interpret what was once a yucky or scary thing they wanted to get rid of, to something they have a greater understanding of and so sense of agency about.

Ultimately, people want to grow. They want meaningful relationship with others, and want to deepen their relationship to themselves - their spirits, their souls. However, when situations or relationships trigger them into feeling stuck in their big feelings, it’s hard to go deep and meaningful.

I know I’m taking bit to get to the point but I wanted to illustrate how helpful it can be to observe what’s going on energetically, emotionally (also cognitively) when stressful things happen.

So first, have a look at image (A). Image the whole “window” represents a certain time, place or situation in your life, the top RED line represents the upper limit of your energetic- emotional state, and the bottom BLUE line represents the lower limit of your energetic -emotional state in this span of time and place. When you’re in a situation where your energy-emotions stay between the red and blue lines - inside the window – it’s smooth sailing. You’ll fluctuate in your energetic-emotional state (blue wavy line), but overall, all is well. You’re calm, clear minded, focussed, at ease in your body, and engaged with what’s happening. Think of perhaps strolling through some gardens with a good friend, then stopping to eat cake.

Now, let’s say something stressful happens (the yellow star). In this scenario, perhaps your friend asks you about your relationship, which is going through a very rough patch. This triggers all sorts of upsetting thoughts, beliefs, ideas, imaginings, and all of a sudden your energetic- emotional state jumps into hyper-arousal – it quickly flies above the red line. Too much energy floods your system, and you’ve been sent into a reactive fight-flight-freeze. Panic or Rage or Overwhelm. You start crying, hyperventilating, and muttering about how doomed you are. Your body reacts to this situation as if it were life or death, and in this moment, your clear thinking mind is “offline”. There’s no way to reason out of it (no matter how hard your friend tries to tell you you’re over-reacting). All you can do is ride it out.

Now it doesn’t always happen like this next, but for efficiency, let’s imagine after this overwhelming moment that pushed you high up out the top of your window, after several minutes you’re calmer but really you start to beat up on yourself. You feel embarrassed, you can’t believe you reacted that way, you feel stupid …. And on and on … You feel energy fall away, you’re now tired (also a common outcome after extreme hyper-arousal), you’re feeling disappointed, sad, and decide to go home and go to bed. Your emotional-energetic state falls below the blue line, into hypo-arousal (not enough energy) and you’ve been sent into a non-responsive, hopeless, collapse. A low, apathetic, depressive state. Here too your clear-thinking, reasonable, and creative mind is “offline”.

In both scenarios, there’s a sense of being out of control.

Key to shifting from UNCONSCIOUS reactivity or unresponsiveness, to CONSCIOUS responsivity, is to widen your window of tolerance – widen your capacity to cope with life events - by growing your coping RESOURCES. Resources help you stay present in the stressful moment without getting overwhelmed, and giving you time to process and even resolve what is going on. This will help you move from having a small, narrow window that quickly trips you out, toward an expansive floor to ceiling model window that can hold and take in a lot of life stuff, and ultimately make you resilient and feel more capable. I’ll describe shortly how this might look, but for the moment, let’s briefly look at two more scenarios to illustrate this further. Look at the next image (B).

This next scenario (B) speaks to what might happen if we avoid stressful situations.

Imagine there’s an opportunity to do something exciting and creative at work. Your employer suggests you’d be a good fit, and would like a plan tomorrow (1st yellow star). You really want to do this thing, in fact, you’ve dreamed of it, but you lack confidence. You feel stress rising. You can’t sleep that night, you’re grinding your teeth, your mind tells you stories of failure. You wake the next morning in absolute fear of failure (2nd yellow star). You can’t bear the thought of mucking up the project and looking stupid in public. You’re approaching the top of your widow. You react in a habitual way; you call in sick, and email your employer, making an excuse you can’t do it. In that moment you feel so much better. Emotions and energy fall back into your window. You don’t have to do it, so you feel calmer, safer! and find some satisfaction in your usually projects and activities. But eventually you have regrets, you feel uninspired, and disappointed that you didn’t take the opportunity. You begin to feel dull, lethargic, and quite low. Your energy falls below the bottom of the window into hypo-arousal. Here you’ve avoided feeling vulnerable but missed out on something important, resulting in over time, a sense of heaviness and boredom.

Next is a classic scenario where the combination of multiple, perhaps less intense stressful events, accumulate (allostatic load) (C). And because you’re not recognising the accumulation and/or not adequately resourcing yourself, the pressure keeps building up and up, toward your upper limit where you’re emotionally and energetically skirting the edge of your window. This could be a scenario where you get stuck in traffic on the way to work, then you forget your lunch so stay hungry, then a customer is fussy and wants lots of attention, then a colleague is sick so you carry more load that day, you’re exhausted … until that final trigger, you arrive home and your partner has prepared dinner like they’d promised… and boom. Out the top you go. Any one of these on their own may not have triggered you to feel out of control, but together they turn to overwhelm. When your reflect back you acknowledge that your reaction was out of proportion to the “crime” but in your mind it was the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Let’s revisit that earlier scenario with the friends walking in the garden and see how that could be different, and how you can engage resources to keep you calm and widen you window. Take a look at image D. In the scenario, the same conversation about your relationship gets raised while you’re both eating cake. This time you RESPOND differently. You become aware that this touchy topic is triggering a familiar response in you. You notice your heart beginning to beat faster, your breathing getting faster too, and your hands and tummy clenching. You can observe your familiar pattern of thoughts and worries that come up about your relationship. So your energetic emotional state begins to shift upwards, toward, and even a little out the top of your window. As you notice this, you engage more resources.

Like deep full breathing.
Like, telling your friend that you’d like to talk about this, but would like to keep walking around the garden as walking helps you use up the big energy coming through your system.
Like, stating your hopes and fears about the relationship without them snowballing into catastrophic thinking.
Like freely receiving a hug from your friend, and taking in their supportive words.
Like connecting to appreciation for your friend, and the courage it took you to speak out.

Here, you’ve gone out the top of your window, but not so far as you lose control. In fact, by doing this hard thing, by staying conscious and responsive while staying in the challenge, your window stretches wider. See Image E.

Eventually you do come well back into your window, but something important has changed within you. You went through something. Your perception shifts. After speaking with your friend, you decide to take action by having an open, non-blaming, conversation with your partner. In the long term, you begin to find it easier and easier to handle similar challenging situations, because your capacity for coping and resilience has increased along with your widow.

The next question I’m often asked by clients is “great, now how do I stay in challenge to widen my window?”. So yes, the next step after understanding how energy responds (unconsciously) to stressful events is to become aware of this happening in your daily life, and what it looks and feels like in your body-mind. So the first resource is to become aware. I have found that just by starting to watch and name where you are in your window is a process of bringing awareness (eg. “I notice that anxiety almost pulled me right out the top of my window”, “I notice I’m feeling pretty heavy, and low down in my window”) . In addition, can you begin to notice and observe from a curious, non-reactive place, the sensations in your body, the habits of your mind and your emotional patterns. Practices such as mindfulness during everyday non-stressful activities, meditation, and just being, among many other practices can build this capacity.

It’s important to note that often we may have small, narrow windows in some parts of our lives, or with some emotions. While in other parts of our lives or with different emotions, our windows are very wide – we can handle a lot before becoming overwhelmed. For instance, you might find you can handle a phenomenal amount of stress at work, but are easily overwhelmed in your intimate relationships.

To list all possible resources beyond initial awareness, is beyond the scope of this blog. but you can start to think about and accumulate ideas, practice them, and engage in energy-emotion balancing activities more often when not stressed. The first example connected to Image A and D showed how our person in the scenario engaged resources in the moment to stay present. But also as a start:

To address over-arousal, energy that threatens to go too far beyond the top of your window, think of things that:

· contain, soothe or discharge excess energy (eg. breathwork that first releases excess energy, then balances, squeezing/ rubbing the body, walking briskly, then being still, grounding the feet) .

Once arousal drops below the bottom of the window, it can be quite hard to pull yourself back up. Time helps, but often you need to

· do something activating to stir up and draw your energy back into your body (e.g., physical activity, exercise, walking, chores, active breathing).

Other resources are those outside you, such as connection to friends and social groups, spiritual practices, nature, hobbies and activities, support groups and therapists. If you have a sense that your repertoire of resources is low, it’s time to commit to learning and broadening these, little by little. More to come …

mendy neralic15 March 2021Comment