**EXPANDING The Window Of Tolerance: How Alternating Stress & Recovery Builds Resilience — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/window-of-tolerance-alternating-stress-recovery-resilience/

Heidi Priebe explains how to expand the window of tolerance using alternating stress and recovery, drawing on Elizabeth Stanley's 'Widen the Window' and attachment theory.

## Key Takeaways

- Expanding the window of tolerance requires alternating periods of stress with recovery, not just increasing endurance.
- Early attachment and caregiving shape the nervous system's capacity for self-regulation.
- Adult ongoing stressors are an area where individuals can regain agency and gradually widen their window.
- Small, titrated exposures followed by return to baseline are a practical method for building resilience.

## What the video covers

- Introduces the window of tolerance (coined by Daniel Siegel) as the zone of optimal arousal where one can feel emotions and make choices.
- Argues that expanding the window does not mean enduring more stress, but alternating stress with recovery, analogous to muscle growth in weight training.
- Draws on Elizabeth Stanley's book 'Widen the Window', identifying three causes of a narrowed window: childhood adversity, shock trauma, and repeated ongoing stressors without adequate recovery in adulthood.
- Explains how attuned caregivers act as external nervous system regulators, teaching children to self-soothe and self-stimulate.
- Notes that children with inconsistent caregiving often remain upregulated, learning that intense distress is needed to get attention.
- Suggests adults can reclaim agency over ongoing adult stressors, which are more changeable than early trauma.
- Recommends identifying activities that are meaningfully and adequately challenging rather than chronically agitating.
- Describes secure people as organizing their lives around staying regulated, in contrast to insecure patterns of constant threat scanning.
- Advises running small titrated experiments that stretch the window and then allow return to baseline, building repeated cycles of stress and recovery.
- Mentions related resources such as videos on titration and attachment styles, and a sponsored nutrition service segment.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction to the Window of Tolerance
2. 02:09 Why Expanding Means Recovery, Not More Endurance
3. 04:33 Causes of a Narrowed Window of Tolerance
4. 06:49 Attachment and Caregiver Nervous System Regulation
5. 09:49 Upregulation and Learned Dysregulation
6. 16:40 Building Agency Through Adult Stressors and Challenge
7. 26:40 Titrated Experiments and Practical Next Steps

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the window of tolerance according to this video?

The window of tolerance is the zone of optimal emotional arousal in which a person can feel emotions at their actual level and make deliberate choices. The term was coined by Daniel Siegel and is discussed heavily in relation to complex PTSD.

Why does Heidi compare nervous system healing to weight training?

She argues that muscles grow during recovery, not during constant stress, and the nervous system works the same way. Expanding the window requires alternating stress with recovery periods rather than pushing through without rest.

What are the three causes of a narrowed window of tolerance?

According to Elizabeth Stanley, as presented in the video, the causes are childhood adversity, shock trauma such as single traumatic events, and repeated ongoing stressors in adulthood without adequate recovery. The speaker notes that adult stressors are where individuals have the most agency to change.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Pribb. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. Today on this channel, we're going to be talking about how to expand the window of tolerance. So, this is a term that we've been talking about quite a

00:13

Speaker A

bit on this channel lately, especially as it pertains to complex PTSD. But for those of you who are not familiar with the term, the window of tolerance is essentially just the zone of optimal emotional arousal within which we can

00:26

Speaker A

feel our feelings at the level that they exist at and we can be at choice about the decisions that we're making. So, how we are responding to our lives. This is a term that was coined by Daniel Seagull

00:37

Speaker A

who is a really phenomenal researcher and educator in the field of psychology. You should definitely go check out his stuff if you haven't before. But today in particular, I'm actually going to draw really heavily on the work of

00:49

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someone named Elizabeth A. Stanley, who wrote this phenomenal book that I just finished reading called Widen the Window. And I want to be clear, this is not in any way sponsored by Elizabeth Stanley or by this book in any capacity.

01:02

Speaker A

This is just a genuine recommendation of a book that I super super enjoyed reading. But essentially in this book, she goes into a ton of detail about how certain experiences cause us to develop a narrow window of tolerance. So a very

01:16

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narrow range of situations within which we can stay associated and at choice about how we're dealing with them as well as how to start changing that. So a lot of the stuff in this video is very heavily informed by this book, which I

01:30

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do recommend that you go pick up if this is an area that you've recognized you might want to do some work in. It has a ton of really tangible and really practical things that you can put into place in order to start building that

01:43

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window of tolerance. So without further ado, we're going to start talking about what that looks like inside of this video as well. So the first thing that I want to make clear is that in order to start expanding that window of

01:54

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tolerance, we have to actually understand what we are going for and how the nervous system heals. So, I think that a lot of people, particularly those of us who grew up with complex trauma or other forms of developmental wounding,

02:09

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can be really quick to assume that expanding our window of tolerance means being able to just endure more. So, being able to keep our lives equally as stressful as they are without incurring any of the nervous system consequences.

02:24

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And what I want to kind of liken this to is the idea of how we get stronger physically. So, if we go into a gym and weight train for eight hours a day, what's likely going to happen is that

02:36

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we're going to injure ourselves. But if we have no idea, if no one has ever educated us on the fact that muscles actually grow during recovery time, what we are going to be completely unaware of is why it is that we aren't getting

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stronger. The way to get stronger is to alternate between periods of stressing the muscle and periods of recovery where the muscle is able to repair. And the same is true for nervous system healing.

03:08

Speaker A

If we want to expand our window of tolerance, for most of us, the thing that we are going to need to focus on the most is giving ourselves periods of recovery in between stressors rather than trying to move directly to

03:23

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tolerating more stress with less strain on the system. So, in this video, we're going to talk a lot about how to do that and how to bring ourselves to the place where we're eventually able to kind of psychologically lift more challenge and

03:38

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more stress with less of an overall strain on the system. So, in this book, Widen the Window, one of the things that Dr. Stanley goes into is how the window of tolerance narrows. And she gives three clear explanations for this. The

03:53

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first is childhood adversity. So, a lot of what we talk about on this channel, particularly around the topics of complex PTSD, are going to fall into this bucket. The second is shock trauma.

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So, what we might think of as PTSD. So, single instance traumatic events that rewire our capacity to deal with certain situations from a place of association and agency. And then three is repeated ongoing stressors without adequate recovery in adulthood.

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Now, what I love about the way that Dr. Stanley lays these things out is that she makes the point very aptly that we are often not in control of those first two things. But when it comes to ongoing

04:33

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stressors in adulthood, this is where we have a bit of an opportunity to start reclaiming some agency and to start negotiating how we're going to relate to the stressors of our lives in a way that we may not have had the agency or

04:47

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flexibility to do when we were younger. So, what we're going to talk about as this video goes on is exactly where we can start working to find that agency again and start working our way towards healing. So, what is it like to live

05:01

Speaker A

with a nervous system that has a wide window of tolerance? One of the things that I loved about Dr.

05:07

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Stanley's book is that she brings attachment into the mix. So, again, we talk quite a bit on this channel about attachment and specifically about how attachment impacts our nervous system development. So there is this very beautiful very clean example that Dr.

05:22

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Stanley gives of the fact that when we are young, when we are infants and toddlers and young children, essentially our parents or our caregivers serve as our nervous system regulators. So if we are a baby and we start getting upset,

05:36

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we start getting really agitated and we have an attuned caregiver, they're going to be able to notice when we're starting to exit that window of tolerance. So when we are becoming more frustrated or more stressed than we're able to handle

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and what we'll have if we have that attuned caregiver is someone who notices those signals and finds ways to soothe us. And then the same is true on the opposite end of the spectrum because remember the window of tolerance is not

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just about being calm, it's also about being healthfully stimulated. So, a parent who can notice when their infant or their child is too under stimulated and they're falling into apathy or depression or dissociation is able to notice that and re-engage the child so

06:20

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that they feel stimulated, interested, and curious about their environment again. And essentially what happens when this is the type of caregiving that we have consistently is that we develop an imprint of this in our nervous systems, right? So when we find ourselves

06:35

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becoming too agitated or too distressed, it feels intuitive to us to find ways to soo ourselves and calm ourselves down and bring ourselves back into that window of tolerance. And the same is true on the other end of the spectrum.

06:49

Speaker A

If we notice ourselves becoming checked out or becoming apathetic or feeling down, we find ways to healthfully stimulate ourselves and bring ourselves back into the present with curiosity and alertness. Right? So we develop this nervous system that naturally fluctuates

07:07

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but that has the capacity to kind of continuously return us to baseline which means being inside of that window where we are neither too overwhelmed nor too underwhelmed. The problem is that this is not the type of caregiving that all

07:20

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of us had. Right? So, let's say that quite a bit of the time in our early environments when we needed help or care with something, we didn't get it until we had been crying for quite a while or

07:32

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until we tried three different ways of getting our parents' attention and then finally we got it. So, in that type of context, what often happens is that we spend quite a bit of time slightly outside of or quite outside of that

07:45

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window of tolerance in the direction of being too upregulated. So when we are screaming and crying and throwing a temper tantrum, maybe we're getting attention. But when we're going up to our parents and just calmly saying that we need something, we're not. And so

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what the nervous system learns is that it's actually quite safe to be outside of that window of tolerance because that's where we get attention, right? So we don't have that natural mechanism that goes, "Oh, we're getting a little

08:11

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bit too upregulated. Time to find ways to calm ourselves down." our nervous systems might go, "Oh, we're getting too upregulated. Time to double down on that upregulation because that's where safety lives. It's inside of that place where we're able to kind of rally everything

08:27

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we've got to get care and attention." Or the opposite might be true, right? It might be that anytime we were to show strong emotion in our early environments, we got rejected or we got criticized or treated with contempt,

08:41

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whatever it is. And in that case, our systems might learn that it's actually safer to be hypoaroused, to not really stay in contact with what we're feeling, particularly those kind of strong feelings of anger or of wanting closeness or whatever it is. And it's

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actually safer for the nervous system to stay in a state of being kind of too downregulated.

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And by the way, I do have a video on how our nervous system wires around different attachment styles if that's something that you want to learn more about. So, I've also linked that in the description of this video that kind of

09:14

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takes this specific point and expands on it quite a bit. But essentially, what we're getting at here is that for some of us, our nervous systems have actually learned to incorrectly log being outside of that window of tolerance as safer

09:29

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than being inside of it. And so, what we're doing when we go through the things that we're going to talk about in the remainder of this video is essentially going to be teaching our nervous system a new imprint. So

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teaching ourselves discernment about when it is safe to calm down from over stimulation or upregulate from under stimulation. Outside of our window of tolerance, what we are often doing is accumulating something called alostostatic load. So we're going to get

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into a kind of sciency section of this video in just a moment. But before we get into that, I want to take a quick moment to thank the sponsor of today's video. So when we talk about building the resources that we need to handle the

10:07

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challenges of our lives, we are not just talking about psychological resources. We're also talking about taking care of ourselves physically, which makes this a very fitting moment to thank Nourish, who I'm partnering with on today's video. Nourish is a service that

10:21

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connects you with a registered dietitian who can help you develop an approach to nutrition that's tailored to your individual needs, goals, and lifestyle.

10:30

Speaker A

So, my favorite thing about the meeting that I recently had with my registered dietitian through Nourish was how practical it was. So, we were not talking about some pie in the sky idealized eating routine that I could follow if I had unlimited time and

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Speaker A

energy and a perfectly predictable schedule. Okay? We immediately got into talking about what types of habits would actually support my needs within the context of what my life looks like right now. Because I think that for a lot of

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Speaker A

us, we go through periods where taking care of ourselves feels pretty straightforward. And then other periods where life gets more complicated. It gets more stressful and the same routines that ground us in good conditions just aren't as realistic for

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Speaker A

us. And so I find that it's really helpful to have an approach to nutrition that can adapt to those changing circumstances. With Nourish, you get to work one-on-one with a registered dietitian who can help you figure out what actually makes sense for your life

11:26

Speaker A

and your goals and your circumstances on an ongoing basis. You can meet with them over Zoom, message them through the Nourish app, and even scan or log your meals so that they can offer personalized feedback if you find that

11:38

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11:54

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12:09

Speaker A

care and support when it comes to looking after your physical health. So, you can find out more using the link in my description or by scanning the QR code on screen. Thanks again to Nourish for sponsoring this video. And with

12:21

Speaker A

that, let's get back into that conversation about allostasis. So, allostasis in a nutshell is the process by which our bodies adapt to stress and changing demands on a physiological level. So, for example, let's say that you know you need to have

12:37

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a conversation with someone that you think is going to be kind of uncomfortable. And so walking into the room to have that conversation, what's probably going to be happening is something to the effect of you're going to notice yourself becoming more alert.

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Your muscles might become more tense. Your attention might narrow quite a bit. And then afterwards, after the conversation is over, what's likely to happen is those muscles are going to relax again. Your heart rate's going to slow down and your body is going to

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naturally start returning to that normal resting state. So both the activation that we experience around a stressful event and the return to baseline afterwards are part of that process of allostasis, right? It is a feature, not a bug of our nervous systems that they

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are able to kind of rally up the energy that we need to stretch ourselves in the direction of growth or in trying things out that are uncomfortable. And it is also a feature of the nervous system that once that stressful event has

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completed and we're able to feel safe again, we're also able to discharge that stress physiologically.

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Speaker A

But when we go through a stressor and we're not able to return to baseline afterwards or if we go through chronic repetitive stressors without adequate recovery time, what we start accumulating inside of our bodies is something called alostostatic load. So

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if our body is kind of chronically gearing up to respond to stressful events without adequate recovery time over time this starts to cause disruptions in how the stress response system functions. So we can become more reactive to stress. So we can go from 0

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to 100 quicker. We can become slower to recover. Allostic load can increase our risk of serious physical health complications like cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, chronic inflammation. And then there are things that we might be quick to notice on a

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psychological level. So chronic fatigue, sleep disturbances, difficulty concentrating, increased irritability, a sense of being totally overwhelmed by or tuned out from everyday demands. All of these can be downstream of having too much alostatic load in the nervous system.

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So if this is the place that we're starting out from when we're trying to widen the window of tolerance, the first thing we need to work on is not taking on more stress. It's returning to baseline so that our systems can get the

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recovery that they need for that alostatic load to lessen. We do this by giving ourselves periods of rest and recovery after stressful events or finding ways to meaningfully upregulate ourselves out of states of numbness or shutdown. So once we have

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built that capacity to rest and recover from stress, then what we do to start widening that window is we start from the inside out. So we start from that place where we're feeling regulated and associated to our environment and then

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Speaker A

we try adding in one stressor. So stretching ourselves either right to the edges of our window of tolerance or a little bit beyond it and then deliberately giving ourselves the experience of returning back to the window of tolerance where we can

15:49

Speaker A

discharge that stress and return to our baseline state. So we learn to deal with more situations in our life from a place where we are both associated to ourselves as we're moving through those scenarios and we feel at choice about

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Speaker A

how we are responding to them. We do this in small steps to avoid overwhelming the system. But essentially the more times that we go through this cycle of encountering something stressful and then returning to baseline, the more our relationship ends

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up changing to the stressor itself. Okay. So, if for example, you really really struggle with tension in relationships and so you've spent a lot of your life basically trying to do everything you can to make sure that tension doesn't arise. What expanding

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that window of tolerance might look like is by allowing yourself to experience first a couple of moments of awkwardness inside of a connection. I remember when I was doing a lot of attachment healing work, this was actually something that I

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worked on. So, I used to always think that inside of a conversation, it was kind of my responsibility to make sure the other person was never feeling uncomfortable or whatever it is. And then I would test out going on a walk

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with a friend, letting there be kind of awkward silence for a moment and just seeing what happened. And the first few times this happened, I noticed, oh, I can actually relax. Let there be a second or two of awkwardness. And then

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when I go home later, I'm going to give myself a relaxing experience of being alone inside of my apartment with no social threats. And I'm going to notice that it was okay, that there was a little bit of awkwardness and nothing

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terrible happened. The conversation carried on. I survived it and the friendship survived it. I had that moment where my stress level increased, but I was able to stay associated to what was happening. And then that stress discharged after. And after enough

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repetitions, I ended up not fearing moments of awkwardness or discomfort in connections anymore because my body had stopped logging them as a giant threat.

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And so now when those moments arise in conversation, usually I just find them kind of endearing and assume that there's just a certain degree of awkwardness that is inherent to forming new connections. It doesn't mean that anything is dreadfully wrong. So that's

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just one small example and we'll get into some more down the line. But essentially the idea here is that what we're trying to move from is a paradigm of learning to endure more situations within which we feel disconnected from

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ourselves and continue on with them to one where we are at choice about the situations that we're putting ourselves in or we're able to at least find as much agency as we possibly can inside of unidal scenarios and act from that place

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of agency and then give ourselves recover. recovery time after so that we can prove to ourselves when I become either a little bit too activated or deactivated, there is a way to get myself back to baseline. This is that

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process of doing that secure inner parenting work where we're figuring out what is the appropriate level of challenge to give ourselves to start growing as well as when is it time to soo ourselves or when is it time to kind

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of rally ourselves so that we're able to spend a lot of time inside of that window of tolerance where that recovery and that integration is actually able to happen. So we're going to get into how we actually do this work. So, what is

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the step-by-step process we can follow for starting to expand our window of tolerance? And what I want to be clear about is that this is not any sort of official process that I'm referencing.

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It's just kind of how it makes sense to me or how it chronologically appears in my awareness based on the reading I've done about this topic. But for all of us, we're going to need to find our way

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through this in the order that makes the most sense to us. So, if you are starting from a place where a lot of your life is being lived outside of your window of tolerance, here is where I would start. Step one is I would start

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noticing and paying attention to which habits, which routines, which relationships tend to naturally keep you inside of that window of tolerance without costing you much. So, what I mean by that, and there's a really awesome chart inside of Dr. Stanley's

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book that I really like about this, is that there are certain things that might help kind of regulate us in a pinch, but that end up causing a lot of side effects that then lead to more dysregulation. So an example of that

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might be let's say using alcohol to calm down when we are really upregulated. It might actually help our nervous system do a kind of force down regulation.

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However, if we're chronically doing this, it's going to come with other consequences that are going to make it harder to regulate down the line, right?

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Because chronic alcohol use actually affects our brain chemistry in a way that can make us feel more anxious and more depressed on a neurochemical level.

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And the reason I bring that up is not at all to be shaming. It's to be clear that sometimes when we're desperate, we use coping mechanisms that have negative consequences in other areas. But the more that we can fill our lives up

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proactively with coping mechanisms that are not expensive in other areas, the better a chance we're going to have at spending more time inside of our window of tolerance. So, for example, let's say I know that when I get really stressed

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and overwhelmed, what I need is a lot of sleep, a lot of alone time, and a lot of long walks. For me, all of those things are true. That is just what helps me return to baseline when I get over

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stimulated. If I can start to really prioritize giving myself a lot of that, what it's naturally going to start doing is giving me more time inside of my window of tolerance. And when I am inside of that window of tolerance, I'm probably doing

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less compulsive self soothing. So things like trying to numb out from being overstimulated and I'm doing more generative self-care. So other forms of things that might feel kind of positive some for our mental health and our nervous system might be being part of a

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community. So spending a lot of time around people that we love, engaging with hobbies that we love, so playing an instrument if that's something that brings us joy or cooking meals that feel really nourishing or reading a really

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good book. Whatever it is that helps us feel relaxed without significant negative consequences, we just want to start by being aware of what those things are. So, even pausing this video right now and writing out a list of as

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many things that you can think of that help you stay regulated without incurring major side consequences might be a really great practice. And then when you're ready, you can unpause and we'll go on to step number two.

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The next thing I would do if I were starting from the ground up with widening my window of tolerance is start noticing and paying attention to things that make you feel meaningfully and adequately challenged.

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Okay. So, which things do you love working on that make you feel kind of excited and lit up? Or which types of relationships make you feel really inspired? Or which environments do you love being in where you feel the most

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alert and attentive and excited to go engage with what's around you? Or what does it feel like for you to have something that you are really looking forward to? So what would get you really excited if you knew that 6 months down

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the line you were going to be doing that thing? Whether that is taking a trip somewhere or having a bunch of friends over or essentially just having something that you're going to be doing that feels really energizing for your

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nervous system to think about. And I would recommend that you once again pause this video here and on a new page take some time to journal out as many of these things as you can think about. So things that make you feel energized and

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alert and excited, but in a way that is kind of pleasurable and manageable, not something that makes you feel kind of frantic and desperate to have it. Okay?

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So as many of those things as you can think of, just take a moment and try to write them down. These are generally the things that we need to turn to to help ourselves out of that hypo arousal.

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And then the third thing we want to pay attention to is we want to start learning to notice the early warning signs that we are slipping out of that window of tolerance. So what are some of the early signs that you might be

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fawning for example? Maybe there are physiological things that happen in your body when you're fawning. Maybe there are certain thoughts that you start to have or maybe there's a general feeling of disconnection from yourself inside of a relationship that indicates that you

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might be feeling unsafe. or what are some of the early signs that you might be going into a fight response? So maybe you're feeling kind of chronically frustrated and activated and combative in your life. You might be spending a

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lot of hours on Twitter picking fights with people or kind of scanning your environments for anything anyone might be doing that you think is wrong because your body is in this kind of upregulated agitated energy because you're perceiving some threat or some need to

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defend yourself. Right? These might be the early signs that you're in a fight response or the early signs of being in a flight response. Again, it's going to be different for everyone, but it might feel like being really restless or

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scattered or not wanting to pay attention to what you're working on and feeling desperate to think about the future and escape what's happening for you right now. There might be physiological sensations that come along with it. It might be harder to

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downregulate or get to sleep at the end of the day or with patterns of freeze.

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Maybe there are early feelings of starting to feel overwhelmed and having a harder time responding to messages or struggling to begin new things or get started on projects. These are going to be different for everybody and I don't

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want to overwhelm you here with trying to kind of perfectly and comprehensively come up with every scenario that might indicate you're heading outside of your window of tolerance. But what I would encourage you to do is again take a

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little bit of time to pause this video and just write down some of the warning signs for yourself that you're starting to cross that threshold from a place where you feel centered and agentic and in touch with your feelings into the

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experience of being in one of those 4F responses or otherwise being too stimulated or too under stimulated. What are some of the early warning signs?

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Then step four, we want to start putting some attention on what we might be able to do for ourselves when we find ourselves in those situations. So how might we be able to kind of rearrange our priorities in order to help

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ourselves return to baseline when we start encountering an amount of stress that has pushed us outside of our window of tolerance. And for most of us, this will mean actually changing our priorities. So actually changing the way that we are spending our time, our

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energy, and our money. Okay, secure people naturally organize their lives around staying regulated. That's part of why they get so much flack for being boring inside of insecurely attached circles, right? It's not that they are boring, but they are willing to organize

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their lives in such a way that protects them from unnecessary chronic stress. And so what we want to just start developing some awareness about is when I start bearing outside of my window of tolerance in all of those ways that I

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just wrote down, what routines or practices or things could I do that could help me return to that window of tolerance? So if I find that I am fawning, what might I need for myself? I often find that I need to take some

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space from a given relationship dynamic to reenter, figure out what I want inside of it and then be able to go back in from a place of increased connection to myself so that I am not kind of compulsively going along with someone

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else wants out of a panic response when I feel kind of frozen or shut down.

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Sometimes what really helps is having a conversation with a friend or a coach or someone who's very positive who can help me kind of get connected to what feels exciting and inspiring again, right? And so how we bring ourselves back into our

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window of tolerance the way a loving parent would when we go outside of it is going to be totally unique to each of us. We're all going to have unique strategies and unique things that work for us. But the more of those that we

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can become aware of, the better a chance we give ourselves at actually being able to implement them and to start repatterning our nervous system to resemble that of someone who had that loving, nurturing caregiving in early life that intuitively understands when I

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go outside of my window of tolerance, when I respond to stress in a way that taxes my system, here are the ways I can bring myself back into it. From that place, we give ourselves a solid basis to start that process of expanding our

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window of tolerance to include more things that may be used to trigger us or push us outside of it. So once we have that baseline established of what it feels like to be inside of our window of tolerance and what it feels like to be

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outside of it, what we can also begin to do is start running little experiments that stretch that window of tolerance and then allow us to return back into it. So I have a video on titration that I will link in the description of this

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video. But essentially this is what we are doing when we are doing trauma work, right? We're exposing ourselves to a manageable amount of distress and then we are returning to safety and we are teaching our nervous system actually

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this thing is safe to encounter. Now depending on what we are working with here, it can be very very very useful to have professional help. Right? So, if you have access to therapeutic support, it can be incredibly useful to work with

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a therapist in this process who can kind of help us figure out what the right level of challenge is. But I also just want to be mindful that not everyone has access to that. And that doesn't mean that trauma healing is inaccessible to

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you. It might just mean that you need to air a little bit on the side of caution when it comes to how much trigger you are exposing yourself to. So, start way way way way smaller than you're probably thinking,

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Speaker A

right? I have this friend who works in the attachment space with couples, and if she has one or both people in the couple who really struggle with tolerating distance in connections, she'll start out by just getting one partner to turn their back, literally

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Speaker A

like turn around, and ask the other partner to stay present with what is coming up for them when their partner is turned around. So not facing them and not speaking to them. So truly really tiny baby steps where we stay associated

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to what comes up for us inside of scenarios that feel threatening and then returning to baseline. So in that scenario, having the partner turn back around and get back in connection and then building outwards from there with that nervous system patterning of

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encounter stress, return to baseline, encounter stress, return to baseline. And as we go through this process, what ends up happening is eventually more and more scenarios that once clocked to us as stressful or threatening. Now we have given our bodies the experience of

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Speaker A

recognizing can in fact be normal and things that we are perfectly capable of tolerating without disconnecting from ourselves. And so now our association with that object changes, right? Maybe that partner who once really struggled with distance in relationships can

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Speaker A

eventually learn to see something like their partner going away for a business trip as completely non-threatening and in fact as something that they can learn to kind of enjoy and see as an opportunity to spend more time connecting with friends or getting alone

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Speaker A

time or whatever it is. because that association of it as dangerous and unsafe is no longer there based on those incremental experiences of having some exposure to it and then returning to a state of safety. This already covers

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step six in this process which is that we start to form new associations. So I can disagree with someone first in little tiny ways and then in increasing ways as our skill level increases without being abandoned by them or

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without abandoning myself in the process. Or I can make a mistake or I can be in a state of not knowing what comes next without getting stuck in panic or humiliation.

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Speaker A

Or I can feel overwhelmed in a relationship and end up finding my way back into a place of regulation and calm where I can explain what my needs are to another person without feeling overwhelming shame or guilt or I can

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leave a situation that is wrong or bad for me and have a happy life on the other side of it.

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Speaker A

So the more window of tolerance aware and the more nervous system aware that I became, I once had a situation where I had to leave an incredibly unhealthy situation that I was in. And I took everything that I knew about this stuff

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and I went, you know what? What I need to focus all of my attention on for the next couple of months is giving myself as much support, as much safety, and as much joy as I can manage to encounter

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Speaker A

because I need to prove to my nervous system that I can be okay on the other side of detaching from something that is really hard to detach from. I need to work to prove that to myself. And it was

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Speaker A

one of the first experiences I ever had of going through one of those really hard changes where it's a change we know we need to make but our nervous systems don't want to make it and feeling like I

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could actually regroup and feel stronger and more resilient and more excited about the future on the other side because I knew that the amount of stress my nervous system was going to go through when leaving was huge and

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therefore the amount of recovery kind also needed to be huge if I wanted to stand a chance at sticking through with my own decision, which I did. So, the reason why we want to make sure that we're experimenting in safe environments

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is because we want to give ourselves those new experiences of things that we used to not know how to do, which sometimes means we have to do a little bit of intentional environmental design in this experimentation process. And

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Speaker A

this leads us to the last point that is a bit of a sobering one, but I think it's really important to pay attention to is that developing a wider window of tolerance also means that we are going to develop stronger discernment about

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Speaker A

what is bad for us. And this part is so important because what we do not want to be doing is finding ways to endure more and more abuse or more and more traumatic situations. What we want to do

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Speaker A

is spend enough time inside of a state that feels good for our nervous system that if we repeatedly encounter a situation or a person that feels very bad for our nervous system that we are needing a disproportionate amount of

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Speaker A

time to recover from that is going to be more obvious to us than ever if we are spending a lot of time inside of that window of tolerance. Okay. So, the more time that I'm spending inside of a state

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Speaker A

that feels healthy and good for me, the better I'm going to be at noticing the states that feel destructive and bad for me, because there's going to be a real big contrast there. Right? I think that for a lot of us, what keeps us really

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Speaker A

stuck inside of toxic work environments, toxic relationships, whatever it is, is that if all of our life feels bad, we don't have a lot to kind of compare things with, right? If we're treating ourselves badly and denying ourselves

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Speaker A

things like rest or positive self-t talk or whatever it is that helps us stay grounded, it's going to be a lot harder for us to notice when someone else is mistreating us because it's all just going to feel normal. But if we are

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Speaker A

caring for ourselves in a practical and tangible way, if we are giving ourselves rest and nourishing food and good support from people who love us and then someone comes along and starts insulting us or making huge demands on us, we are

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Speaker A

going to notice the difference, right? We are going to notice the difference of how it feels in our nervous system to be in that context versus to be in the context that we are usually putting ourselves in where we are caring for

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Speaker A

ourselves. And so as we go through this whole process, what we want to be paying attention to is am I actually developing more freedom and more flexibility through the process of widening this window? So, am I actually finding that

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Speaker A

now my connections feel more authentic as I've begun bringing more and more of myself into them? Or am I actually finding that situations that used to really trigger me are now ones that I experience more ease inside of? Or am I

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Speaker A

kind of using this reserve of nervous system regulation to keep putting myself back in situations that are triggering or destructive for me? Right? We really want to pay attention to in what way we are trying to expand that window of

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Speaker A

tolerance because again we don't want lives where we are just enduring things that feel terrible. We want lives where we feel like we can stay present and associated and interested and engaged with our lives in a wider range of

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Speaker A

scenarios. And if we are practicing window of tolerance expansion, that is ideally exactly where we're going to end up after we give this a lot of reps and a lot of recovery time in between.

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Speaker A

Okay, I am going to leave this at that for today, but as always, any thoughts, anything coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of

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Speaker A

yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon. [music]

Topics: window of tolerance nervous system regulation complex PTSD attachment theory resilience trauma recovery Elizabeth Stanley Widen the Window titration emotional regulation

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