widening your window of tolerance
all of yoga podcast · episode 40
Why do some days feel easy… and others completely overwhelming?
One day you can handle traffic, difficult conversations and unexpected problems without much trouble. But, the next day, the smallest inconvenience can tip you over the edge.
This experience is closely related to something called the Window of Tolerance - a concept from neuroscience and psychology that describes the zone in which your nervous system can function in a balanced and regulated way.
When you’re inside your window of tolerance, you can think clearly, respond instead of react, regulate your emotions and have happy physiology.
But when you move outside this window, you can shift into:
Hyperarousal: stress, anxiety, overwhelm, frustration
Hypoarousal: numbness, disconnection, zoning out or low motivation
The size of this window can change from day to day depending on things like stress, sleep, nutrition, workload, emotional demands and even if you’ve eaten!
The encouraging news is that your window of tolerance can be widened. And yoga is a powerhouse at helping here.
In this episode, you can expect to learn:
• What the window of tolerance actually is
• Why your reactions can vary from day to day
• The difference between hyperarousal and hypoarousal
• How stress narrows your window
• Simple techniques that help widen it
• Why yoga is uniquely effective for nervous system regulation
yoga’s practical tools
Yoga offers practical tools that help regulate the nervous system and increase resilience, including:
• Breathwork
• Mindful movement
• Meditation
• Nervous system awareness
• Yoga philosophy
Together, these practices help train the nervous system to stay regulated even when life becomes challenging.
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widening your window of tolerance
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free toolbox: widening your window
This free toolbox brings together a handful of powerful techniques drawn from yoga, breathwork and nervous system science.
Inside, you’ll find short practices you can use during busy days to help settle your mind, regulate your breath and gently bring your nervous system back into balance.
You don’t need special equipment or lots of free time - many of these tools take just a few minutes and can be done anywhere.
Over time, these small practices can help you develop greater resilience and a wider window of tolerance.
Transcript - widening your window of tolerance
Window of Tolerance: Yoga for Regulation
Have you noticed that some days you take absolutely everything in your stride, traffic jams, annoying comments from your boss, even your friend having huge meltdown [00:01:00] and needing your help, but then other days the slightest thing just tips you over the edge?
Well, I was finding this with myself and with quite a lot of my yogis, and I really wanted to understand what was going on. and so I stumbled across the window of tolerance, the window of tolerance, also called the window of regulation, because of course, something can't just have one name. Is the window within which you can operate effectively and in a way that you want outside of this window. You might feel really stressed or you might push away what's going on and zone out.
For example, listening to really loud music or scrolling on your phone. I will explain all of this in more detail in a moment, but first I want to be really clear that moving outside of your window of tolerance is not in and of itself a bad thing. It's a [00:02:00] mechanism, a strategy for coping with life, especially modern life, which is stressful.
And so that's really important. So if you listen to this and you're like, that's me, I do that. That is not at all a reason to feel bad or to feel like something needs to immediately change or improve. It might be that with this knowledge, you're able to make decisions that help keep you within your window of tolerance, and if so, that would be amazing, but there's no judgment about moving outside of it.
Okay, let's go through it in a bit more detail. earlier I said that the window of tolerance is the window within which you can operate effectively and in a way that you want. So what does that mean? Well, it means a window within which you can speak and say what you [00:03:00] want to say, rather than reacting.
Rather than exiting the window into hyper arousal, which is a stress response or hypo arousal, which is an under activation of the nervous system, this might manifest as feelings of disconnection, low motivation, numbness, and just wanting to zone out. The window of tolerance is a window within which you are able to think clearly.
You are able to regulate your emotions. And your physiology, your heart rate, digestive system, immune system, they're all working really well. And the window of tolerance can change size. It can become narrower, meaning you are more likely to move outside of it, or it can become bigger. Interestingly, a friend of mine recently was saying, well, I should say that this friend is a psychologist and an experienced yoga [00:04:00] teacher, so she is very, very, very aware of the brain, the window of tolerance, the ability to regulate.
Anyway, she was telling me the previous day she'd had a training day with tons of information and she'd found it quite challenging. By the evening, she got into a small traffic jam and her words, she had completely lost her mind. She was screaming at the traffic crying, banging the steering wheel, and then complaining that her whole life was ridiculously hard.
Anyway, following this meltdown, she realized she hadn't eaten all day and she was just hungry. So she ate some tea and she was fine. I am telling you that because we both found it quite amusing that someone who teaches regulation through yoga and who knows so much about the brain still had a brain exploding moment at a tiny traffic jam.
Her window of tolerance was so narrow because she'd been so busy and [00:05:00] forgotten to eat anything all day. And that's a really potent reminder that sometimes our window of tolerance will narrow or widen a lot based on what's going on inside our bodies and minds. And based on external factors too. Over the past few years, I have been so amazed by, and so excited by an idea of taking steps to manage our own window of tolerance.
I'm always, always spouting on about the idea of stress management, not necessarily being about managing external circumstances, like not necessarily being getting a new job or moving to a cave, but instead stress management being about putting processes in our lives and tools in our toolbox to ongoing manage the stress load.[00:06:00]
And this, this widening of the window of tolerance is most definitely that. Life living in this world moves us naturally towards the edges of the window, and we can start to develop tools to widen the window to stay regulated within it. Now, this isn't a complete fix. It doesn't at all mean that you won't react or overreact to stress, but they're tools that we can use to feel better and to cope better If you want to.
So what can you do realistically in your busy life without special clothing, special equipment, loads of extra time? Well, in times of rising stress, you can elongate the exhale. This helps to lower your heart rate and reduce the release of stress hormones in the body, ultimately helping you stay [00:07:00] within the window rather than exiting it.
Or you can take slow mindful movements. It doesn't have to be a full hour yoga class. Of course, that would be great, but even five minutes of slow mindful movement at your desk will help. In fact, one of the things that genuinely never ceases to amaze me is that yoga doesn't just offer individual techniques, but it's a whole system for supporting the nervous system.
Including breath work, pranayama, meditation movement, and yoga philosophy. All of these aspects continuously work together to help us develop greater resilience, a, a wider window of tolerance and awareness. I've created a free widening the window toolbox. If you'd like yours, you can get it in the show notes.
And if you [00:08:00] just are itching to know more about this, know that we explore it in great, great depth on yoga teacher training. Again, tons more information in our show notes about that too. But above all, remember that although we live in stressful times, it doesn't mean that we have to relegate ourselves to feeling stressed all the time.
There are preemptive and reactive things that we can do to widen the window within which we feel great, and many of these tools naturally exist in yoga. I really hope that you found that information useful and interesting and above all, as always, happy practicing.