Did you know that there’s a technical term for being in your comfort zone?? it’s called being in your window of tolerance. Fancy that!!
Being in your window of tolerance, a term coined by Dr Dan Siegel, means that you’re functioning in a calm, regulated and balanced state. You deal well with the ups and downs of daily life, you respond to life around you in a healthy way. You are able to be yourself and engage with people around you.
When faced with excessive, overwhelming, chronic or traumatic stress, we leave our window of tolerance and instead start operating from a fight/flight/freeze response. In this state, our rational, thinking brain shuts down, instead we become reactive, defensive and dysregulated. Of course, under life threatening situations, these responses make sense. It is our body’s survival response.
Difficulties arise, when repeated, long term or acute stress, in a sense “shrinks” our window of tolerance. With a smaller window of tolerance, we can easily become dysregulated and leave our window of tolerance more frequently.
The good news is that we can work on our window of tolerance, making it wider and bigger, thereby increasing our resilience and reducing our proneness to anxiety.
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