The Window of Tolerance response to stress and trauma

Transcript

hi everyone i just got off a trauma sensitive mindfulness community call and i was inspired to talk to you today about the window of tolerance so this is a model that helps us understand what happens when people are experienced saying significant stress or trauma and the window of tolerance describes three different states that we can be in at any one time and i really thought these were relevant to yogic philosophy so i'll touch on that and one of these i guess to talk about the window of tolerance i'll show you a diagram here so if you imagine that this piece of paper is a window in the middle is this area that we call the window of tolerance and it is a place where we can feel at rest we can feel easeful we have a sense of balance a sense of feeling whole let's say and when we're out of that window we can become hyper aroused which means that we may feel agitated restless as if our thoughts are racing perhaps we need to escape it's it's a state of high arousal so this is one way in which we can respond when we're under severe stress and the other way is a hypoarousal state which is more of a state of freeze so we can shut down we can engage in numbing behaviors we might feel very lethargic we might sleep a lot those are the kinds of behaviors that tend to evidence themselves and here i've described you know the state of hyper arousal in yoga we talk about a continuum of rajas where we may feel very agitated and restless and at the other end of that continuum is a state of thomas lethargy sluggishness a feeling of heaviness and in the middle which is what we strive for is a state of saatva a state of being at ease where we can rest and restore ourselves so we go we can go in between these states we can have our go-to state when we're under serious stress and i just invite you to reflect on where you tend to find yourself when you are experiencing a lot of stress so i know for me it's up here i'm in my head i worry a lot i go over things a lot i try to problem solve my thoughts are all over the place and i get very anxious and my body expresses that anxiety so knowing this and what i learned today as well or had reinforced was that this window of tolerance narrows when we're under a lot of stress chronic stress over a long period of time like we all are with covet 19 were in month 9 of this pandemic and i think it's really helpful to recognize that our window of tolerance is narrower and this really helped me to hear this today because i've been having a really hard time and i just find it takes less and less to kind of send me over the edge so to speak into that hyper-aroused state and hearing this discussion today really helped me realize that when i find myself in that state of hyperarousal i need to stop and i need to do something to try and de-escalate that reaction in my body and my mind so they talked about grounding techniques today so i'll perhaps go into those in my next call or in my next video and give you a couple of techniques that you can use when you find yourself outside of your window of tolerance thanks for listening and i wish you well look forward to seeing you next time