Window of Tolerance- How to Regulate Your Nervous System and Heal from PTSD

Transcript

hi friends Jeanette Connery here yoga therapist and today's video is going to be about the window of Tolerance the window of Tolerance is a really important tool for healing from chronic stress and traumatic stress because it helps you monitor your nervous system state and this self-monitoring this self-reflection is a really important part of yoga which we call and you can find that in the yoga sutures of patanjali and the window of Tolerance also does another really important thing which is it helps you develop the witness State and I'll talk more about that later but before we dive in please take a second to give a big thumbs up by clicking the thumbs up like icon below and to so you can be notified every time I post a video something else I really like about the window of Tolerance is that it applies really well to a very broad range of people and lots of different experiences and it also transfers really well across philosophies and approaches for example psychologists use the window of Tolerance a lot in their therapy sessions and mindfulness teachers mindfulness meditation teachers use it to make sure that their teachings are what we call trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive it also when you transfer it over to neuroscience and neuropsychology you see that it lines up very well with polyvagal Theory and beyond that it even lines up extremely well with the some care philosophy which Echoes throughout all the teachings of yoga it's the scientific basis of the teachings of yoga and I won't be talking too much about that today in great detail but there will be a little bit um just enough for you to understand what I mean when I say that the window of Tolerance applies so well in so many different ways and that's why I've decided to share it with you today I hope you find this helpful so we're going to talk about the window of Tolerance and how this can help people in the first stages of uh inhabiting their body comfortably and and using yoga and other mindfulness practices and even just in daily life to cultivate a little bit more space and a little bit more resilience when you have PTSD or even everyday trauma that over time adds up you can start to see some symptoms similar to PTSD awareness is always such a good way to go um so the window of Tolerance model was created by Dr Dan Siegel and he he first created window of Tolerance and then later made another analogy as a river a River of Life so if you'd like to see a picture of a diagram of the window of Tolerance and how that works I have it on a Blog and I will be dropping a link to that blog in the description I've chosen to use the river analogy because it works so well for our purposes today and I'm going to draw a river in blue so you can see this is our River the River of Life hey you are when you're in the river you're flowing you're flowing with life things are fluid things are changing all the time and you're resilient you're adapting to those changes um when you're in this River you are feeling excuse me you are feeling calm you were feeling grounded and grounded just means that you're present in your body right now your mind is here and now rather than being caught up in the past or the future and worrying and you can feel your body and you can experience life as it's happening moment to moment um when you're in this River so you're feeling centered and present okay and you're safe you're feeling pretty confident and safe about who you are where you are people that are around you and what we uh what neurologists would say about this is that it's the optimal optimal nervous system arousal right so your nervous system goes through different states of arousal that just means how much energy and what kind of energy is going through your nervous system this one is optimal your nervous system is functioning well and when a person is habitually in this state this River can become really wide that means a wide variety of experiences can happen and keep that person still in the flow of Life feeling okay and resilient and adaptable for people with PTSD or chronic stress depression and anxiety this River can become very small it might even become more like a creek or just a mere Trickle and that means that it takes a lot less to knock someone off of their Center okay so when you're in your flow you are here this is where you are you are right in the center okay inevitably things can happen that will make us start to drift away from that Center and when that happens you can go in one of two directions you can go this way which I'm going to fill in this space later and show you a lot of detail and this space you could go this way um so as you start to drift away from the center you can become dysregulated so dysregulation just means you're not in your Center anymore and there are lots of different ways that you can experience that so if you're going in this direction you're moving towards nervous system hyper arousal okay hyper arousal is the fight or flight okay so we don't go well a lot of people don't go straight from their Center to hyper arousal we go through dysregulation first so that means we have certain things that are happening that might be Clues to us that hey I've been knocked off my Center I feel myself starting to get revved up and for people who are not living in their bodies people who really have a hard time with being aware of their nervous system you can move through dysregulation extremely quickly and not even notice and all of a sudden you're here and you're overwhelmed and you have no control Okay so what happens when we're in that hyper aroused state or even as we're going through dysregulation to the state we have increased heart rate increased blood pressure foreign blood pressure we also have maybe a feeling of being hot or you've heard someone referred to as a hot head right this is what they're talking about uh you're definitely feeling it unsafe in the moment where you are um subconsciously at the very least right and you are perhaps experiencing hyper vigilance paranoia hey anger ID so hyper arousal is associated with movement of energy movement and heat and neurologically speaking from the polyvagal theory standpoint we're talking about sympathetic nervous system arousal I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about polyvagal theory in this video because it's it would make the video very long but the blog that I mentioned earlier also has a very concise explanation of polyvagal theory if you're interested in understanding more about your nervous system and the way that plays out in the context of the window of Tolerance okay all right so um reactive over sensitive um someone getting angry for almost no reason right that's all Happening Here with Hyper arousal now alternatively when we get knocked off center we can also go the other direction instead of fight or flight we could go towards freeze response and again we go through dysregulation to get there we and dysregulation feels like oh things are changing something's happening I better pay attention but for a lot of people that's not possible it happens so fast they don't have that space all right I dropped my blue I'm gonna go get my blue um again so I'm using my cheat sheet because I know that I will give you a better presentation if I have the information in front of me I'm a lot less nervous when I do that so good I'm regulating my nervous system in the best way that I can when you're going down this this way this is called hypoarousal not surprisingly okay and hypoarousal feels cold energetically or even physically your freeze responses cold and well what we experience physiologically is decreased blood pressure decreased heart rate that's getting really squished there and when you feel hypo aroused or even when you're dysregulated on your way two hypo arousal you could experience confusion you could experience indecisiveness have you ever had to make a decision and you have just been unable to do it and you're thinking how am I having such a hard time choosing which color shirt to buy right that's part of this picture down here the brain um slows down in this case hypoarousal is associated with inertia that means non-movement okay and it's trapped energy something really interesting about hypoarousal is that it happens when you know there's something triggering in the environment another person some kind of event happens and you start to feel unsafe and there is a there is this response at first your body says danger but then shifts that and you end up repressing that energy not instead of fighting or fighting you freeze so there's rigidity in the body there's tight muscles and it's um a lot of Trapped energy okay so um hypoarousal you can be blank you can be numb so all of those things are happening on your way and then once you get fully hypo aroused this is where we're well certainly very depressed right this is where people find that they have trouble even getting out of bed in the morning people find that they just cannot bring themselves to do the things that they know will be good for them um and it can be very difficult to break out of that okay so I want to bring in some oh polyvagal Theory this is the dorsal parasympathetic nervous system at work okay over here we have in in this optimal Zone it's the ventral vagal nervous system or the ventral branch of the vagus nerve so good uh to bring in the some care philosophy really briefly well we have like these all this big range this big picture of what's happening in the nervous system and we've talked about the nervous system and we've talked about the behavioral patterns and the emotions around that and um each of these sections is also associated with aguna now the gunas are just energies there are three of them that comprise everything in the Manifest Universe the physical Universe including waves so the yogis include waves in that physical description including sound waves light waves and thought waves so they're all created or comprised of these three energies in countless combinations three different colors that combine to create the vast palette of Life as we see it in our universe and say gunas are satba which goes right here in this River area in this centered present um part of your life and then we have rajas which goes up here and then we have Thomas which goes down here I also give a lot more explanation about this in my blog again I don't want to make this video really really long but essentially each of these components Associates with everything else that's listed here okay very clear and very direct relationship between those all right so this is a model that I teach my clients and my somatic yoga therapy class is on the very first day and they always tell me that it's extremely useful because it then gives them something to keep an eye on as they're doing their work it gives them a framework from which to approach body awareness and it gives them permission to stop what they're doing now I'll explain that and why that's so important okay you can only learn and you can only heal when you're here in this River area when you're inside your window of Tolerance that's because when you're here you're um prefrontal cortex the part of your brain that's responsible for rational thinking and reasoning that part of your brain is in charge and uh when you're not there that prefrontal cortex is shut off and who's running the show The Lizard brain the Primitive brain that only knows fight flight or freeze it only knows survive okay so and you cannot learn and you cannot grow and you cannot heal when you're concerned with your survival everything else becomes secondary okay so when we're practicing mindfulness and we're trying to bring awareness into the body into a body that we have worked very hard not to live in you can imagine that that can be a challenging experience so when we are working with the body and mindfulness and Present Moment awareness we're also keeping an eye on where we are on this Continuum and the moment we start to notice ourselves drifting towards dysregulation we stop the mindfulness activity into one of a variety of techniques that will bring you back into a feeling of centeredness safety and being okay and that is the practice essentially I've moved away from Center I'm bringing myself back and gradually over time we can notice sooner when we start to drift and we can stay in that mindfulness a little bit longer before we start to drift so all of this is in yoga what we call self-reflection self-study we are learning about ourselves we're learning about the way the nervous system works the way we react to stress what are my triggers what are the things that I do when I'm triggered and awareness brings us into that witness State the witness state has traditionally been viewed by many Eastern philosophies and approaches to Wellness as a key element to mental health and indeed Wellness overall now in the modern time we have a lot of data backing up the idea that this is actually very very important for mental health so it's become eastern and western it's just generally accepted by professionals everywhere to be a key element in healing the witness State and that is bringing yourself away from your experience stepping back a moment and being able to see that I am not the things that I think I am here the things that I think are there in fact I'm not even thinking them they're the thoughts think themselves they arise and look after a while they go away and then new thoughts come um I'm not my feelings my feelings happen and I'm over here this witness State also gives us the ability to see that oh look everything is changing all the time and this is a essential element of some kale philosophy of foundational aspect of our universe is that everything is changing all the time including you so including your environment including your thoughts including your feelings and once we see that we can start to work our way out of the Trap of feeling like what's happening right now is so overwhelming and I will not survive okay and that disidentification is another key element of yoga I am not my thoughts and feelings I am different from that I am separate from that it's very freeing to know that and that it's not your fault and that it's not your doing that these things are happening um we then can experience over time with lots of practice and increased feeling of willingness to inhabit our bodies and increase sense of security in our own bodies and a willingness to be here and feel our feelings and and experience what we're experiencing rather than repressing rather than pushing it away so this ability creates a lot of space eventually oh so much space between the trigger and the reaction that we actually have more choice you have more choice after practicing awareness Choice over responding rather than reacting so rather than jumping here you actually get to say oh look something triggering has happened what am I going to do about that well I'm gonna fill in the blank right we learn lots of coping strategies okay so I hope this was really helpful to you again I have a Blog about all of this that gives so much more detail if you're interested in reading it I'm dropping a link in the description below if you're interested in my eight week somatic yoga therapy class for healing trauma and chronic stress and anxiety there will be links to that as well um thank you for joining me The Light in Me bows to the light in you because they are the same namaste