Passage 5: The Window of Tolerance (A real-time map for your nervous system in transition.)
Let’s start with a simple question: how are you right now?
Not in your life or location, but in your body.
Before you answer with a story, take a moment and scan for signals…
Do you feel tense and tight? Jittery and braced?
Or slow and heavy—like your energy is running on a dimmer switch?
Or are you steady enough to stay grounded, even as the terrain shifts beneath you?
Sometimes “right now” feels like too much: your mind sprinting ahead, your attention snagging on a dozen things at once, your system acting like everything is time-sensitive. You might be talking faster than you mean to. Fixing. Fixating. Pushing. Over-explaining. Trying to get a grip on a moment that won’t hold still.
Light
Dark
And sometimes “right now” feels like too little: fog, flatness, the strange distance of watching your life from the outside looking in. You can still do the tasks—answer the email, pack the bag, make the dinner—but it’s as if the part of you that inhabits those efforts has stepped back.
And if you’re in the sweet spot for your nervous system, you’re not necessarily basking in bliss. But you’re resourced enough to stay present. You can take in what’s happening—and respond instead of react.
““Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ”
Let me explain why I’m starting here, and why this matters: your nervous system’s state changes your ability to reach for the resources you already have: the pause, the words, the perspective, and the capacity to repair.
If you don’t know your state, you’ll keep trying to solve from the wrong place—and pay for it later.
The same conversation, the same request, the same conflict can land differently depending on whether you’re inside your workable range or outside it. Inside that range, you can stay connected to yourself while you decide what to do next. Outside it, your system is less interested in nuance and more invested in protection.
That’s not a character flaw, it’s functional physiology.
If you can name where you are, you’ve already given your nervous system language instead of judgment. That’s the shift from blame to bearings. And in transition—when meaning is still in the making—that’s not insignificant.
The body tends to speak in primal indicators: too much, too little, just enough. Tracking your nervous system’s bandwidth won’t always shorten the transition—but it can prevent the slowdowns that can come from trying to solve from a dysregulated state. It will help you move forward with more dignity: fewer decisions made from survival mode, and a more reliable path back to yourself.
Most of us need that support. When our systems tip into protection (fight, flight, or freeze), meaning-making and wise next steps get harder to access—right when we need them most.
Psychiatrist Dan Siegel calls that “just enough” range the Window of Tolerance: the zone where you can stay present enough to feel what’s true and keep access to choice. It’s where your thinking brain and your survival brain can stay in conversation with each other. In Passage 5 of Anatomy of Transition, we’ll use this model to track the part we can sense in real time: your capacity to stay in contact with yourself while everything else shifts around you.
““When we are within our window of tolerance, we are able to respond to the world around us with the most flexibility, adapting to the demands of the moment rather than being thrown off balance by them.” ”
The Window of Tolerance is one of my favorite models for that very reason: it’s compassionate, and it’s clarifying. It doesn’t ask us to be “better” or to “do more.” It asks us to be authentic. It gives us a way to locate ourselves in real time—without turning our nervous system into a moral referendum.
And yes—this model lives in a psychological context. But it also lives in a physiological one. In Passage 4, we talked about the “bucket”: the cumulative load of a life—full calendars, unfinished conversations, buzzing phones, grief, pain, sleep debt, blood sugar swings, inflammation, uncertainty—everything that adds strain, even when nothing looks dramatic from the outside.
Your nervous system is part of your allostatic load because it’s doing the adapting—constantly scanning, responding, and recalibrating to keep you functional. It’s also the system most shaped by that load. As full-body strain increases, your range narrows.
A key detail in this model: the window shifts.
The best news is that your Window of Tolerance isn’t fixed. Your system can learn “more room.” Not overnight, and not by force—but through support, repetition, and small cues of safety that add up. We’ll get to those in a bit.
Your particular window is shaped by history—yours, and sometimes what you’ve inherited. It can narrow with grief, chronic stress, illness, sleep debt, sustained uncertainty, conflict, isolation. It can widen with support, repetition, safety cues, and practices that build regulation.
And sometimes what changes isn’t the whole window—it’s your headroom for the day. A good night’s sleep can lift the ceiling a little. A hard week can lower it. Because these states live in the body, the best route back into your window is by listening to your body’s signals: sensory cues, rhythm, grounding, movement, warmth, contact. Explanation and rationalization come later.
Trauma and prolonged stress also matter here: they tend to narrow the window and increase sensitivity to specific cues—making it easier to tip into too much or too little. Whatever the reason, that narrowing isn’t a defect. It’s the system adapting.
Note: For this Passage, I use the word trauma in a broad, human sense: anything that overwhelms capacity and alters the system’s sense of safety. This can include adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), chronic illness, grief, rupture, violence, disasters, or long seasons of unpredictability.
All of that is why your capacity shifts moment by moment: from voice to shut down, patience to urgency, connection to retreat. That’s why we’re tracking it closely here—not because your nervous system is separate from the rest of the body, but because it registers everything else. It’s the system that sets your internal ‘permissions’ in the moment.
I also want to invite us to notice something important: we often try to problem-solve from a state where we can’t clearly see the whole picture.
It’s like asking an overloaded device to run twelve programs at once: not enough bandwidth, not enough memory. The video screen freezes. The battery drains faster. And if you keep forcing it, you don’t get performance—you get errors. Humans are not that different. When we operate outside of our window, we can say things we don’t mean, make promises we can’t keep, go quiet when we actually need alliance, and then pile on guilt as if shame and regret will restore capacity. (Hint: they won’t.)
So the aim throughout this Passage is subtle: internal range awareness.
Not perfect regulation. Not a new personality. Just the ability to notice where you are, stay within what’s workable when you can, and recognize the earliest signs that you’re drifting outside your window—so you can find your way back again.
And I want to be honest with you: I will drift outside my Window of Tolerance, and you will too. It’ll happen often, and for all kinds of reasons. Some moments briefly knock you out of range: a tense text thread, a brief argument with your partner, a hard meeting. And some chapters take longer—because they aren’t a moment so much as a season: grief, chronic stress, illness, caregiving, prolonged uncertainty, relational rupture. In those chapters, coming back to your center can take time. You don’t just get over it, move on, and let it go. You have to locate yourself. Then again.
We’re often advised to “move on” or “let it go.” I saw those words in a social post today about positive thinking and manifestation. This guidance can work for someone inside their window, but outside it, the pressure to ‘move on’ can feel like one more demand your body may not be able to meet yet. So before we push for closure and the “next thing,” let’s start with that simple question: How am I right now—too much, too little, or just enough?
If you’re not in “just enough,” the work isn’t deliverance just yet. Take a breath. Be kind to yourself. It’s time to focus on return work—helping the system settle enough to locate the inner yes your body can trust.
Why the Window of Tolerance matters in transition
Transition doesn’t just ask us to feel. It asks us to synthesize—to hold multiple truths at once and stay in contact with choice. It asks us to make decisions we didn’t necessarily want to make, have conversations we’d rather avoid, and keep living while our internal settings are in flux.
The Window of Tolerance matters here because it names the hidden variable in so many “why can’t I…” moments:
Why can’t I find the words?
Why can’t I stop over-explaining or over-reacting?
Why can’t I let it go?
Why can’t I get moving?
Why do I keep making it worse when I’m trying to make it better?
Often, the answer isn’t insight. It’s capacity. When you’re outside your window, which can happen naturally in periods of transition, even excellent advice can ricochet. The system needs enough steadiness for steering to come back online.
Remember: When you’re outside your window, the first move isn’t wisdom—it’s return.
““Integration is the process by which we connect different aspects of our experience—our thoughts, feelings, sensations—so that we can stay within our window of tolerance and respond to life with flexibility and resilience.””
A story of narrowing range
I was recently reminded of the Window of Tolerance while watching the new Frankenstein adaptation. You know the bones of the story: a being is created and reaches for recognition. Instead, he’s met with fear. Alarm replaces attunement.
He’s left to navigate a world with nowhere secure to land, and we watch exactly what that does to his system. Initially, he’s flooded: urgency, panic, the surge to protect himself. Then, he drops into distance: withdrawal, blankness, the kind of shutdown an outsider might read only as a personality trait. In the terms we used earlier, this is too much, then too little.
The world labels him a monster. But author Mary Shelley’s warning was always more incisive than that. The true horror is what happens when a being is shunned without safety, mirroring, or support. The monstrous act isn’t his existence—it’s the abandonment.
“The injury isn’t in being different. It’s in being treated as a danger when you’re asking for a connection.”
This suffering is what the Window of Tolerance helps us name: With no refuge, the system shifts settings—out of integration and into protection. And that’s what transition can do, too. It removes familiar cues and reliable landing places, and the nervous system adjusts accordingly.
When I refer to the “nervous system,” which we will explore in more detail in this passage, I mean your internal safety-and-capacity system. It’s the one that decides whether you have access to patience, speech, sleep, appetite, and the ability to begin again.
This is why a discussion of autonomic regulation matters so much in the anatomy of transition. Endings, in-betweens, and new beginnings don’t just change our plans. They change the signals our body is trying to interpret—and that shifts the range we have available to us.
Flying solo
I want to say something carefully here, because it matters: I grew up with many of the conditions people associate with safety—reliable shelter, food, love, adults who showed up, a childhood with room to be a child. That steadiness shaped me, and I’m fortunate.
But safety is an inside job too. And our ability to detect safety or danger rests on both personal history and what we internally perceive.
Amid the steadiness of my upbringing, my system still developed a sensitivity to one particular circumstance: when I feel misunderstood, misread, or placed outside the circle of shared understanding.
In these moments, my body responds before my mind can interpret it. I tighten. I speed up. My words can get sharp—less because I want to wound, and more because I want to be accurately seen. And then, just as quickly, I feel the trap: my nervous system reaching for a sense of belonging in a situation that has not earned my trust.
That’s when I pull back. I retreat. I go private. I determine to do it alone, to soldier through. Distance becomes my quickest version of safety.
Honestly, I can choose to be an outsider and feel steady, even proud. But when I sense a misjudgment—when I’m made the outsider instead of choosing it—my body registers it as scrutiny and separation. My range narrows: less softness, less patience, more work to stay present.
My response is not uncommon. Belonging is one way the body measures safety, and it has a powerful pull. When a sense of belonging is at risk, the system responds quickly—often before we can name what’s happening. And in transition—when the cues are already unstable—that risk can feel amplified, like belonging is suddenly up for debate.
It’s important to note that belonging isn’t just emotional—it’s biological.
Studies of inclusion and exclusion show that when we feel rejected or ‘outside the circle,’ threat detection ramps up, stress hormones rise, and the brain recruits circuits that overlap with pain processing. That shift changes what we can access and whether we can remain in our Window of Tolerance.
We should also recognize that not everyone gets the same baseline of belonging cues. Some people move through workplaces, systems, families, or cultural contexts where exclusion is more frequent, familiar, societal, or consequential. Over time, chronic disconnection doesn’t just “hurt feelings”—it can add wear and tear to the body, shaping inflammation, immune function, and long-term health outcomes. That’s part of why tracking your state matters so much. It gives you a way to meet reality accurately and mitigate some of the downstream damage.
““Belonging means something closer to ‘the deepening of longing.””
Tracking helps reveal the landscape. But some losses deliver the lesson before you’re ready—before you have language, before you’re even watching for the signs. I didn’t fully understand how precarious that line between connection and ‘other’ could become until Isamu died.
The hard days weren’t those where I felt sadness. Grief has a humbling honesty that I welcome. The hardest days were the ones where I felt isolated—as if everyone else was having a recognizable experience, while I was navigating something stranger and lonelier. Those were the days when my system was even more determined to fly solo.
I would get quiet. Decline invitations. Pull back into my sanctuary. My energy would shift to the interior world I knew as a child, when solitude felt safe, and imagination kept me company. But in my grown-up home, it didn’t feel like a refuge. It felt like I was disappearing and disappointing.
I’d read the same sentence three times without taking it in. I’d watch the kettle come to a boil and feel nothing in me reach for the tea—like the next step had simply vanished. I might have called my seclusion “being strong” or “independent”. But what I actually felt was harder to label—like I was insulated inside a glass castle.
That’s the state I recognize now as too little. The brake pedal pushed down against the floor. My nervous system narrowing the world around me, so I didn’t have to feel the full force of what it couldn’t hold.
And then life would speak loud enough to penetrate the glass. My young son needed a snack. A diaper bag had to be packed before heading out to the farmer’s market. A question from work would land on my laptop screen with the expectation that I was still there to answer. Cookies needed to be baked for a potluck. Some of these were commitments, and some were small acts of self-love I’d learned to keep on the calendar. Care pulled me back toward the action. Even when my impulse was to fly solo, love and responsibility asked me to stay engaged.
That’s where the Window of Tolerance gives me context for something I couldn’t reconcile at the time—not just my behaviors, but what my body believed. The nervous system doesn’t narrate with nuance outside the window. It speaks in primitives: alone, unsafe, too much—or too little. And in the wake of loss, separation struck the exact place my system reads as danger: lack of belonging. So my mind did what minds do—it tried to make meaning. And the meaning it landed on was: I’ve been abandoned.
But how could I feel “abandoned” by someone who fought so hard to live?
Abandonment was clearly not true in the factual sense. Isamu did not choose to leave me or this life. But my nervous system wasn’t making a rational claim—it was doing what nervous systems do: registering a loss and reaching for protection. The feeling was sudden aloneness. The story was “abandonment.”
And this reveals something bigger. The nervous system doesn’t only register abandonment when a person dies or we suffer a break in a relationship. It can register it when a community breaks, when an identity is stripped away, when something you built is suddenly no longer yours to lead—especially when the ending comes without conversation, without repair, without understanding, and without a chance to be accurately seen. In those moments, the nervous system feels “othered”—as if the room has decided what you are without ever taking the time to know you. The facts may read “organizational change.” Your physiology says “I’ve been left outside the circle.”
This is one of the most important distinctions I’ve learned: nervous system state isn’t necessarily literal, and it isn’t your character. A trigger isn’t always a “thing” that’s happening right now; often, its something brushing against a wordless memory in the body. So when you’re outside your Window of Tolerance, insight and self-talk are often secondary—not because they’re wrong, but because they’re arriving too early. What has to come first is more primal: a small act from the part of you that can witness what’s happening and call the rest of you back home. This is a return signal—a cue of safety that lets your breath drop and your shoulders unclench.
Sometimes that signal is small. Feet on the floor. A warm mug. Daylight on my face. A deliberate disengagement from the source of harm. Or saying Isamu’s name out loud—bringing myself back toward the place where belonging felt most profound.
Without that cue of safety, the mind can’t do the kind of meaning-making we keep asking it to do. Instead, it defaults to protection. We can’t reliably hold nuance, have the difficult conversation, or solve the financial problem. We over-explain, go sharp, go quiet, or go numb, and then have to climb back out later.
Once back inside your window, repair is possible—because you can stay connected long enough to revisit, revise, and respond differently. And this is why it matters in transition: transition changes the cues your body is trying to interpret—and those cues can move you into too much or too little with surprising force.
A neuroscience primer: your “safety-and-capacity” system
The phrase “nervous system” is everywhere right now—in therapy rooms, on podcasts, in social posts asking for your attention, even in the way we market “support.” In some ways, I appreciate that shift. It’s helped many of us stop moralizing our experiences and start recognizing that overwhelm, reactivity, and shut-down are often states, not personality defects.
But the language has also gotten fuzzy.
“Nervous system” can become shorthand for any difficulty, blurring the lines between stress, grief, conflict, fatigue, and actual threat. Or it becomes a quiet demand to override your state: Calm down. Regulate. Heal. Move on—already.
I’m not here to police terminology. I’m here to make it usable. This primer is a small reclamation: less jargon, more accuracy, and more relief—because you can’t reliably return to a place you can’t name.
I should also name what this passage is not. There are deeper nervous-system frameworks—Polyvagal Theory, and the many therapeutic and somatic approaches it’s informed—along with clinicians and researchers who’ve devoted their lives to this work. This exploration isn’t meant to replace any of that. It’s an orientation tool. A way to make the language usable in ordinary life: What state am I in? What’s available right now? What’s the smallest return signal I can actually receive? Because when you can locate yourself, you stop trying to “think” your way out of a physiological setting—and you start meeting your body with the precision and compassion that makes change possible.
And, in my opinion, the Window of Tolerance is one of the most compassionate models we have for understanding our own state. It doesn’t ask you to be inspiring while you’re flooded. It doesn’t shame you for going quiet. It simply helps you locate what’s true right now—and that changes what you do next.
Because in transition, the stakes aren’t just emotional; they’re practical. You’re asked to have hard conversations, make decisions, keep showing up, and keep living—all while your internal world is unstable. So, a little physiology isn’t “extra.” It’s familiarization. It’s a map—because when you understand what’s going on in there, you stop making it a moral problem.
Your nervous system, in human terms
Think of your nervous system as your body’s communication network—the system that keeps you alive, oriented, and responsive. It’s constantly doing two jobs:
Taking in information (from sensations and cues)
Sending instructions (settings and responses)
You don’t need a diagram for this. You just need the basic layout:
Central nervous system (brain + spinal cord): the command center
Peripheral nervous system: the wiring that carries signals between that command center and the rest of you—muscles, organs, skin, senses
The peripheral nervous system has two primary branches:
Somatic: what you do on purpose—movement, voluntary action, and lots of sensory input
Autonomic: what you don’t consciously manage—breath rhythms, heart rate, digestion, temperature, alertness—your behind-the-scenes settings
The autonomic nervous system: the internal thermostat for safety and energy
Your autonomic nervous system is constantly adjusting based on one core question:
How safe is it to be here, right now?
Most people learn “sympathetic” and “parasympathetic” as opposites. I find it more helpful to think of them as protective modes—ways your system manages energy and safety.
Mobilization (sympathetic): energy rises so you can act—move fast, scan, solve, protect
Restoration (parasympathetic): energy settles so you can digest, repair, connect, sleep, and return to maintenance
Immobilization: the system reduces access when intensity feels unmanageable—numbness, fog, collapse, disconnection
And here’s the subtlety that matters in grief and transition: freeze can look like stillness while alarm continues to run underneath. Not calm. Not rest. More like brakes on, engine revving.
You’re not “lazy.” You’re not “dramatic.” You’re protecting.
So if you’ve ever wondered, Why can’t I just move on? Why can’t I get it together?—this may be the missing context. Your system may not be “off.” It may be protecting you the only way it knows how: by going still, or by going fast, or by going numb.
And this is where I want to gently interrupt a common internal dialogue: you cannot shame your way back into capacity. Capacity returns with cues, not criticism. Pressure might get you through a moment, but it often costs you later—in remorse, in exhaustion, in repair work you didn’t mean to create.
The brain’s safety circuitry: why state changes what you can access
Your brain is running multiple streams at once, all day long:
Alarm: Is something off? Is there danger?
Context: What is this like? What does it resemble? What does it mean?
Steering: What matters most right now? What’s mine to do? What can wait?
When you’re regulated, these systems collaborate. An alarm can whisper, context can broaden the view, and steering can do its job.
Under strain, collaboration gets tighter. Protection takes priority. Alarm gets louder. Steering less available. Nuance becomes harder to access—not because you’re weak, but because your system is doing what it was built to do… protect you until it gets the signal that it’s safe to come back online.
An ending and the shift outside my Window of Tolerance
In this most recent season, that shift played out in a way that left me profoundly disoriented. I made the difficult decision to step away from something significant—the way we step away from a relationship, a role, a chapter. What I asked for was an untangle—something paced, respectful, workable. What unfolded felt more like a sever: fast, abrupt, and without conversation.
Before I had words, my body voted. My chest tightened. My jaw set. Heat rose behind my eyes. My mind started sprinting into strategy—explaining, drafting, rehearsing, trying to restore safety through clarity, connection, and control. That was me outside my window, in fight or flight: mobilized, certain that if I could just make myself accurately understood, we could find common ground. Or at least I could steady that ground for myself.
When it became clear that accuracy wouldn’t change the behaviors or the outcome, I felt the second shift: a drop. It wasn’t just frustration—it was mobilization with no outlet. My system revved to do what it’s designed to do: respond, explain, resolve, restore safety through contact. But when it became clear that contact wasn’t available—no repair, no mutuality, no shift—my body made the call. It dropped me out of high gear. Energy drained. Attention narrowed. Brakes on, alarm still running. Freeze isn’t peace. It’s protection when the system can’t find a workable path forward.
What helped—and what’s still helping—wasn’t a pep talk or a faster “move on.” It was return work—the kind you can’t bypass. Small, steady signals that tell the body, we’re not trapped. These count too. And in moments like this, it’s the only work that actually works. “Moving on” can come later. For now, the task is more simple: return—locate myself—return again. A walk. A longer exhale. A warm mug. A long hug. One honest message to someone safe. And then again the next day.
In a season like this, returning isn’t one clean comeback. It’s circles: locate yourself, drift, locate yourself again—without treating your nervous system like it’s failing for needing care. Seasons like this look like many things… A divorce. A death. A diagnosis. A caregiving season. A job ending that doesn’t end cleanly. A long stretch of uncertainty that keeps moving the goalposts.
““With mindful awareness, we can actually change the structure and function of our brains, increasing our ability to stay within our window of tolerance even in the face of stress.””
The Window of Tolerance (mapping the three zones)
Maps are for navigation, not judgment.
The Window of Tolerance is your personal bandwidth—the range where your system can do three things at once: take in what’s happening, feel what you feel, and stay in contact with choice. Inside that range, your thinking brain and your survival brain can share the room. Outside it, your system isn’t trying to be wise. It’s trying to be safe.
Inside the window (“just enough”)
Inside your window, you might still be sad, stressed, or uncertain. Nothing gets magically erased.
What’s different is access: you can stay present, hold perspective, and remain in contact with choice.
This is where steering stays online—voice, pacing, meaning-making, and repair.
Above the window (“too much”) — hyperarousal
When arousal rises, the system shifts into mobilization: fight or flight.
You might feel urgency, agitation, racing thoughts, irritability, panic—your attention narrowing to what feels time-sensitive.
Human translation: This is the state where you draft the email three different ways, rehearse the conversation in your head, and still can’t settle after you hit send.
Below the window (“too little”) — hypoarousal
When arousal drops, the system shifts into conservation: shutdown, freeze, withdraw.
You might feel fog, flatness, heaviness, disconnection—like you’re watching your life from a slight distance.
Human translation: You can still do the tasks, but it’s as if you’re doing them from a few rooms away.
One more thing: As we’ve already named: your window isn’t fixed. It can narrow and widen—sometimes seasonally, sometimes day to day.
Your body as barometer (reading range & navigating return)
By this point, the question is probably: How do I know which side of the window I’m on—without turning it into another thing to “get right”?
Let’s return to where we started this Passage: How is your body doing?
Remember, this is not what your mind is arguing. Our thoughts can litigate. Physiology is usually more direct. In real time, your system tends to announce itself in a handful of those repeatable cues—speeding up, slowing down, or staying steady enough to steer.
If you misread your state, you’re not doing anything wrong, but you may keep reaching for tools you can’t reliably access or use with any dexterity. You’ll try to have a calm conversation from a body that’s braced. You’ll attempt to make the wise decision from a system that’s in protection. It’s a mismatched ask that can be gently rerouted.
So instead of asking, What should I do? Start with: What’s available right now?
Your response will make more sense when you include what you’re carrying:
what you’ve lived through
what support you had (or didn’t)
what your system learned to expect
what this season is already asking of you (sleep, illness, grief, stress, uncertainty)
whether you have co-regulation—or you’re doing it alone
The hopeful part is that these patterns are responsive. Your window can narrow—and it can widen. And learning your own map means you can stop treating your responses like mysteries—or evidence you’re failing—and start treating them like information.
Then the next question becomes practical: What’s tightening my range—and what helps me come back?
A few common range-tighteners:
Uncertainty: ambiguity can register as threat because the system can’t predict what comes next.
Separation cues: loss, rupture, misunderstanding, being misread—belonging signals that hit the body.
Sleep disruption: less sleep means less buffer, thinner steering.
Physiological strain: pain, inflammation, blood sugar swings—baseline alarm stays higher.
Always-on input: alerts, news, constant responsiveness—micro-mobilizations that stack.
Isolation: fewer moments of safe contact make the return path feel steeper.
The practical point: when range tightens, insight doesn’t lead. Safety cues do. First, the system needs to settle enough to come back online. Then meaning-making can do its work.
Return signals (10% shifts): how to come back toward range
In Passage 4, we discussed practical 10% shifts as a way to reduce load without collapsing into all-or-nothing thinking. Here, we’ll use the same idea in a more precise way: 10% shifts as return signals—small, body-believable cues that help your nervous system move back toward range.
A return signal is an invitation back to yourself—small enough that your body believes it. When you’re outside your range, your system isn’t asking for a breakthrough, it’s asking for a safe way home. A 10% shift is that doorway: a cue of warmth, rhythm, contact, breath—something that says, This moment is not a trap.
““Emotions are like waves; we can’t stop them from coming, but we can learn to surf. The window of tolerance is the surfboard that helps us ride the waves rather than being swept away.””
These aren’t hacks. They’re direction: small enough to be doable, strong enough to change your state. And when you’re outside your window, your job isn’t to force closure—it’s to offer your system a return signal, just enough to re-enter workable range.
Let’s take a look at how subtle—and how powerful—these moves can be.
If you’re in “too much” (hyperarousal): downshift 10%
When you’re mobilized, your system is doing what it was designed to do: preparing for action. It’s prioritizing speed, certainty, and protection. The move here isn’t to argue with that state—or demand calm from a body that’s braced. The move is to send a small signal to call you back home.
Try one:
Longer exhales (3–5 rounds): Not “deep breathing.” Just a slower out-breath to tell the body, we’re not sprinting right now.
Warmth: A mug, shower, heating pad, blanket, hug, embracing your pet: Warmth is one of the simplest “safe body” cues.
Orienting: Let your eyes move slowly around the room; name a few true things you can see: Present-time signals reduce alarm.
Containment: One task, one tab, one conversation: Fewer demands means less internal urgency.
Rhythm: A slow walk, rocking, steady steps—something repetitive and predictable.
The aim isn’t to force calm. It’s to create just enough settling to get your steering back.
If you’re in “too little” (hypoarousal): upshift 10%
When you’re in shutdown, your system isn’t being stubborn. It’s conserving. It’s pulling you away from intensity because intensity feels unmanageable. The move here isn’t to push harder—or demand motivation from a body that’s gone quiet. The move is a gentle re-entry: a small signal of contact, aliveness, and “we’re here.”
Try one:
Light + movement: Two minutes outside, or stand at a window: Light is a simple cue that helps your system reorient to time.
Temperature contrast: Cool water on wrists/face; a cold cloth: A clear sensory signal can cut through fog.
Sound with pulse: Music with a beat; humming: Rhythm can recruit aliveness without requiring words.
Texture/sensation: Something crunchy, scented, tactile: Sensation is a bridge back to the present.
Micro-contact: One text, one voice note, one small point of connection.
The goal isn’t to “get productive.” It’s to restore a little access—enough to feel time again, feel choice again, and take the next doable step.
If you’re in “just enough” (within-window): protect your range
This is often the part we skip—because when you’re inside your window, it’s easy to treat your bandwidth like it’s disposable. You cash it out on urgency, caretaking, over-performing, over-explaining. You use your “just enough” to prove you’re fine.
But within-window capacity is a resource, and protecting it is part of the work.
Try one:
Take breaks before you “need” them: Don’t wait for the swerve.
Keep your inputs clean: Fewer tabs, fewer alerts, fewer conversations that spike you.
Choose one meaningful next step instead of ten urgent ones: Urgency multiplies load; clarity reduces it.
Let support count: Regulation is not always solo work. A check-in, a co-walk, a steady voice can hold your range in place.
End things cleanly: Close the loop on a task, a text thread, a decision. Small completions calm the system.
The goal here isn’t optimization. It’s stewardship—staying close enough to yourself that you don’t burn the very capacity you’ll need later.
Expanding your Window of Tolerance over time
Return signals help you get back within range in the moment. But over time, something even more hopeful can happen: your system can develop more room. Not through intensity, but through repetition.
A wider window doesn’t mean you never get activated. It means you have more space before you tip into too much or too little—and a more reliable path back when you do.
Here’s what actually widens the window in real life, over time, especially when we know states of transition may be part of our norm:
Consistency over heroics: Small returns done often teach the system, “we can come back.”
Right-sized challenge: Growth happens when what you take on matches what you can metabolize—especially when your life is already changing.
Clean endings: Nervous systems expand when they trust things have a beginning, a middle, and a finish, whether that’s conversations, tasks, days, projects, or relationships.
Co-regulation counts: A steady relationship, a safe room, a familiar voice. Support isn’t extra—it’s a nervous-system intervention.
The Non-Negotiables are non-negotiable: Maintain your sleep, food rhythms, movement, and pain or inflammation support.
And a key distinction: sometimes you’re not widening the whole window—you’re just raising the ceiling for that day. That still counts. In transition, we don’t need a total transformation overnight. We need more access, more often.
Self-advocacy swipe copy (protecting your range)
Most of us were trained to override our state—especially when other people are waiting. But override has a cost. Pressure can get you through a moment, and then hand you the bill later: guilt, shame, remorse, exhaustion, repair work you didn’t mean to create.
You might try these sentences when you need to protect what’s workable—without turning it into a debate:
“I’m not at my best capacity today. Can we simplify this?”
“I can do this, but I need a slower pace right now.”
“I’m going to pause and come back with a clearer yes.”
“I want to stay connected. I just need less intensity.”
“I need a clean ending before I move to the next thing.”
These are agreements with your nervous system—the kind that make integrity possible. To yourself, you might also say: I’m not available for urgency that isn’t mine—recognizing that you’re at capacity, and that someone else’s alarm doesn’t get to set your pace.
These work best when there is room for progress, dialogue, and restoration. But sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes you don’t get the conversation you’d choose. Sometimes the ending arrives without dialogue, without repair, without a chance to name what’s true. In those moments, the system can read separation without repair as danger—and it may translate that danger into a story like abandonment, even when that’s not the whole truth. Part of return work is naming the cue without turning it into your identity.
In those moments, self-advocacy may look less like speaking—and more like staying anchored to your own knowing, even when a clean ending isn’t available.
A mirror (when the ending isn’t clean)
When the ending isn’t in your hands—when the momentum and the narrative are being set elsewhere, and there’s no clean place for the truth to land—self-advocacy has to change shape. So let’s look at two very public mirrors of that dynamic: endings that kept moving while the person most impacted was still witness.
This brings that earlier Shelley thread back into focus. Part of the ache in these stories is that the creator isn’t trying to abandon what they made. If anything, they stay longer than they should—out of safeguarding, out of responsibility, out of a kind of maternal protectiveness that isn’t sentimental so much as cellular: I made this. I’m responsible for what happens to it. And when you’re tethered to what you built but no longer able to shape it, the nervous system can start to do what nervous systems do: brace, mobilize, then drop—because there’s nowhere for care to land.
Myoko Schinner is a chef and entrepreneur who helped popularize plant-based butter and cheese. She founded the company that carried her name. And then, like so many founders, she lived the whiplash of building something… and no longer being the one steering it. What she wanted wasn’t fame or a symbolic role—she wanted a real voice: the ability to protect the brand’s direction and the quality of what she’d produced. When the brand later changed hands, she drew a clear line publicly: she wouldn’t serve as a “brand ambassador” for what she built without a real say, and she reiterated that new ownership couldn’t imply she was associated with the trademarked name.
Even if you don’t know the details of Myoko’s story, you can feel the nervous-system moment: all that identity, all that labor—and nowhere for the conversation to land. When there’s no remedy, no receiving, no relational place for what’s true, the body often reads it as separation without refuge. It reaches for protection. And when Myoko spoke up, it landed with people—not because everyone knew every fact, but because the shape is familiar: watching what you created keep moving while your voice is treated as peripheral at best.
Bobbi Brown’s story may be more familiar. She’s the makeup artist who built an entire beauty philosophy around looking like yourself: clean skin, real faces, less performance. She founded Bobbi Brown Cosmetics in the early 90s and sold it to Estée Lauder—then stayed for years inside the machine she’d partnered with to grow this vision. But over time, as leadership shifted, the work got more process-heavy, more layered, more consultant-driven—less conversation, less creative oxygen to fuel her passion. As she describes it, she was offered a new role to be the face of the brand while stepping away from the day-to-day. She read that for what it was: removal from the place where her voice and aspiration actually mattered.
And that’s the nervous-system moment I’m naming here: when the ending isn’t clean—when your care and affiliation is still present but your say is not—self-advocacy stops looking like persuasion and starts looking like boundary. The kind that guards your range long enough to find solid ground again.
There’s an irony here that I can’t ignore: the word frankensteined has come to mean something altered beyond its recognizable form. And sometimes that’s exactly what it feels like to watch a creation keep walking around with your name attached—changed, redirected, repurposed—while you’re still close enough to observe, but far enough away to be powerless.
““I am no longer associated with the company that holds my name.””
I don’t share these as business case studies. I bring them up because they’re public versions of something many of us live privately: sometimes you don’t get the conversation, the acknowledgement, or the dignity of being accurately met. Something ends—or changes shape—while you’re still standing there, still accountable, still watching. And that can be a real blow to the nervous system—enough to tip you outside your Window of Tolerance. In those moments, self-advocacy starts looking like staying anchored to what you know: refusing manufactured urgency, setting clean boundaries, and leaning on the smallest return signals that keep you connected to yourself until your system can settle again.
A reliable return is a form of wisdom
In transition, the world can change faster than the body can integrate. That isn’t a flaw. It’s your system trying to keep you safe.
So if you find yourself outside your window, recognize that you’re human. Something in you is protecting something else in you. The work isn’t to force calm. The work is to find your way back to what’s workable—back to enough range to hear yourself, to stay connected, to locate the inner yes your body trusts.
Because a nervous system that can return can adapt. And in the in-between, that return to your Window of Tolerance is its own kind of ‘onward.’
References:
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Nicholson, W. C., Sapp, M., Karas, E. M., Duva, I. M., & Grabbe, L. (2025). The Body Can Balance the Score: Using a Somatic Self-Care Intervention to Support Well-Being and Promote Healing. Healthcare (Basel), 13(11), 1258. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare13111258
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