You're Not Broken — You're Just Out of Your Window of Tolerance
It's 5 PM on a Tuesday and you've just snapped at your partner—or your kids—over something small. Or maybe you're staring at your to-do list and you can't make yourself move. Your body feels heavy, your mind is foggy, and you can't remember the last time you felt like yourself.
You're not broken. You're not lazy. You're not "too much" or "not enough."
You're just out of your window.
What Is the Window of Tolerance?
One concept I often return to in my work with clients is the Window of Tolerance—a framework developed by Dr. Dan Siegel to describe the zone where your nervous system can respond to life without getting completely overwhelmed or shutting down entirely.
This is where you function most effectively. Where you can feel your emotions without being flooded by them. Where you can work hard without burning out. Where you have the capacity to respond rather than react.
Inside your window, you're in a state of coherence—that sweet spot where your mind, heart, and body are actually on the same team, rather than fighting each other. This is where you can consciously create your life, rather than just survive it.
But when you move outside that window—into what we call dysregulation—things start to feel uncomfortable. And if you keep moving further out, you land in one of two extreme states.
Image credit: The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) https://www.nicabm.com/trauma-how-to-help-your-clients-understand-their-window-of-tolerance/
What Affects the Size of Your Window?
Not everyone's window is the same size. Some of us were born with wider windows—our genetics and early brain development gave us a bit more capacity to handle stress. Others of us started with narrower windows, or our windows got smaller over time.
Adverse experiences—especially in childhood—can narrow the window. Trauma, grief, chronic stress, grief, growing up in environments where you had to be hypervigilant or shut down to survive—all of this over-sensitizes your nervous system to stress.
For perfectionists and high achievers, the window often narrows because you learned early that being "on" all the time = being safe. For people-pleasers, the window shrinks because saying no or setting boundaries felt dangerous—so you learned to silence yourself, accommodate, and stay small to stay safe.
But here's the good news: your window can be expanded. With the right support, practices, and awareness, you can build resilience—the capacity to move through life's challenges without getting knocked off balance as easily.
Inside vs. Outside the Window
Inside the Window
When you're inside your window, you're grounded. You can feel stress without being consumed by it. You can rest without disappearing. You have access to your emotions, your thoughts, and your ability to connect.
This is the space where you can respond—not react.
Dysregulation: Starting to Drift
Before you land in full hyperarousal or hypoarousal, you move through dysregulation—the space at the edges of your window where things start to feel off.
In dysregulation, you might notice:
Feeling agitated, revved up, or irritable (moving toward hyperarousal)
Feeling spacey, disconnected, or starting to shut down (moving toward hypoarousal)
Not comfortable, but not fully out of control yet
This is the zone where catching it early matters. If you can notice when you're moving into dysregulation, you have a better chance of guiding yourself back into your window before you go all the way out.
🔥 Hyperarousal: Fight or Flight
This is when you feel extremely anxious, angry, or out of control. Your heart races, your thoughts loop, and you feel like you must do more to stay safe. You might snap at people, feel wired but exhausted, or experience a sense of urgent overwhelm.
For high achievers and perfectionists, hyperarousal often looks like:
Racing thoughts that won't turn off
Snapping at your partner or kids over small things
Feeling like you're constantly behind, no matter how much you do
Wired and tired—can't sleep but can't function either
Perfectionism is often just a nervous system trying to outrun a perceived threat.
Think of it like being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. Your body is in full fight-or-flight mode—ready to run, ready to fight. Except in modern life, the saber-toothed tiger might be a deadline at work, a conflict with your partner, or the pressure to be "on" all the time.
🧊 Hypoarousal: Freeze and Fawn
This is the realm of shutdown—where you feel numb, "checked out," lethargic, or stuck. You might zone out, struggle to say "no," or find yourself fawning and accommodating just to keep the peace. Time can feel like it's slipping away. You're on autopilot, frozen in a fog, simply trying to survive by blending in or disappearing.
For people-pleasers, hypoarousal often looks like:
Scrolling Instagram for hours and not remembering what you saw
Saying "yes" when you mean "no"
Feeling numb or flat—like nothing really matters
Heavy, stuck, unable to move or make decisions
Freeze and fawn are survival strategies. Freeze is when your body shuts down and you can't move. Fawn is when you people-please, accommodate, and try to keep the peace to avoid conflict or harm. Both are ways your nervous system tries to protect you when fighting or fleeing doesn't feel safe.
From an evolutionary perspective, some animals freeze when they're threatened (like those cute little goats that faint). Your body is doing the same thing—shutting down to protect you.
It's Normal to Move Out of Your Window
Here's what's really important to understand:
It's completely normal to move out of your window—fully out, into hyperarousal or hypoarousal.
This is not failure. This is being human. Your nervous system is designed to respond to threat. The problem is, modern life creates chronic low-level stress—emails, expectations, boundary violations, relentless pressure to perform—that keeps your system activated or shut down.
Sometimes you'll catch the dysregulation early. Sometimes you won't. Both are okay.
The goal isn't perfection. The goal is noticing.
Widening Your Window
The Window of Tolerance isn't just for trauma work—it's a foundational skill I teach pretty much every client I work with. Whether you're navigating perfectionism, people-pleasing, ADHD, or preparing for deeper therapeutic work, learning to recognize when you've moved out of your window is essential.
A lot of us have lost that mind-body connection. We've spent so long pushing through, performing, or numbing out that we don't even know what our body is trying to tell us anymore. This practice helps you rebuild it.
Healing isn't about "fixing" your anxiety or "stopping" your people-pleasing. It's about two things:
1. Widening your window
So you can handle more of life's turbulence without losing yourself.
Stress and trauma shrink your window. When your nervous system has been under chronic stress, it becomes harder to stay calm and focused. You get thrown off balance more easily.
But practices like therapy, somatic work, nervous system regulation, and connecting with safe people can help expand your window. You build resilience—the capacity to move through challenges without collapsing or spiraling.
2. Recognizing when you're moving into dysregulation
Catching the subtle shift before you go all the way into hyperarousal or hypoarousal.
When we cultivate awareness, we start to notice:
The perfectionist "over-drive" before it becomes a crash
The "people-pleasing fog" or the "shutdown freeze" before we lose our voice
The early signs that our system is moving out of the window
By coming back into your window, you move from the exhaustion of performing to the empowerment of being. You reclaim coherence—a state where your mind, heart, and body are aligned. You trust that while life will shift and change, you have the internal strength to stay grounded.
The Practice: Head, Heart, Feet
So for now, here's the practice: just notice.
Not to fix, not to optimize—just to name.
I often invite clients to check in with three places: their head, their heart, and their feet.
🧠 Head: What are you thinking? Is your mind racing, looping, planning, catastrophizing? Or is it foggy, blank, hard to access?
❤️ Heart: What are you feeling? Can you name the emotion, or does it feel tangled? Is there tightness, heaviness, openness?
👣 Feet: What sensations do you notice in your body? Is there tension, numbness, buzzing, weight? Can you feel the ground beneath you?
There's no wrong answer here. Just data. Just your body telling you what it needs.
This simple check-in—head, heart, feet—is a way to tune into your own inner compass. And when you notice you've drifted, you have the chance to adjust. Not perfectly. Not immediately. But intentionally.
You Will Move Out of Your Window (And That's Not a Problem)
Let me be clear: you will leave your window. You will find yourself in hyperarousal—wired, snapping, overwhelmed. You will find yourself in hypoarousal—numb, shut down, unable to speak up.
This is not failure. This is being human.
The work isn't about staying in your window 24/7. The work is about:
Recognizing when you've moved out
Not judging yourself for it
Having tools to gently guide yourself back
And yes, sometimes—with practice—you'll start to notice the early signs of dysregulation and can adjust before you go all the way out. But even that's not the goal.
Noticing is the goal. Everything else follows from there.
What's Next
Over the next two posts, we'll dive deeper into what hyperarousal and hypoarousal actually feel like—and explore playful, accessible tools for regulating your nervous system when you're out of your window.
Part 2: When Everything Feels Like Too Much (Hyperarousal)
Part 3: When Nothing Feels Like Anything (Hypoarousal)
For now, just practice noticing. Head, heart, feet. Where are you right now?
If you're feeling called to explore nervous system regulation and widening your window further, I have openings for both in-person therapy in Edmonton and virtual sessions across Alberta. [Learn more about working with me here].
References
Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.
For more on Dr. Siegel's work, visit The Mindsight Institute.