energy haemorrhages, adaptation and the faux window of tolerance

One way to make your life easier is to stop hemorrhaging energy.

Most people think that this means auditing where your time and energy goes and making changes, which while useful is not what I unpack here.

This post is about the way that inefficiency hijacks your capacity for adaptation in the name of survival without you realising it. Survival behaviour is great in the short term, but over time creates its own problems. The problem with “survival” is that is not flourishing. 

The way this happens is via your capacity to adapt to your circumstances. Kathy Kain oberserved that most people live their life in what she called the “Faux Window of Tolerance” and mistake it for their Window of Tolerance.

An article in Psychology Today (linked below) gave a short definition of the window of tolerance:

“The Window of Tolerance is a term coined by Daniel J. Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, to describe the optimal emotional “zone” we can exist in, to best function and thrive in everyday life.

On either side of the “optimal zone” are two other zones: the hyper-arousal zone [too much activation] and the hypo-arousal zone [too little activation]. 

The Window of Tolerance—the optimal zone—is characterized by a sense of groundedness, flexibility, openness, curiosity, presence, an ability to be emotionally regulated, and a capacity to tolerate life’s stressors.”

The faux window differs from the window of tolerance in one significant way: the window of tolerance is your ideal level of arousal, and the faux window is what you think is your ideal level of activation.

The reason for the existence of these two windows is your fascinating capacity to adapt to your circumstances. When, at any stage in your life between living in the womb and today, you lived with sustained activation of your nervous system, rather than being made to be constantly aware of it, your bodymind adapted to it. It became normal. Moreover, your bodymind came to believe that this level of activation was necessary for survival.

When your body lives with stress long enough, you adapt to it so much that it becomes your normal way of living and you no longer notice. The effect of this is that what most people think is their ideal zone for living life requires too much activation.

There are so many ways this expresses itself that make your life harder that I can’t list them all, but some of the greatest hits are: inability to really relax, moodiness, intolerance, constantly moving, not feeling satisfied with life and not knowing how to increase satisfaction, trouble sleeping, stomach and digestion problems, sexual disfunction, addictions, relationship conflict, restless leg syndrome, heart disease, emotional eating, and the list goes on…

Literally every client I’ve worked with has a faux window of tolerance and mistake it for their actual window.