Newsletter 2025-2-23
Topics Covered:
How the nervous system impacts decision making
Intro to the “Window of Tolerance”
The psychology of denial
3 steps to expanding your Window of Tolerance
February 23, 2025
Decision Making & Your Nervous System
You understand from experience that really high stress clouds decision making.
What you might not understand is why this happens and what to do about it.
Your autonomic nervous system (ANS) is in charge of the stuff your body doesn't do consciously: heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, digestion.
And every tweak it makes beneath the surface of your awareness is sending signals to your brain to perceive, think, and behave accordingly.
This is why you can't think straight when you're stressed. The brain has more important things to worry about -- like survival -- at least that's what it's bring told by your ANS.
And if we want to affect our stress response, we first need to become aware of it.
The Window of Tolerance
Fellow physiology nerds might feel natural thinking in terms of the ANS, but here's an even simpler model for awareness of your state.
It's called the Window of Tolerance, and it was coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of Psychiatry at UCLA.
Simple, right?
Your Window of Tolerance (WOT) is where you want to be most of the time. Balanced, adaptable, and even-keeled.
Above your WOT? You're stressed or anxious. Below your WOT? You're shutting down.
For the purposes of this conversation, we're going to focus on high stress, so when I say "outside your WOT," know that I'm referring to hyper-arousal.
Decision Making Outside Your WOT
During the pandemic, I was running the middle school program at the American School of Tangier.
The Head of School and I were a powerhouse administrative team; we had no choice but to respond to a constantly changing situation.
Shutting down school. Going online. Re-opening school. Keeping students in pods. Monitoring community outbreaks. Shutting down school again.
Let's never do that again.
Anyway, at one point we'd updated our protocol to include more people in determining our response to potential outbreaks.
But my nervous system was still living in "urgent mode." In other words, I had a pretty small Window of Tolerance.
So when we got news that one of our 8th graders had a confirmed case of C-19, I was shot into hyper-arousal, and I immediately made the decision to send the entire middle school home to learn online for two weeks.
Was this the best decision? Hard to know.
But should I have made it on my own, so quickly? No.
And this leads me to my first point about decision making: Being outside your Window of Tolerance leads to hasty decisions.
But that's not all! Equally common is hyper-arousal leading to no decision at all!
Think of a time you were so overwhelmed that you just froze.
I'm not talking about hypo-arousal, where your nervous system has no energy to engage.
I'm talking about hyper-arousal that's so intense, it short-circuits your ability to think.
This is the second thing can happen when you try to make decisions outside of your WOT.
A Note About Denial
Denial is a foundational coping mechanism for humans to deal with overwhelm.
Because if something doesn't exist, you don't have to deal with it.
So if you're seriously struggling with deciding what to do, your psyche will may insist, "This isn't happening. Everything is fine. This isn't happening."
And in an attempt to rid yourself of the annoying reality in front of you, you'll either make a quick decision so you don't have to think about it anymore -- or you'll freeze altogether.
The more overwhelming a situation feels, the more likely you are to go into this state of denial.
The inverse of that is even more important...
The less overwhelming a situation feels, the less likely you are to freeze or make hasty decisions.
Notice the emphasis on the word "feels." It's not about the situation itself; there are humans who have successfully dealt with more stressful situations that you or I could ever dream of.
It's about how well your nervous system can handle it. And that's trainable.
You just need to work on making things feel less overwhelming.
In other words, your aim is to expand your Window of Tolerance.
Read on to learn how.
Using Breathing to Train Your Window of Tolerance
Air hunger is a term used to describe that feeling of suffocation you get when you hold your breath, or when you're exercising really hard.
Air hunger is a primal response that lives deep in the fear centers of the brain stem. It exists to keep us alive.
If you can train yourself to handle such a fundamental stressor, you are also training yourself to handle other stressors.
The same way lifting weights makes lots of other things feel easier, breath hold training essentially does this for your nervous system.
Breath training, when done appropriately, is stress tolerance training for your entire life.
How to Apply This
Do not just start trying to hold your breath as long as you can.
In fact, strong air hunger is not safe for people with certain conditions, including pregnancy, epilepsy, blood pressure conditions, or cardiovascular conditions.
And medical contraindications aside, anything that involves exposure to stressors need to be done safely, methodically, and with keen attention to the individual.
So while there's no blanket protocol for breath holding that I can responsibly share, I won't leave you without a roadmap.
3 Steps to Expanding Your Window of Tolerance
Step 1: State awareness
Step 2: Down-regulation
Step 3: Stress Tolerance
State Awareness = Knowing you're outside your WOT
Choose a situation you know stresses you out (e.g. Getting the kids ready for school; rush hour traffic).
Next time you're in that situation, direct your attention to how stress makes itself known in your body (e.g. tight neck, elevated shoulders, rapid breathing, clenched jaw, locked out knees).
Avoid resisting the sensations. Notice them and focus on them. Leave behind any stories, labels or judgements you might otherwise attach to them.
As you focus purely on sensation, notice if the body begins to relax and/or the sensations start to soften. Allow this to happen naturally.
Down-Regulation = Coming back to your WOT
If your body naturally started to relax from the above-mentioned awareness process, you've already started to down-regulate. If not, no problem.
Either way, tt this point, take 5-10 NGSE breaths. Make sure your inhale is gently expansive, doing your best to feel healthy breathing mechanics. Prolong each each exhale without forcing extra air out, allowing it to effortlessly "flow" out of you.
Bring your awareness back to your state, and take note of any differences after the slow breathing.
Stress Tolerance = Expanding your WOT
Last week, I posted and made a video about how detrimental it can be to jump into resilience training before first spending time regulating.
Stress tolerance via breath holding is a form of resilience training and should not be practiced until you have developed the awareness to understand your own state and the ability to down-regulate your state as needed.
If you have reached that place, then it can be appropriate to begin progressive exposure to air hunger, under the direction of a trained professional.
In my opinion, working with a qualified Breath Science Practitioner is the most reliable way to get the guidance you need to (a) monitor your readiness for stress tolerance training, and (b) introduce stress tolerance training to your life.
If you'd like to learn more about 1:1 stress tolerance coaching with me, you can apply here.
Guidance Without 1:1 Coaching
In The North Star Body online community, members get access to a monthly group call with me.
Sometimes it's a guided practice, and others it's a discussion about a specific topic. Sometimes it's a Q&A session.
No matter what form it takes, this is the best way to take your understanding to the next level -- and really use this stuff to change your life.
Membership also includes:
✔️Access to foundational courses in athletic stability, stress management, and violence prevention
✔️Access to discussion threads to ask questions and get support
✔️Discounts on all premium course offerings & materials (not available outside this community)
✔️Option to join targeted group coaching cohort for only $49/month (also not available outside the community)
I could easily charge a subscription fee to join this platform. In fact, beginning March 1, I will be.
But you can still become a member for $0/month if you join now. No strings attached.
Have a wonderful day,
Griffin
