What’s your Window of Tolerance?
Dionne recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Jessica Maguire, an expert on the Vagus Nerve. The Vagus Nerve?! The Vagus Nerve is one of the largest nerves in our body, attaching from base of the brainstem, down the neck, chest, heart and abdomen, attaching to almost every organ all the way down to the colon.
It is important for the following reasons:
It is the epicentre of the mind body connection and key communicator between the gut and the brain.
It controls the automatic nervous system (e.g. how we respond to stress and how quickly we recover form it)
When the stress response is activated (cue shortened breath, increased heart rate, digestive system getting out of whack and our immune system going haywire), it triggers all of our systems.
So, when it comes to having a healthy nervous system (AKA regulating stress), it is a pretty important nerve.
An important thing to remember about a healthy nervous system, is that it is not always calm. It has the ability to be flexible and resilient and can bounce back from stress easily. Have a look at the model below and think of the green box as a healthy nervous system. Imagine this is you; you wake up in the morning, get ready for work, drive along the freeway (traffic jam, spike!), check emails (an email from your boss, spike!) and throughout the day you experience moderate levels of stress. You may jump into heightened states of emotion such as anxiety or anger, but you recover from them quickly and your Vagus Nerve helps you stay in your Window of Tolerance.
Now imagine that you’ve had a stressful day every day for the last month. You’re constantly angry, anxious, stressed and the slightest thing can send you into a panic. Your nervous system has spent so much time in hyperarousal (AKA Fight or Flight) that it has forgotten how to self-regulate and your window of tolerance gets smaller and smaller.
Thousands of years ago, our body used this sympathetic response when we were getting chased by a tiger or in life-or-death situations. Now it is so used to spending time in this state that it is triggered by small things such as getting stuck in traffic on the Mitchell Freeway or when you miss your bus!
There is good news though, you can exercise your Vagus Nerve like a muscle and grow your Window of Tolerance back to a healthy state. There are many ways to do this, but a simple technique that you can always bring out is the 1:1 Breathing Technique, which you find here.
For more information on the fantastic work that Jessica is doing, please see the link to her website here. She is also running a six-week online course starting this week, the next one coming up very soon.