 Hello and welcome back. Today I'm talking through a really simple tool to help you understand and carry out emotional regulation. It's called the window of tolerance and you can use it with anyone of any age. You might want to adapt the language a bit if you're using it with tinies but generally I find that they can understand it pretty well. Okay so the window of tolerance works on the basis that every day each and every one of us are kind of our mood, our feeling and how things are going is kind of always going up and down and up and down and up and down. That can be due to internal factors so things that are happening with us sort of anxieties, hormones, different stuff going on inside. It could be stuff that's going on externally so a conversation you have with someone, feedback you get about something, traffic jam, all sorts of different things. So there are different things that can impact on how we're thinking and how we're feeling and those can be both positive and negative. Now what our aim is each day is where possible and it's not always possible. We want to try and stay within our window of tolerance so we're going up and down and up and down but we're trying to stay in the optimal zone so we're trying not to shoot up through the top which is what we call hyperarousal and that's when we tend to go into a very kind of anxious mood so that's our kind of fight or flight type response and we can get the extremes of that or kind of more minor but so that's hyperarousal and we also want not to shoot down through the bottom which is when we go into hypoarousal and that is like our kind of freeze response and that's our more sort of depressive low mood lacking motivation type response. Now in order to try and stay as so far as possible within our window of tolerance each day there's kind of two key things we can do. One is to begin to get a better understanding of what impacts on where we are within our window of tolerance so that might mean then we're going to try and avoid things, we're going to try and manage them differently that we might for example if something makes us highly anxious that we build in a little bit of a breathing space for ourselves after that for example and the other thing we can do is to think about how to respond quickly if we feel ourselves either tipping up out into hyperarousal or out the bottom into hypoarousal so in order to respond in that way then we're going to want to think that what works for me or if you're working with someone else obviously what works for them in order to calm so if we're shooting up through the top what can I do right now in this situation that will help me to calm and try and stop me shooting up through the top there or if we're worried that we're going to shoot down through the bottom and go into hypoarousal that depressed lacking motivation then we're going to think what might help to activate. Now this is really personal so this isn't really one where I can just tell you the answers you have to brainstorm it out for yourself you need to try it out journal it see what works and what doesn't but some kinds of things that might work are so for me if I'm going into hyperarousal which is a place I tend to go often that can be because I'm getting highly anxious and that might be because I find social interaction really tough so I might do things like take a break from social interaction I might do something mindfully I might eat mindfully drink mindfully go for a mindful walk and I might do some breathing exercises I find things like the box breathing to be really helpful I might colour I might stroke my dog there's lots and lots of different things I might do to try and help me to calm if I'm feeling anxious on the other hand if I feel I'm dipping down it's that lack of motivation where I just want to curl up and hibernate and that also happens quite often then I would be thinking what might activate me sometimes it's similar things I tend here to think of the five senses as my first go to so I'm thinking about what can I do to arouse myself in terms of the senses so what are things that I can look at that will activate me what are things that I can smell smell and taste are really great ones here so if I'm at home I might jump in the shower with like a lime or a mint shower gel I might brush my teeth I find the taste of mint really good sometimes I find things like chilli good stuff like that and then and then sound can be a good one too again we can use that to to calm if we're if we're anxious use calming music or activate some kind of happy uplifting type music can really help like I say it really depends on on what what works for the individual and also you need to think about the circumstances so for example if I find myself feeling highly anxious but I'm in like a really exposed social situation for example say I'm standing on stage giving a keynote presentation and something's just tripping my anxiety for some reason then I need to think about what can I do right here right now that's going to have the the least impact on me carrying on with my normal stuff and usually there it's just literally a case of me just taking a moment taking a deep breath maybe asking colleagues to discuss something for a moment or two while I gather my thoughts and then stepping back in and the key thing here is that ideally we're trying to get a better understanding of where we're sitting within the window of tolerance all the time and to understand what are the small things that we can do that will help to nudge us in the right direction so we're just becoming more aware really of what's going on with ourselves each day and we're taking small steps so that we can try and keep ourselves in that optimal zone so far as possible and the other thing we can do longer term is to think about ways to increase our window of tolerance so that we're more resilient we're more able to manage the kind of ups and downs of day to day life and there are lots of ways that we can do that but the the kind of key ones here are to really think about getting our basics in place so I always talk about the the kind of key pillars of our mental health sitting within our physical health so we're thinking about getting good sleep regular exercise healthy food and if we get that right then actually everything else becomes a lot more easy to manage so if you think about a typical day and how you respond to slightly difficult triggers within that day if you then think about how you would respond to those triggers if you hadn't had a good night's sleep then you begin to understand how you know being chronically sleep deprived or not having good sleep regularly can have a really big impact on our ability to manage day to day so there you go introduction to the window of tolerance I hope that you found this helpful I share this a lot so I may well have referred you to this video if I have shared this idea at a conference or a training session hopefully it's a good refresher and something you can share with colleagues too and it's an idea that you can really quickly understand and just use as part of your day to day managing for yourself and or using it to support others too simple idea loads and loads of applications and tons of opportunities to adapt it to meet the needs of you or the person that you're working with or supporting good luck with it please leave a comment below letting me know if you've used it and how and any ideas you've got to add if you like this give it a thumbs up and if you would like to see my other videos in future then please take a moment to hit subscribe and hopefully I'll see you again thanks so much bye