How would you respond?
Picture this: it's the mid-week morning rush at your regular coffee spot. To say it's been a rough week is an understatement and all you want is your soul-nourishing oat milk latte, steamed to exactly 157 degrees. After a long wait, you eagerly take that first sip and you realize your latte has dairy milk; an intestinal enemy, as far as you're concerned. Your polite request to remedy the error is met with contempt, and your blood begins to boil. We've all been here. It's that moment that breaks you. How do you respond? Do you politely assert yourself? Do you become angry? Or do you apologize and walk away with your dairy milk latte, praying for the best, considering you've got a sushi lunch with a client on the calendar?
“Keep calm and carry on.”
It's a cliche that’s been generally embraced as a practice in “politeness” and drive, but it overlooks a critical aspect of emotional resilience. The thing is emotional resilience isn't about suppressing emotions or staying calm all the time. On the contrary, constantly forcing yourself to "keep calm" and keep on without processing what’s going on inside can be counterproductive—it's like trying to hold a beach ball underwater; eventually, it's going to pop back up, and when it does, it might hit you in the face.
Instead, emotional resilience is about having what is referred to in psychology as an expanded “window of tolerance.” How you respond to “triggers” or emotional stimuli can say a lot about yours. Psychiatrist Dan Siegel first coined the term to refer to the range within which a person is able to function in a “regulated” - centered, grounded - state. It’s within this range where we experience feelings of calm, confidence, courage, compassion, creativity, curiosity, to name a few. We have clarity and focus, and our nervous system is functioning at its optimal state from which we’re able to exist beyond survival: we can thrive.
Folks who have experienced severe emotional distress for prolonged periods of time, especially during early development, will often have a smaller window of tolerance. Thankfully, with the right support, we have the ability to expand this range at any age.
And let’s be clear: It's not that emotionally resilient people don't get triggered. It's that they've developed the clarity and self-assurance that enables them to navigate THROUGH the intensity of the moment, without becoming overwhelmed and shutting down from it. They’ve learned to recognize and accept their emotions without judgment. It's about understanding that it's okay to feel angry, sad, or afraid, and that these emotions are a natural part of the human experience.
So, how do we build emotional resilience and increase our window of capacity? One effective method is through somatic healing practices like breathwork. By consciously controlling and manipulating the breath, we can activate the body's rest and digest response, which helps to calm the nervous system and reduce stress at the physiological and cellular levels. Over time, regular breathwork practices can help to expand the window of tolerance, improve our ability to regulate our emotions and our overall sense of wellbeing. With the support of a skilled, trauma-trained facilitator, breathwork can be a valuable tool to support folks to cultivating deep, life-giving transformations for themselves.
If you’re ready to dive deep on your inner healing to expand your window of tolerance, I’m ready to support you! Let’s get on a discovery call to see if we’re a good fit for each other.
