Sometimes, your heart is racing. Your jaw is tight. Every sound feels like a warning - this is hyperarousal. At other times, you feel foggy, heavy, or far away. You can see the room, but you don’t feel quite in it. This is hypoarousal. Both states make life difficult. to manage, and can interfere with therapy.
Clinicians use “window of tolerance” to describe the range where you can stay present, think, feel, and act. Hyperarousal and hypoarousal are states outside that range. When you’re outside it, helping you return to the window is an essential part of the work.
What is the window of tolerance?
The phrase comes from psychiatrist Dan Siegel. Inside the window, you can feel things, sometimes strongly, and still think, talk, and make decisions. You can be upset and still feel like yourself.
Above the window is hyperarousal, the fight-or-flight state where everything feels like too much. Below it is hypoarousal, the shutdown state where everything goes quiet.
Neither state is a choice or a character flaw. They’re ways your nervous system responds when it senses that a situation is more than you can handle.
Trauma tends to narrow the window. It can take less to push you outside it, and longer to return. One person may feel shaken for an hour after a hard conversation. Someone with a narrower window may lose the rest of the day to it. Pat Ogden, who developed Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, made this model central to her approach.
The right tool To Get Back into Your Window of Tolerance depends on how you feel
The first step is noticing which way you’ve gone: Is everything speeding up, or is everything going quiet? Skills that help when you feel revved up are often close to the opposite of what helps when you feel shut down. Slow breathing is one example. If you’re revved up, longer exhales can help you settle. If you’re already shut down, slowing everything further can leave you foggier. If relaxation exercises make you feel worse, you may be using a tool meant for the other side of the window. These practices come from Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Each one gives your body some evidence that the danger has passed.
When everything feels like too much
Try these when you feel revved up:
Orient: Let your eyes move slowly around the room and settle wherever they want to. Name a few things you see. Your body has been scanning for threat, and this gives it a chance to finish the scan and find none.
Feel your weight: Notice where your body meets the chair or floor. Press your feet down and feel the floor press back.
Push: Put your hands flat on a wall and push slowly, as if you were moving it an inch. Fight-or-flight energy with nowhere to go can settle when it has something to do.
Lengthen your exhale: Breathe out for longer than you breathe in. It doesn’t need to be deep, just long.
When you feel foggy or far away
Here, the aim is to bring a little energy back, gently:
Sit up: Lengthen your spine, lift your head, and let your eyes come up off the floor. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy pays close attention to how posture and shutdown can feed each other.
Move something small: Wiggle your toes, press your fingertips together, or roll your shoulders. Small, deliberate movement works better than big movement.
Look around: Find a color, then notice one thing across the room and one thing close by. Shutdown can pull your attention inward; looking around brings it back out.
Find a clear sensation: Try a strong scent, a rough texture, or something with weight in your hands. A mild, definite sensation gives your body something to register.
If you start to feel agitated, that’s useful information. Ease off and do less.
Working with activation slowly
Somatic Experiencing rests on two ideas worth knowing, even if you never see an SE therapist.
Titration means working with a small amount of activation at a time, on purpose. You might approach one corner of a memory rather than the whole thing, or notice the first edge of a feeling rather than going into all of it.
Pendulation means moving back and forth. You approach the activation a little, then return to something steady, such as the feeling of your feet, a person you trust, or a place that brings ease. Then you move toward the activation again.
Over time, this can widen your window. You spend a short while near the edge, come back, and your nervous system learns it can go there and return. Many people arrive having tried to go straight into the worst memory and wait for it to break. Shaking or crying isn’t the measure of progress. What matters is whether you’re still present while it happens.
These skills can help, and they’re part of the work you can practice at home. They aren’t the whole of it. A narrow window usually has a history behind it, and widening it takes slow, steady work with someone trained to track what your body is doing when you can’t.
What the research says
Research on body-based trauma therapy is growing, but the evidence base is still smaller than it is for EMDR or prolonged exposure, which have strong research support for PTSD.[^1] A randomized trial of Somatic Experiencing for PTSD by Brom and colleagues in 2017 found meaningful improvement compared with a waitlist.[^2] We’d call the evidence promising rather than settled.
In practice, these approaches are often most useful for people who find talking about the trauma directly too much, too soon.
Martha Jimenez, LCSW, SEP is certified in Somatic Experiencing. She sees clients in Glen Rock and virtually across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and PSYPACT states.
Melissa Green-Jackson, LPC, LMHC is trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Somatic Experiencing. She specializes in dissociation and complex trauma.
If you’d like more background, we’ve written about the core ideas behind SE and getting out of freeze.
(1) National Center for PTSD: Overview of psychotherapy for PTSD
(2) Brom et al. (2017), randomized study of Somatic Experiencing for PTSD
