The language we use when we talk about stress often isn’t exactly correct when compared to how stress functions in reality.

For example:

We say things like “this situation is stressful” or “I am under a lot of stress”.

But stress isn’t an external thing that can be put on us.

And don’t worry, I’m not going to imply that all your stress is self-created either.

That would be quite dismissive towards anyone dealing with genuinely dire circumstances.

Stress, like so many things I write about, is relational.

It doesn’t exist as an inherent quality in an external stimulus. We can’t point and say “this external of situation has 7 units of stress in it” or “this feeling gives you stress”).

But it’s not an internal response either.

If we’d tell someone “respond with anger”, they would likely succeed in getting just a tiny bit angry by reaching for the part of ourselves that gets angry about stuff.

But if we’d say “respond with stress”, that doesn’t work. We don’t “respond to things stressfully”. You can’t reach inside yourself for stress and turn it up, the way you can do with joy, fear or sadness.

Because stress isn’t “in you”, just as much as it isn’t “out there”.

Stress happens somewhere in between:

In the interplay between external and internal stimuli which put a demand on a system, and the resilience of that system.

That system can be anything.

It can be a well you hang shelves on and how many obejcts you put on. The wall gets “stressed” when the load starts to challenge its resilience.

It can be the economy of the country you live in. Debt, inflation, trade collapses. These happen in every country. But economic stress ensues when the country’s economy isn’t resilient enough to bear the load.

Similarly, ​what’s happening, what you think about it,​ ​which feelings that bringsup and your relationship to those feelings​, can all increase or decrease the load on your nervous system. The stress exists in the relationship between those things your nervous system’s resilience.

This is easy to observe, because there are situations in which everyone panics, yet some people remain calm.

Why are they not experiencing high stress?

Because the stress is neither in them, nor in the event. It’s in the relationship.

The reason some situations appear inherently stressful is because they far exceed most people’s resilience. I think it’s fair to assume that war generates stress for 99.9% of beings in it.

The reason spiritual guru’s claim all stress is created by the mind is because most situations are not war, and many people are constantly at war with reality, which makes them experience stress.

I think neither belief is helpful to adopt. If you keep telling yourself “all stress is self-inflicted, I can change my thoughts”, you might not realize you’re surrounded by people who mistreat you.

If you keep insisting that your stress is the result of your environment, you disempower yourself, because you could also work on being more resilient.

Hold up? More resilient? Yes.

The Window of Tolerance

You’ve probably already experienced the window of tolerance without having a name for it:

here are moments —maybe common, maybe rare for you— where you’re experiencing pressure yet somehow feel okay with it.

And there are other moments where something small can set you off and ruin your day. There’s a precise way to describe what’s happening here:

The “Window of Tolerance” is a concept developed by Dr. Dan Siegel.

He introduced it to describe the optimal zone of arousal in which a person can function most effectively—emotionally regulated, flexible, and resilient—without becoming hyperaroused (fight/flight) or hypoaroused (freeze/shutdown).

At any given moment, your nervous system is riding a wave between too much and too little.

The sweet spot—where you’re grounded, flexible, responsive—is called your window of tolerance.

Inside the window of tolerance:

• You can think, feel, choose. You have agency.
• Emotions appear but don’t control you.
• Stress can exist, but doesn’t lead to oerwhelm.

Outside the window are 2 different states:

Hyperarousal: Heart racing, range, panic, urgency, overwhelm.

Hypoarousal: Numbness, shutdown, disconnection, exhaustion.

As you can see, the size of the window isn’t fixed.

It expands or shrinks based on a variety of causes trauma history, attachment experiences, current stress load, and nervous system health.

But most importantly: It can shrink and expand based on our present lifestyle and how we treat ourselves.

We are not ​victims​ to a certain window of tolerance that was “installed in our childhood”. I’ve personally gone from a very tiny to a very large window.

But it gets better…this doesn’t require you to eliminate stress!

How to Use Stress to Increase Calm

On the left and right of the image, you’ll notice a list of things that can shrink or expand your window.

This is really helpful information to know. And I advise you bookmark it somewhere.

However, it doesn’t really point the full picture. In my experience, all the things on the left, that “shrink you window”, also have the power that expand it—given the right conditions.

When people talk about nervous system regulation, there’s a high emphasis on ground and relaxation. Rightfully so. And overwhelmed nervous system does need them.

But there’s an other side to this story:

Why do high intensity athlete’s have such calm heartrates?

Why can we make people immune to some diseases by injecting those very diseases into them?

This is because of stress.

When the the load on a system exceeds its capacity, but not high enough to do serious damage, the system will experience stress and do something about it.

And this creates a more resilient system than one who doesn’t experience stress.

Because making a system resilient is expensive. You wouldn’t pay to put bulletproof glass in your car by default. You would add it because your experience enough stress to make it worth investing in. And then your car feels safe again.

Being locked inside a sauna all day could kill you. But spending 30 minutes in it could improve your health.

Grief—an experience which can drastically shrink your window of tolerance—when processed in doses just slightly beyond your capacity, can greatly expand it.

The period after my dad died was a period when I was often dysregulated. But the positive impact on my window of tolerance has been amazing. Purely from a nervous system perspective, such big grief has been a blessing, and probably made me better at my job too.

The good news?

People don’t have to die for you to expand your window of tolerance.

You can engineer your own exploriments.

For example, back when I experienced a lot of social anxiety, I would go on little missions.

“Today I’m going to make eye contact with 5 people.”

If I did it, and it felt okay. I’d increase the challenge the next day (”E.g. This time I’ll add a smile. This time I’ll say hi and walk on. This time I’ll say hi and pause. This time I’ll do it with someone I feel intimdated by.”).

If I tried to do it and got overwhelmed, I’d decrease the challenge (E.g. Today, I’ll make eye contact with 1 person who is already looking at me.)

I spent at least a year doing this and tweaking the dosage, until I got to the point where I felt comfortable doing things socially I’d probably feel intimidated by today.

The key to building a high window of tolerance this way is to consciously seek out low-level dysregulation in either direction and stay.

But to stay only so long as you don’t reach hypo- or hyperarousal, and then engage in some things that expand your window afterwards.

You can apply this process to nearly any type of inter-action that creates stress, and no matter what you apply it to, it will also widen your window of tolerance on average.

P.S. If you have an​ oura ring​, you can actually nerd-out about this and track your increased stress resilience over time. But this is not a requirement for applying the tips from this article.