Did I leave the stove on?
Did I close the garage?
Did I lock my car?

These and many other muscle memory habits were questions that I started to ask myself, when I started to feel my stress levels increase. My body was doing actions that my mind was not aware of. I started to notice that my muscle memory was taking action in my body, while my mind was thinking about something else. I was no longer present in my current moment.

When my stress levels heightened, the busier my mind became. Thus, the movements between my mind and my body started to disconnect. The result of this experience was an inability to shut off the mental chatter in my mind and allow my body to function fully. I struggled to sleep. I would awake thinking, unable to stop the constant mental hum. In the morning, I would be tired and the self-talk would start before I got out of bed. My mind was trying to convince myself that getting out of bed was a logical first step. I was problem-solving my steps before my feet hit the floor in the mornings. My mind was running full-tilt on a mental treadmill, and I couldn’t figure out how to slow the pace, get off, or how to hit the emergency button to abruptly stop.

A myriad of life circumstances threw me off the treadmill, full-tilt. I have been grateful to the people in my life that have helped me up, dusted me off, cast my broken ankles and taught me how to walk again. I am hopeful that my journey will prevent you from the hard-knocks that I have learned, and allow you to readjust the treadmill settings to a healthy pace.

The first lesson I want to explore is a concept called “The Window Of Tolerance”. (I would encourage you to search the internet for a variety of visual charts that demonstrate this concept). This concept helped me understand that I had been toggling between hyper-arousal (a fight-flight response, emotional reactivity, panic, rage, stress, hyper-vigilance) and hypo-arousal (freeze response, numbness, detachment, slowness, fatigue, shut-down, disassociation) for too long. The “window” of things that I could tolerate had slammed shut. Like a slider-window that moves from top to bottom, my level of tolerance was not allowing air (new circumstances) to flow easily into my life. Anything that was beyond my realm of control jostled me between the extremes of hyper and hypo-arousal.

Many in the teaching profession during the years of Covid-19 joked that we felt like we were on a roller-coaster ride. However, this visual of going up and dropping down was the experience of my emotions. I was living in the extremes. The middle area or the Window of Tolerance that allowed me to deal with any type of stress or change was almost shut. I was starting to toggle between rage and numbness, panic and exhaustion, hyper vigilance and shut-down.

An open Window of Tolerance brings an ability to take positive risks, try new things, view the world with a lens of patience, problem solve and logically reason through issues. In the education profession, these are key components of the job. Without an open window, my smile was high jacked and my daily joy was buried. Life became a chore and my job became a necessary evil. Knowing that I once loved my job left me baffled, frustrated and evaluating what exactly had change over the course of the past few years.

Further posts will explore the tool kit that I have created to expand my Window of Tolerance.

Photo Credit: Alistair Macrobert, Unsplash