"I'm so dysregulated. What can I do?" (Part One)

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 1, 2023

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

What is the Window of Tolerance and how does it explain dysregulation?

The Window of Tolerance is a term and concept coined by the esteemed psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, MD – clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute – that describes the optimal emotional “zone” our brains can exist in, to function best and thrive in everyday life.

On either side of the “optimal zone,” there are two other zones – the hyper-arousal zone and the hypo-arousal zone, each characterized by its own attributes.

What does it feel like when you’re in your optimal arousal zone?

The optimal zone – is characterized by a sense of groundedness, flexibility, openness, curiosity, presence, an ability to be emotionally regulated, and a capacity to tolerate life’s stressors.

It feels good, we feel good, and we feel more equipped to “adult and human.”

However, if this Window of Tolerance is eclipsed, if you experience internal or external stressors that cause you to move beyond and outside of your Window of Tolerance, you may find yourself existing in either a hyper-aroused or hypo-aroused state.

What is the hyperarousal zone and what does it feel like in your body?

Hyperarousal is an emotional state characterized by high energy, anger, panic, irritability, anxiety, hypervigilance, overwhelm, chaos, fight or flight instincts, and startle response (to name but a few characteristics).

Being in a hyperaroused state can cause us to react impulsively and with increased aggression or fear.

This state often leads to reduced rational thinking and difficulty in processing information calmly.

Additionally, when we’re in a hyperaroused state, we may find it challenging to focus on tasks, as our heightened alertness can make us easily distracted and overwhelmed.

(And full disclosure, this is where I’m most prone to going if outside the optimal arousal zone; I know this landscape well.)

What is the hypoarousal zone and why do trauma survivors spend so much time there?

By contrast, the hypoarousal zone is an emotional state characterized by shutting down, numbness, depressiveness, withdrawal, shame, flat affect, and disconnection (to name but a few characteristics).

Being in a hypoaroused state typically involves a noticeable decrease in physiological and mental activity.

Someone in this state may display signs such as slowed movements, reduced muscle tone, and a lack of responsiveness to their environment.

Their heart rate and breathing may become slow and shallow, and they might have a vacant or distant expression.

Mentally, individuals in a hypoaroused state may appear lethargic, disengaged, and have difficulty concentrating or staying alert.

This state can often be associated with feelings of fatigue, depression, or even dissociation from reality.

So clearly, the ideal is to exist in the optimal arousal zone versus being hyper- or hypoaroused. But how do we do this?

How Do We Stay In The Optimal Arousal Zone More?

How do we stay in the optimal arousal zone and increase our window of tolerance?

Related reading: Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections

Look, this is ideally where we want to be.

But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that all of us – at every age from the moment we’re born to the moment we die – eclipse our Window of Tolerance and find ourselves in a non-ideal emotional regulation zone sometimes.

That’s normal, and that’s natural.

So the goal here is not that we never eclipse our Window of Tolerance – I personally and professionally think that that’s unrealistic.

Rather, the goal is to increase our Window of Tolerance and to grow our capacity to “rebound and be resilient” — coming back to the Window of Tolerance quickly and effectively when we find ourselves outside of it.

So again, how do we increase our Window of Tolerance?

In my personal and professional experience, this work is two-fold:

First, we provide ourselves with the foundational biopsychosocial elements that contribute to a healthy, regulated nervous system. This is what we’ll explore next in this essay.

And two, we work to cultivate and call upon a wide toolbox of tools when we find ourselves outside of our Window of Tolerance (which, again, is inevitable). We’ll explore this more in two weeks.

Thank you — check your inbox.

Your guide is on its way.

For now, let’s explore a concept to help you create a solid foundation of biopsychosocial elements to help equip you to be in the optimal arousal zone more.

What is the Healthy Mind Platter and why is it the first step to self-regulation?

Derived from Dr. Dan Siegel’s work and concept of Healthy Mind Platter, this first step in creating a greater window of tolerance focuses on the psychological and physiological foundations many of us would suspect lead to a healthy life.

I don’t think any of the foundational efforts will surprise you, but as Dr. Dan Siegel describes them, they are, in summary with my own examples provided: (PMID: 11556645)

1) Focus Time:

Engaging in challenges that foster new neural connections. For example: Learning a musical instrument, solving puzzles, playing chess or strategy games, working on your fiction book or screenplay, learning a new language, planning the millions of details for your next international trip.

2) Play Time:

Deriving pleasure from novel experiences to forge fresh neural connections in the brain. For example: Learning a new skill or hobby, joining a community sports league, attending workshops or seminars on diverse topics, volunteering for a cause or organization, taking up house, gardening or landscaping projects, and getting together with your friends in new cities for adventures.

3) Connecting Time:

Activating and reinforcing the brain’s relational circuitry by connecting with others and appreciating the natural world. For example: Arranging playdates for your kids in city parks, becoming part of a local parenting support network, getting involved in community gardening projects, attending neighborhood block parties or social events, volunteering for school or community functions, exploring family-friendly experiences where you live such as visiting botanical gardens or nearby urban nature reserves.

Related reading: Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

4) Physical Time:

Enhancing brain function through physical activity and movement. For example: Peloton bike rides, jogs around the neighborhood, walks with a good friend, danging to Spotify in the kitchen, chasing your kids around, a bike ride through your city.

5) Time In:

Fostering brain integration through self-reflection. For example: Journaling, meditation, mindfulness, contemplation, deep breathing, and solitude.

6) Downtime:

Revitalizing the mind through leisurely focus or relaxation. For example: daydreaming, listening to an audiobook while staring at the wall, putting on your favorite album and just sitting on the couch, standing in the shower, and staring at the wall.

7) Sleep Time:

Synthesizing knowledge and recuperating from daily encounters. No examples are needed.

What Does Your Healthy Mind Platter Look Like?

Now, speaking as a working parent, I know firsthand how hard it is to have time even to shower some days, let alone carve out time for all of these things, so let’s remember: a healthy mind platter that checks off all seven criterion is the ideal and something we aim for, not necessarily what’s realistic every day for most of us.

But still, let’s take a minute and have you design what a Healthy Mind Platter could look like for you. If you need any inspiration, review the examples earlier in the post:

• What does focus time personally and ideally look like for you?
• What does your adult version of playtime ideally look like for you?
• What does connecting time look like for you socially and with nature and spirit?
• What does your ideal physical time look like?
• What does time in mean for you and how can you build in internal reflection time?
• What even small slivers of ideal downtime might be available to you regularly?
• How can you better protect your sleep time to consolidate learning and recovery more?

How can therapy help expand your window of tolerance over time?

When daily rollercoasters of dysregulation exhaust you despite your best self-regulation efforts, trauma-informed therapy provides the specialized support needed to fundamentally expand your Window of Tolerance rather than just managing symptoms. A skilled therapist helps identify why your window remains narrow—often tracing to childhood experiences where dysregulation was constant and co-regulation absent—and works to heal those original wounds while building new neural pathways for resilience.

Through consistent therapeutic work, you don’t just learn about optimal arousal zones intellectually. But actually experience staying regulated with support, gradually internalizing this capacity. The therapeutic process addresses both the trauma keeping your window narrow and the practical skills for widening it.

Your therapist might help you recognize early warning signs of leaving your window, understand what specific triggers catapult you into hyper- or hypoarousal, and develop personalized strategies beyond generic self-care advice. As you explore the biopsychosocial basics in your self-care tool chest, therapy provides the container for safely practicing these tools when dysregulated, experiencing co-regulation that teaches your nervous system what returning to baseline actually feels like.

In session, you build your Healthy Mind Platter with realistic accountability. Addressing the guilt about not managing all seven elements perfectly while problem-solving actual barriers to implementation. Your therapist helps differentiate between can’t and won’t. Between trauma-based resistance and practical limitations. Creating modified platters that work for your actual life.

Over time, as trauma heals and your window expands, what once required enormous effort becomes more natural, transforming the exhausting emotional rollercoaster into a more manageable journey with gentler curves and reliable brakes.

How does building a Healthy Mind Platter help you stay regulated more of the time?

It’s the bedrock foundation of our daily living that can support our self-regulation abilities.

Take some time to journal about your answers to the above-listed questions. And then, in two weeks’ time, I’ll share the second tool to increase your emotional regulation skills: building your hyperarousal and hypoarousal toolboxes.

And now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

What goes into YOUR “Healthy Mind Platter”?

If you feel so inclined, please feel free to leave a comment and share your wisdom and experiences. You never know who you’ll help when you write.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: You Can Be Healing Your Nervous System and Still Get Dysregulated

Driven women often approach nervous system regulation the way they approach everything else: as a skill to master, a problem to solve, a state to achieve and maintain. When dysregulation returns — and it will — they interpret it as failure rather than information. In my work, I try to reframe this: regulation isn’t a destination you arrive at. It’s a range you gradually expand. (PMID: 9384857)

Talia is a financial analyst who started somatic therapy after years of unexplained chest pain that every cardiologist cleared as non-cardiac. She made rapid progress — learned to identify her activation patterns, practiced grounding techniques, began sleeping through the night for the first time in years. Then a workplace conflict triggered a full-body shutdown, and she came to session convinced she’d “lost all her progress.” She hadn’t. Her window of tolerance had expanded enormously. This event just landed outside it.

Both/And means Talia can be genuinely further along in her healing than she was six months ago and still experience moments of intense dysregulation. It means her nervous system can be rewiring and still occasionally default to its original settings. Progress in somatic work looks less like the absence of distress and more like a faster return to baseline, a broader window of tolerance, and a growing ability to stay curious about sensation rather than consumed by it.

The Systemic Lens: The Structural Demand to Be Calm While Everything Burns

From the earliest age, girls are taught to override their body’s signals. Sit still. Be quiet. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be too much. By the time a driven woman reaches adulthood, she has decades of practice ignoring the cues her nervous system is sending — hunger, fatigue, fear, anger, the need to cry. This isn’t a skill. It’s a systemic training program designed to produce women who are maximally productive and minimally inconvenient.

The driven women I work with have often been overriding their nervous system for so long that they’ve lost the ability to identify what they’re feeling until it becomes a crisis. They don’t notice stress until it becomes a panic attack. They don’t notice exhaustion until they collapse. They don’t notice anger until it erupts. This isn’t a failure of self-awareness — it’s the predictable result of a culture that punishes women for having bodies with needs.

In my clinical practice, I help women reconnect with their nervous system’s signals — not as problems to manage but as information to heed. This requires naming the systemic forces that taught them to disconnect in the first place. When we understand that body disconnection in driven women isn’t a personal limitation but a cultural conditioning, the work shifts from “fixing what’s wrong with me” to “reclaiming what was taken from me.” That reframe is clinically significant — and for many of my clients, it’s the beginning of real change.

How to Regulate: Practical Steps for When You’re Dysregulated Right Now

In my work with clients who come in describing a state of dysregulation — the can’t-think-straight, heart-racing, want-to-scream-or-cry-or-run feeling that takes over when things get to be too much — one of the first things I do is slow down and help them understand what’s actually happening in their nervous system. Dysregulation isn’t a character flaw or a sign that you can’t handle stress. It’s a physiological state: your autonomic nervous system has moved into survival mode, and in that state, the parts of your brain responsible for complex reasoning, perspective-taking, and good decisions are temporarily offline. That’s not failure — that’s biology. And it’s something you can learn to work with, directly and skillfully.

The most important thing to know about working with dysregulation is that cognitive strategies — talking yourself down, listing reasons why it’s not that bad, trying to reason your way back to calm — work poorly when the nervous system is highly activated. The system needs to come down first through bottom-up approaches (ones that start with the body) before the top-down, cognitive work can be effective. This is why “just think positively” or “put it in perspective” often makes people in acute dysregulation feel worse rather than better. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) offers some of the most practically useful approaches for working with dysregulation at the physiological level. The techniques include orientation — slowly looking around the room and naming what you see, which activates the ventral vagal system and signals safety to the nervous system — and pendulation, the practice of moving your attention back and forth between a distressing sensation and a neutral or pleasant one. These aren’t quick fixes; they’re practices that build nervous system capacity over time. But they also work in the acute moment, and clients who’ve been taught them consistently report that they help.

Havening Techniques and tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT) can also be useful for acute dysregulation for some people — they work through bilateral or rhythmic stimulation similar to the mechanism behind EMDR, helping the amygdala down-regulate when it’s been activated. I don’t use them with every client, but for people who find physical, bilateral techniques calming, they’re worth exploring with a skilled practitioner.

On a foundational level, working with chronic dysregulation — the kind where you’re frequently tipped into overwhelm, where recovery takes longer than it used to, where your window of tolerance feels narrow — really benefits from structured clinical support. Internal Family Systems (IFS) can help you identify which parts get activated during dysregulation, what they’re protecting, and what they need in order to trust that you can handle the current situation without them going into high alert. Often there are younger, exiled parts whose distress is what’s being expressed through the dysregulation — and addressing those parts directly produces more lasting relief than any regulation technique alone.

I also want to normalize something: if you’re experiencing frequent dysregulation, it’s a signal worth taking seriously — not by adding more pressure to “fix” yourself, but by genuinely asking what your system is trying to tell you. Chronic dysregulation is often the body’s way of communicating that something important needs attention: an unprocessed loss, an unsustainable situation, a relational wound that hasn’t healed, a level of load that exceeds your current capacity. Regulation techniques help you manage the acute experience; therapy addresses the underlying conditions that are producing it.

If you’re regularly experiencing dysregulation and want to build both immediate skills and longer-term capacity, I’d love to support that work. You can learn more about working with me in therapy, where nervous system regulation is a core part of how I practice. You can also take the free quiz to get a clearer sense of what kind of support might be the right fit for what you’re experiencing. You don’t have to white-knuckle your way through dysregulation — there’s real, substantive help available, and you’re allowed to have it.

DEFINITION AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM DYSREGULATION

A state in which the autonomic nervous system — the branch of the nervous system governing involuntary bodily functions including heart rate, digestion, breath, and stress response — becomes chronically shifted out of its regulated baseline, described in detail by Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist at Indiana University and developer of Polyvagal Theory. Dysregulation can manifest as hyperarousal (anxiety, reactivity, insomnia) or hypoarousal (numbness, collapse, dissociation) depending on which defensive circuit the nervous system recruits.

In plain terms: When you feel like you’ve completely lost your footing — too wired to sleep, too numb to feel, or swinging between both — that’s not a character flaw. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do in the presence of too much. The good news is that regulation is a skill you can build, not a state you either have or you don’t.

Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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