Regulation Isn’t Just for Crises: Building Daily Practices to Support Your Window of Tolerance
When you experience something as profound and overwhelming as fertility challenges, loss, or a traumatic birth, it doesn’t just get imprinted in your memory — it can also leave an imprint on your nervous system.
When you're trying to regulate through emotions and thoughts that seem to sneak up out of nowhere, it can help to have two different types of tools available:
Skills you use in the moment to get through the upsetting memories or the flood of negative self-talk.
Practices you build into your daily life to support ongoing healing and regulation.
In our first sessions together, I often introduce clients to a concept called “the window of tolerance.” We come back to this metaphor often — it becomes a helpful way to understand your experiences and to talk to yourself (and others) with more compassion.
Window of Tolerance…what is it?
The window of tolerance is your nervous system’s general bandwidth — your ability to feel and think at the same time, adapt to challenges and victories, and remain regulated (or re-regulate) when adversity arises.
As human beings, the size of our window is influenced by so many factors! It naturally fluctuates throughout the day. For example, as spring arrives and the sun starts shining, many people notice their windows opening a little wider — warmth, light, and renewal. But if you're someone who struggles with seasonal allergies, waking up to a sunny sky accompanied by a stuffy nose and watery eyes might actually narrow your window instead.
Our window of tolerance is impacted by more than just the weather — our basic needs being met, the quality of our relationships, and our daily experiences all play a role. And after overwhelming or heartbreaking experiences, our window often becomes much narrower. Suddenly, what used to be small stressors can feel huge.
When we are outside of our window, we typically shift into one of two states:
Hyperarousal (feeling anxious, irritable, agitated), or
Hypoarousal (feeling numb, withdrawn, isolated).
One of the goals of therapy is to support you in understanding your window of tolerance — and to help you learn ways to gently expand it.
In the Moment Coping
When doing EMDR and ego-state therapy, I support clients in learning specific skills and interventions to use in the moment when their nervous system feels overwhelmed. You might reach for these coping skills when grief surges, anxiety spikes, painful memories flood back, or you feel like you're losing your footing. These skills aren’t about "fixing" yourself — they're about bridging yourself from those devastating, overwhelming moments back into a more regulated, grounded state.
Daily Practices Skills
While in-the-moment coping skills are essential elements of therapy, we also focus on the daily practices that can help you expand your window of tolerance over time. These practices don’t just “put out fires” — they help create a buffer zone so you can stay more regulated, even as you continue navigating the complex emotions and challenges tied to your most devastating experiences.
Some examples include:
Spending 5–10 minutes outside each day, reconnecting with rhythms beyond medical spaces or grief.
Moving your body in a way that honors what it can do, rather than focusing on what it cannot.
Nourishing yourself with meals, especially after periods when self-care felt impossible.
Connecting with positive, caring supports — whether that's a friend, family member, therapist, energy worker, or acupuncturist.
The goal of these practices isn’t to "fix" anything — it’s to create conditions where compassion, resilience, and healing can unfold more naturally.
Both in-the-moment coping skills and daily regulation practices matter. We need the in-the-moment skills to help bring you back when the past floods into the present. We need the daily practices to help build a wider window, so that those floods happen less often — and when they do, they feel a little less overwhelming.
Healing often requires both:
Grace for the parts of you that are surviving each moment.
Nurturing for the parts of you that are still learning it’s safe to feel again.
Where Do I Start?
Pick one small, manageable daily practice.
It could be starting your day mindfully — moving slowly, setting a gentle intention to return to throughout the day.
It could be stepping outside for a few minutes of sunshine, even if it's just to walk to the mailbox.
Most importantly, honor where you are.
Regulation isn’t a checklist to complete — it’s part of a relationship with yourself.
Think of it like rebuilding trust with your own body and heart: slow, steady, sacred work.
If you feel like your window of tolerance has narrowed after your experiences, it’s not because you’re failing. It makes sense that your window has tightened after facing some of the most heartbreaking moments of your life. Your nervous system may be shutting down or running on all cylinders — not because you are broken, but because it’s trying, in the only ways it knows how, to help you survive.
Healing is about offering your nervous system new experiences of safety and care — again and again.
If your nervous system is feeling stretched thin after fertility struggles, loss, or birth trauma, know that healing is possible — and you don't have to do it alone.
I offer EMDR therapy and ego state work to gently support clients through reproductive trauma and beyond.