A Brief Guide to Temporary Insanity

I received a lot of positive feedback last week on my post?Empty Threats.?I think the feeling of being in a low-level alarm state resonates with many of us. I want to extend my thoughts today and point out what an opportunity this condition offers.

First, though, I’ll remind you that I’m going live with a 45-minute session on Zen Mind this Thursday which gives you practical tools for working with nervous system dysregulation. (Register?to join live or to get access to the recording afterward.)

There is a concept in neurobiology that I think is very helpful: it’s called the “window of tolerance.” Coined by the psychiatrist Dan Siegel (you may know him as the author of the book?Mindsight, and many others), the window of tolerance refers to an optimal zone of autonomic nervous system (ANS) arousal for everyday functioning.

In layman’s terms, it’s when your emotional intensity is neither too high nor too low. Or, as I described it in my posts on?Right Effort, “not too tight, not too loose.”

The window of tolerance has also been called the “window of presence” (a term I prefer for maybe obvious reasons) and adopted for use in the context of trauma therapy. I feel the trauma model is helpful since the Fear Body is basically a manifestation of learned responses to threat conditions, i.e. a low level trauma response.

Here’s a diagram which shows the spectrum:

Our Fight and Flight responses are in the hyperarousal zone and Freeze is in the hypoarousal zone.

The thing that has captured my attention is how our mind and our thoughts are affected when we are in the the hyper- and hypoarousal zones: our thoughts patterns and our very view of reality become skewed.

As one therapist puts it: “Autonomic dysregulation compromises our health, our emotional stability, our relationships, our decision making,?our perception of reality, our identity, and our ability to protect ourselves and survive, both individually and as a species” (emphasis mine.) (https://wecoregulate.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Window.pdf Elizabeth Dennison, ClearingTrauma.com)

Wow!

It’s like a state of temporary insanity. It’s been described as “feeling hijacks thinking.” In this state you can literally scream “I’m not screaming!” and believe it!

I’ve experienced this many times. When I am activated, I’ve got a very definite view of what’s going on and my place in it, and I am convinced that I’m seeing things clearly. When I come down, it’s like a light has come on and things return to their proper proportion.?And my very sense of self shifts.?Having practiced meditation for a long time, I am quite familiar with these shifts, and kind of roll with them. But if you haven’t, it can be very disorienting, and you are even likely to go into denial about how distorted your thinking had become.

It may take a while for us to realize that our nervous system has been hijacked. Until we do, we are taking false signals as real. This is the real danger zone.

So, with this understanding there are a few things we can do. The first one is pretty straightforward: recognize when we are outside of our window of presence, and take the steps needed to return. As the diagram above shows, the most powerful practices are breath and body mindfulness practices to re-ground or kickstart our systems. (I’ll be covering some of these in the?webinar.)

Since the hijacking can sometimes be subtle (as oxymoronic as that sounds!), it may take some reflection, or the reflection of someone close to you, before you realize it. Hopefully your partner or colleague won’t just shout “Calm down!” but instead offer a reflection something like “it looks like you might be activated. Do you want to take a break?”

This is important: re-regulating has to honor the hierarchy of systems in the body-mind: autonomic regulation (breath, cardio and physiological processes) forms the basis for emotional regulation which in turn forms the basis for cognitive regulation. So, you can’t?think?or?talk?your way into a regulated state, nor can you force yourself to calm down or feel anything other than what you are feeling …. you have to start from the body and breath.

The deeper opportunity in temporary insanity is to consciously explore the edges of your window of presence. It’s only by maintaining stable consciousness in uncomfortable situations that you?increase?your window of presence. From a Zen perspective, this is what we want to do. Not to keep our lives constrained by our emotional comfort zones, but to explore the edges of our comfort zones so we can operate freely and responsively in all situations.

The window of presence is one way of looking at Stable Mind, the first of the three Zen Mind qualities I will be talking about on Thursday (Register). The other two are Satisfied Mind and Beginner’s Mind.

Until then, stay crazy, stay sane.