What Is the Window of Tolerance?
The window of tolerance explains why your capacity to cope varies so much day to day. Here’s what it means, what narrows it, and how to widen it over time.
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Why Your Nervous System Shuts Down in Arguments
When you shut down in arguments, it’s not weakness or avoidance, it’s a nervous system response. Here’s the biology behind it and what to do instead.
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Signs Your Nervous System Is Dysregulated
You’re not overreacting. Your nervous system is just stuck in a pattern it learned a long time ago. “Dysregulated” gets used a lot in wellness spaces without much explanation. Your therapist might have used it about you. You might have come across it in something you were reading and wondered whether it applies. The nervous…
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Anxious Attachment and the Nervous System: What’s Actually Happening
Knowing you’re anxiously attached doesn’t make the anxiety stop. Here’s why, and what does. If you have anxious attachment, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time wondering why you can’t just relax in relationships. You know, intellectually, that your partner loves you. You know the last argument wasn’t actually a sign that everything is…
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Polyvagal Theory Explained: What It Means for Your Relationships
Why your nervous system has three gears, and why the one you’re in determines everything. Polyvagal Theory has become one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in therapy offices and wellness content without anyone fully explaining what it actually means. Which is a shame, because it’s one of the more genuinely useful…
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How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Nervous System
The label is the least interesting part. Here’s what’s happening in your body. Most people encounter attachment theory through a quiz. You answer a dozen questions about how you behave in relationships, get assigned a label, anxious, avoidant, secure, and walk away thinking you’ve learned something useful. Sometimes you have. But the label is the…
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What Is the Vagus Nerve and Why Does It Matter?
The nerve you’ve never heard of is running most of the show. You’ve probably been hearing about the vagus nerve a lot lately. Cold plunges, humming exercises, breathwork apps, half of them claim to be “stimulating your vagus nerve.” At some point it starts to sound like wellness jargon, another thing to optimize. But the…
