To Be Happier at Work, Find Your ‘Window of Tolerance’
Think of it as your mental home base
Of all the things with undeserved bad raps in the workplace — storming out of meetings, LinkedIn, professional jealousy, getting your hopes up — stress is the most unfairly maligned. We’re constantly on the lookout for ways to beat it, prevent it, soothe it, banish it from our lives. And it’s true that too much can make us exhausted, burned out, and disillusioned. But the truth is — and hear me out — we actually do need some stress. Too little can leave us bored and unmotivated. They key is to find a balance between too much and not enough: the sweet spot where the brain functions best, or what psychologists call the “window of tolerance.”
It sounds a little woo-woo, but the term, coined by the psychiatrist Dan Siegel in his 1999 book The Developing Mind, actually has a neuroscientific basis. The window of tolerance is where the prefrontal cortex, the reasoning part of your brain, is most active and engaged. When you drift outside the window in either direction — keyed up and anxious or, on the flip side, sluggish and listless — your “thinking brain” powers down, which means you’ll have a harder time taking in new information.
Siegel, a trauma therapist, initially developed the concept to describe people’s sensitivity to triggers in clinical…
