In My Mind 18 - What you find easy might not be easy, Window of tolerance, and Zero sum thinking

What you find easy might not be easy

I'm finding myself increasingly mindful of things I'm able to do without much thought that others find difficult or challenging. For example, this week I've been building a presentation for senior managers at work based on training 4 colleagues and I have completed over the past month. For the most part I've been the computer driver, adding all the text and images to slides while others have been typing up scripts and completing their own sections. I seemed to spend a considerable amount of time explaining to my colleagues how I achieved things like adding a new slide and deleting sections of text all through keyboard shortcuts. These are things I take as given since I've used computers daily for over a decade, frequently needing to create documents, emails, and presentations while my colleagues didn't have a clue how it was happening in front of their eyes because they don't have the same experience. 

There will be several things in your life that you find easy to do, or do without thinking, that others will find amazing or revolutionary once they learn how to do it for themselves. Try to take note of these skills because it's very easy to only consider the things you don't know that others do and if you only pay attention to those things, life can seem like an uphill battle. 

Window of tolerance

There is a concept in psychology known as the window of tolerance. It describes a state of arousal as part of the poly vagal system. Throughout each day your window of tolerance may shrink or grow depending on your experiences. For example, on a day where you're relaxed and calm your window of tolerance may be wide, on a day where you're stressed it may be a lot narrower. When you're in your window of tolerance your emotions are balanced and you're able to deal with everyday life well. If you're overly stressed you are considered to be in hyperarousal where the fight or flight response can be triggered, if you are burned out, tired or been in hyperarousal for too long you can dip into hypoarousal. In both these states life feels a lot harder.

Hyperarousal tends to make us feel more on edge with anxiety, fear, and anger being the prevalent emotions, while in hypoarousal it's common to feel more depressed, empty, and low energy. As you're reading this it may be possible to draw memories of times when you've been in hyperarousal, hypoarousal, or in the optimal zone (in your window of tolerance).

It's important to be mindful of times where your window of tolerance is shrinking which may lead to hyper or hypo arousal. By taking stock of how wide your window is you can start to get ahead of falling outside of it by using self care methods to stabilise and widen the window. These activities look different to each person but some common ones include being creative (drawing, colouring), relaxing (reading a book, taking a bath), and talking about what is happening in order to rationalise emotions (through journalling or conversations with loved ones).

Zero Sum Thinking

Zero sum thinking is a mindset where in order for one person to have a thing (money, success, fame) other people must not have it. For example, with this mindset you'd consider the success of your competitor to be directly proportional to your lack of success for there is only a set amount of success available in the world. There are times when this is true, for example in a football game there can only be one winner and one loser (or two teams that draw) so the fight for points is a zero sum game - there are a maximum of 3 points up for grabs in any league game. But for a lot of things in life the zero sum game doesn't have to dominate.

Think of two businesses competing in the same market. It would be easy to say that if one is more successful then by the nature of being in the same market the other must be less successful, but this isn't actually true. If the two companies work together and innovate with new technology both companies can win. Similarly, if the two companies have a partnership where each offers services that compliment the other, both companies can grow in capacity and revenue. Both of these examples would be considered positive sum.

I think life is a lot easier to manage if you can find more examples of these positive sum games. If you believe that everything is zero sum it is incredibly difficult to be happy for other people in times of success, because by the nature of them being successful you must be missing out on something. Whereas when thought of in positive sum terms, other people's success is able to be celebrated fully, knowing that by them succeeded there is now a path for you to follow to similar success, or new things to explore based on their increased status.