Your Emotional Bank Account

Brooke Shoup
May 23
4 min read

If you want to Stress-less and show up fully to the people and projects in your life, this is the first thing you'll want to know. Every emotion you feel, thought you think, and action you take matters. There is no "I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed today." Your body is speaking to you about what you want and what you need to thrive. I want to help you learn how to listen.

To speak this language, we want to understand the nervous operates like a bank account. Emotional deposits and withdrawals happen every single day with our thoughts, our actions, inactions, and our surroundings too. We can understand this idea better when we think of our nervous system through a picture called the Window of Tolerance (below).

A Regulated Window of Tolerance (WOT)

The window of Tolerance is a tool that helps us imagine what happens inside of the nervous system. The wavy line shows different emotional states through the day. In a healthy nervous system, we will see people responding to events with flexibility. A range of emotions-like anger, sadness, or fear- are all natural to experience as long as we can FLOW back to our comfy home base. We run into issues when we get stuck inside of these unpleasant emotions.

Sometimes We Get Stuck

If you look at the WOT above, you will see an upper edge (red) and a lower edge (blue). These represent points of "getting stuck" in an emotion. This is when you get so angry and you can only see red. Or when you become burnt out and forget how to enjoy the people and activities you usually love. When stuckness happens, it can feel powerless. We often don't know how to feel better again.

Why We Get Stuck

We get stuck outside of the WOT when awareness of threats are greater than awareness of safety.

Example: when I was newly postpartum, I had many intrusive thoughts. My brain was hooked into all the bad things that could happen. A drive to the grocery store became me looping on 18 ways I could crash my car on the drive there. I couldn't control the thoughts. My brain fixated on potential threats because I was stuck in my upper edge. I'll explain how I got out of it, but first I need to share how our nervous system is like a bank account.

Experiences of Safety Function Like Deposits

In this case, "Safe" is a blanket term. It could mean anything that feels like goodness. Experiences of safety are experiences of what I really need to thrive. Every time we acknowledge something good around us, it puts a deposit in the bank. When awareness of safety is greater than awareness of threat, This will mean we are regulated. We have flexibility and control when it comes to emotions.

Experiences of Threat Function Like Withdrawals

"Threat" is a blanket term to mean experiences PERCEIVED AS harmful. Perceived threat is 100% subjective.

Person A might spot a man in a blue shirt and have positive feelings. It brings up fun memories with dad. Person B can see the same man and have a fearful response. Maybe the shirt reminds them of a person who hurt them. Unresolved pain can deeply change how someone experiences threat.

When awareness of threat is greater than awareness of safety, this called dysregulation. I will either be stuck in heightened in anger or fear or I will be stuck in blue where I am frozen.

The Effects of Stress (Stress Compounds)

If you look at the image below, the WOT on the left has a minimal amount of stressors. Because of this, you can notice a much wider WOT and a bigger FLOW zone. A person with this type of WOT will have more capacity to respond well when new stressers come up.

The WOT on the right has significantly more stressors happening at once. Perhaps they have a sick family member or a high stakes job. When there are more stressors (past or present) putting pressure on the nervous system, the FLOW zone becomes narrow.

Practically, this means we will be more irritable, impulsive, depressive and less compassionate or calm..

Takeaway: Some seasons will come with more active stressors and its important to have patience with ourselves and our loved ones when we see behaviors that feel "unlike them."

This is what happened to me when I was newly postpartum. I was stuck in my upper register for months and it kept me in a state of anxiety.

But this is the good news: we can increase our WOT and create more cushion in our FLOW zones by learning to create more experience of safety for ourselves.

Building Safety:

Safety building practices are always beneficial whether you are in a strained season or not. If you are in a great season of life, you can leverage that felt safety as an emergency fund. When life inevitably hits, the emotional funds will be available so you can remain resilient and joyful while the hard things are happening. If you are in an actively hard season, building safety awareness can dramatically transform the way you endure.