🥛 The Glass Metaphor

How full is your glass? — Your window of tolerance visualised

👋 Welcome — here's how it works

  1. Watch your glass — the empty space at the top is your Window of Tolerance.
  2. Fill it up ⬇️ — tap things like tired, stressed, or hungry and watch the water rise.
  3. Open the drain ⬆️ — tap rest, connection, or movement and watch it empty.
  4. When the glass gets full, you'll be asked how you're feeling — then offered the right tools.
🥛 Your glass has space — you're in your window of tolerance.
⬇️ Fills the glass — tap what's adding stress today
⬆️ Empties the glass — tap what's helping you cope
✏️ Add your own

🥛 Think of your stress capacity as a glass

Each of us has a glass — our capacity to handle stress. The glass is never completely empty; there's always some water in it from past experiences, losses, childhood, and temperament. Daily life keeps adding drops. The empty space left at the top is your Window of Tolerance.

💧 Daily drops fill the glass

Every stressor adds to your glass — a difficult day at work, financial worries, a noisy environment, relationship tension, poor sleep. Drops keep falling. Once the glass fills up, even a tiny drop can make it overflow.

✅ The empty space — your Window of Tolerance

The more empty space in the glass, the more flexible and resilient you are. Inside this window you can feel emotions — sadness, anger, worry — without losing control. You can think, respond, and connect.

⬆️ Overflowing — Hyperarousal

When the glass spills over upward, your sympathetic nervous system floods. Racing heart, racing thoughts, panic, rage, overwhelm. You're in fight-or-flight. Hard to think clearly or make good decisions.

⬇️ Crashing — Hypoarousal

When the glass tips you downward, your nervous system shuts down to protect you. Numbness, fog, exhaustion, disconnection. Everything feels too heavy to move. This is freeze mode.

🚰 Opening the drain

Resources act like a drain tap at the bottom of the glass. Rest, food, water, movement, co-regulation, creativity — these open the tap and let stress flow out, creating more room in your window. The tap doesn't need to run long — even small daily habits keep the glass from overflowing.