Hi there, you are listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

One of the most popular episodes of the entire life of the Lazy Genius Podcast is an episode called How to Be a Person.

In that episode, I talked with author and licensed trauma therapist Andy Colbert and she gave us the most beautiful, small, helpful tools to help us navigate what it means to be a person in a world that is often quite out of our control.

Well, today, Andy is back with the creatively named How to Be a Person Part 2 episode and we are going to talk about her new book Strong Like Water, a beautiful handbook of how to move through difficult times in a way that's compassionate to yourself.

It released this past week, March 21st and I highly recommend it.

Today, Andy talks about the difference between triggers and glimmers, the different kinds of strength that are sometimes necessary depending on what we're going through and she's going to make you take so many deep breaths because of how comforting her words are.

I hope you love this episode. So here's my conversation with Andy Colbert.

Your episode, I have 302, 3, 4 somewhere around there when this comes out plus a lot of bonuses, your episode, How to Be a Person with Andy Colbert is number seven.

That title though, so great. I love it. And what an honor. I mean, truly, I just feel so grateful to have to be with you and just for your support and your endorsement of the book. You, yeah, it just means the world.

This is, I'm not going to, I'm not going to try to fix something that's not broken. So this episode is super going to be called How to Be a Person Part 2.

Absolutely. Well, you have a new book that at the time that this releases, I believe will have been out two days called Strong Like Water. And I cannot wait to talk to you about it. But really, this is like the next phase of How to Be a Person, this book compared to try softer and try softer was like preparing us for how to see

our selves and just the process. And now you're like, and now here's your process. And I'm super pumped. So I want to ask you for as we begin though, as a refresher, you talked about this in the last episode, but that was a long time ago.

Will you give us a refresher on the window of tolerance?

Yes, the window of tolerance is a concept that was primarily coined by Dr. Dan Seagull. And the way I teach it is very much also influenced by the work of Dr. Stephen Porgis.

Just to say, but basically what it means is that we all have a range of arousal in which we can feel our feelings and go through an experience and have emotions and recall a memory.

And in that range, we are able to tolerate that experience. But when our body sort of begins to detect that it's too much or that for any reason it's threatening, we will typically go up into our sympathetic nervous system.

So our fight flight sometimes fawning, which can look a lot like people pleasing. And if that doesn't resolve the threat, then we will go down into sort of like a dissociation, a numbness. And there's a whole range with that that can look all the way to the point of someone losing consciousness if the threat is perceived to be dangerous enough.

And so this window of tolerance concept, when we go back to being in the window, this is really where we feel the most like ourselves.

And part of why that's so important is because, you know, a really important part of our well, all of our brain is important, but

Particular something called the prefrontal cortex and that's at the top of our brain. And when we are in our window, the prefrontal cortex is essentially getting blood flow and that blood flow, that part of our brain integrates all the other parts of our brain.

So on a functional level, what that means is when we when we're going outside of the window, and if the prefrontal cortex goes offline, what happens is is that we are existing from our survival brain.

And that survival brain, it's really important to understand that literally the only sort of aim is truly survival.

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