Firstly what is your window of tolerance?

Your window of tolerance is your boundaries in which you feel comfortable, safe and in charge of your emotions. If you’re outside of that window of tolerance, it can be harder to return to a neutral and calm state.

There may be some things we don’t have a choice over how we spend our time. For instance, work. But outside of work, it’s all a bit of a balancing act of how we could be spending our time to help ourselves return to a neutral calm state, especially if its been after a busy day at work.

How does planning to do stuff and what I am doing now help manage my emotions?

Well, it fills up your positive memory tank. Or if you’d prefer it helps you to stay within your window of tolerance, by opening the blinds.

When is the last time you’ve had excitement for something? For people with Borderline we can get attached to fads real easy, but this is where analysing our typical schedule can be useful.

You could create a breakdown of your week and record all activities they do and rate them for both pleasure (p) and mastery (m) on a scale 0 (none) to 5 (highest). There are lots of weekly activity planners available online, but if you do intend to use one I'd suggest a template that includes a breakdown of the hours of each day of the week. You only need to do this for one week, either a week that has happened or a week that's still due.

An example activity could be a hobby you enjoy. This might make you feel good about yourself because it comes so naturally to you. However, you might have a low sense of achievement with this particular hobby. This could be p5 and m1.

Another example activity could be a more challenging hobby. Something that you can sink your teeth into and something that might solely occupy your mind for a while. You may feel a high sense of achievement. This could be p3 and m5.

You could do this evaluation in combination with either a mood or physical tiredness score. If you go with mood, you could have something like calm being 1 and 10 being your breaking point.

An example could be tidying. This might make you feel like you’ve achieved a lot, but be quite a challenge for you physically or could tire you out. This could be p1 and m4. However, once it’s done it could help calm you as everything is tidy and organised. This could be a c2.

How do I balance between pleasure and mastery?

Notice that you need a mix of both pleasure and mastery and that when you are more physically tired you will respond to challenges differently at those time. It’s then that you’ll also need more activities which are pleasurable to help you to stay within your window of tolerance.

You could also see in your activity breakdown that there is room for more challenges. A challenge for the day or the week doesn’t have to be big. It could be talking to someone you don’t normally. Engaging where you’d run. Trying a different approach to something.