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Your Window of Tolerance
Plus: lat activation for great workouts
Geoff Girvitz
May 29, 2025
Today on Dad Strength
It’s a lateral move
I wrote a piece for AskMen about how to activate your lats — not just to get that V-taper, bro, but for better overall function —including back health. You can read it here.
Window of tolerance
Dan Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist and co-author of the much-beloved The Whole-Brain Child, describes The Window of Tolerance as a Goldilocks zone, where you function well and capably handle emotions that come your way. Optimal performance doesn’t typically happen when you’re half-conscious or utterly furious. There’s a sweet spot in between the two.
Sometimes, an external event pushes us to the edge of the window. Maybe you have just dealt with a work emergency — or narrowly avoided a traffic accident, or doom-scrolled your way into anxiety. You were in the middle of the curve before… and life was good. Now you’re standing on the line —a tiny nudge away from being overstimulated. This is where you are much more likely to overreact to a minor blip with your kid.
If you were already aware of your anger, you might have had a strategy ready. But this is a place where we are all more likely to get caught flat-footed. And according to Siegel, the best thing we can do here is co-regulate… Articulate our emotions and then model coming back to calm. And you know what? This is great. Better, in fact, than never getting angry in the first place
Quick side-note
The Window of Tolerance relates to the Yerkes-Dodson bell curve (this is sometimes referred to as a psychological law but is probably better described as simply a mental model for performance.
Three Power Statements for Parents
As a parent, you want to have a great feedback system for your kids: something that helps them build skills and feel good about the process. And the higher your expectations, the more support you’ll need to provide. Developmental psychologist, David Yeager, describes this in his book, 10 to 25, as the Mentor persona.
Based on this, I’ve crafted 3 power statements — and how to make them authentically your own. Words matter but how you say them matters more.
Sign up to the Community Edition of Dad Strength ($5/month) and I’ll send you the resource.
Two things:
You can cancel your membership right after you get this. That’s ok.
If you get way more than $5 worth out of this resource, just let me know and I’ll refund you right away.
How to steel-man an argument
In the 2013 book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, philosopher Daniel Dennett shared four rules for any good philosophical debate:
First, and most important, is that you should “attempt to express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says things like, ‘I wish I thought of putting it that way.’”
Second, you should list all of the ways in which you and your partner agree on things.
Third, you should recognize the ways in which your partner has taught you something new.
Fourth, only after all of this can you go on to try and rebut or criticize their position.
What I’m reading/watching:
Behold: an echinoderm - Kerstin Meyer/Moment Open/Getty Images
A quote
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”
A dad joke
What kind of people never get angry?
Nomads.
Take care of yourself, man!
Geoff Girvitz
Father, founder, physical culturist
dadstrength.com