Extending the Window of Tolerance

How to break through the barriers of your biggest obstacles

Fort McHenry Tunnel credit: turnpikeinfo.com

A little over four years ago I had a panic attack while behind the wheel of my car. Entering Fort McHenry Tunnel — driving with my wife and kids back to Queens from Baltimore, a drive I’d made back from my sister’s countless times before — I was convinced I wasn’t going to get us out of the tunnel alive. 

That was the longest one and a half mile stretch of my life. It’s cliched, but it felt like those moments in movies when everything slows down around the main character. I couldn’t speak and my whole body felt off. Was I having a heart attack? Was I going to pass out? Could my family even tell what was happening with me? 

Even if I could talk, what would I say to my wife and small children?

“This might sound crazy, but I think I’m going to crash this car and we’re probably all going to die.”

Scene from “Clueless”

Daylight again; we made it out of the tunnel safely. The overwhelming fear and indescribable physical feelings that washed over me subsided. WTF was that?!

Before that moment, driving didn’t scare me in the slightest. I had driven cross-country from NY to California and back, and down the eastern seaboard more than once. On family visits across Ireland, I’ve driven on the other side of the road multiple times.

I even enjoyed the Mario Kart feeling of driving around my neighborhood streets of Queens and over the bridges to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and The Bronx. I wasn’t afraid to play chicken with a bike messenger, MTA bus driver, yellow cab, gypsy cab, dollar cab, you name it. They weren’t cutting me off.

It would be many months before I would finally muster up the courage to go see a doctor and then a therapist to find out what was happening. I learned I was among the lucky 5% of the population to experience a panic attack.

Unfortunately, before finding therapy I discovered I also possessed the super power ability to spontaneously trigger a panic attack simply by asking myself “what if it happens while doing ‘x’?” 

The short answer is I would inevitably have one if I thought about what would happen. I soon dreaded and avoided anything I thought would trigger a panic attack. I wasn’t afraid of the activities that could potentially cause them, just the panic attacks themselves.

Initially it was just driving. Living in NYC didn't make that seem like the end of the world. I had the subway and cabs to easily rely on.

Then they started happening everywhere.

On job interviews, going on airplanes, being a passenger in a car, going over bridges, going through tunnels. I had “what if’d” them into so many aspects of my life. I felt embarrassed, ashamed, and isolated. Slowly I told some people about them, but not everyone.

At a particularly low point I even skipped a friend’s funeral because I couldn’t get myself there and didn’t want to explain why I couldn’t drive myself to those who weren’t in the know.

My first therapist helped me get a sense of what likely caused them, but that didn’t help to make them go away. As much as I wished it was possible, there was no taking her diagnosis to the source of my trauma to return the panic attacks. “Excuse me, you can take these back. I don’t like the way they fit,” wasn’t going to work. 

Fast forward to five days ago; I drove for a 3 mile stretch on a major highway for the first time since the Fort McHenry Tunnel four plus years ago. Two days later I drove 100 miles on NJ’s Garden State Parkway. 

My palms were sweaty at parts, and I wasn’t even sure if I could go through with it even as I buckled my seat belt and moved the gear shift out of park. But what I had discovered is “extending the window of tolerance” was what was going to get me back behind the wheel.

Extending the window of tolerance really forced me to switch mentalities from “when will these go away?” to “how quickly can I tolerate them?”

Extending the window of tolerance is a phrase I only heard a few weeks ago, but it immediately resonated.

I was beginning to tinker with documenting my own 30 day sprint of personal experimentation and this concept instantly became the shiny new top priority thrown into the sprint. No grooming, no pointing of complexity or effort, and no clear acceptance criteria. But still straight to the top of the priority list.

For any of you non-product people reading this, the above is basically a laundry list of sure fire ways to make a team of developers and project managers HATE you. It’s like ripping up a signed agreement and shrugging, “what?”

Within a matter of 2 weeks I was noticing drastic changes in my driving behavior as I documented small attempts to extend my window of tolerance in my giant excel spreadsheet of a journal. Had I cracked it; a 2 week solution to panic attacks?

Sorry to disappoint, but I haven’t cracked the quick and painless way. My “aha” moment was that I’d unknowingly been making these small intentional steps for a couple years while Google mapping and Strava-ing my way to becoming a new runner.

I visualized driving again on nearly all of those runs. When I moved out of NYC a year ago, I knew I had to break out of my comfort zone and I learned the lay of the land almost entirely by running through this new world of New Jersey. 

The slow journey to driving back on multi-lane roads, roads with traffic lights, roads with left turns across multiple lanes, roads with speed limits above 30 mph each started with a map and a run. Small, intentional, and repeated steps.

I can’t oversimplify and lie. There were multiple doctors, therapists, trying meds, and advice from family and great friends included in this path too. Small, intentional, and repeated steps, none the less.

I hope your obstacle to conquer is easier than panic attacks and doesn't leave you a crying puddle of a grown man re-attempting drivers ed., and emotionally breaking down on Queens Boulevard.

But if it does... keep at it. Extend your window of tolerance and keep turning that wall into a tolerable annoyance.

If that first window of tolerance is just admitting you have panic attacks and telling someone about them, start there.

I suppose I missed out by a couple days to join in for May’s Mental Health Awareness month, but here’s to using June and every month to keep fighting the stigmas that come along with asking for help and seeking treatment.