158: EXACTLY how to regulate your nervous system so you don't overeat

You know that moment when you start eating and you feel like you just can't stop, like somebody else's hands are putting food into your mouth and you keep going back to the pantry or the fridge for more and more bites. You feel out of control. You know you're going to regret it in the morning but you just don't care in that moment. The reason why you do this has nothing to do with the fact that you think food is a dicting or that you don't have willpower and it has everything to do with your nervous system. And in this episode I'm going to teach you exactly how to regulate your nervous system so you don't overeat anymore. This is the only thing that was able to set me free from the 15 plus year struggle that I had with food and my body and binge eating and restricting the chaos that you are probably familiar with if you're listening to this episode. Nobody is talking about this. I feel like I'm the only one who's shouting it from the rooftops and so I can wait for you to listen and have so many breakthrough realizations in this episode. If you're listening to the show and you've been enjoying it feel free to give it a rating. I like leave a review. It helps the show reach more people who are struggling with food so they can be free from the struggles and so that would mean so much to me if you're able to do that. Let's dive right in. [Music] Work at throughout the week and they're playing this really ethereal spa music in the background and I'm sure you can hear it as I'm recording so we're just going to go with it because this is the only option that we have right now. I'm so excited to record this episode. This is an episode that has been requested by so many listeners. I get DMs all the time asking me, okay, Ashlyn, I know that you're sharing that the reason why I struggle with food is because of my nervous system but how do I actually regulate my nervous system so I don't overeat or I don't binge? And if I would have listened to this episode when I was struggling with food it would have saved me years and thousands of dollars that I spent on therapists and coaches and programs that didn't actually work. And I wish I would have listened to it back then so if you're listening to this right now consider yourself lucky because you're not going to have to struggle as long as I did. I want to start out this episode by sharing me story with you that shows you what's possible when you actually heal at a nervous system level. I always remind my clients that you are designed to experience ease with food. Food is truly supposed to feel as easy as peeing. Like you know how you wake up every day and you don't even think about how many times you're going to pee, you're not tracking your peeing in an app, you're not obsessing about if you pee too much or not enough, you just let your body guide you. That is how eating is supposed to feel as well and if it doesn't feel like that for you right now it's because you have unhealed root causes. It's because your nervous system is using food for regulation and so you're unable to just eat with connection to your built-in calorie calculator and you're eating food to try and create safety and relief and regulation. Two of my clients, guys this is a crazy story that I have to tell you. Two of my clients, Kathleen and Jordan, shout out to both of you. I love you so much. They met each other through heart-led eating or in the alumni membership now and they've become friends through heart-led eating which just gives me goosebumps and they decided to go on a trip together. They decided to travel together to meet each other in person and just spend friend time together and they posted this win in the community this week. They, I'm not going to read it too because it's quite long but they essentially shared that they have been going out to dinner, they've been getting desserts and they even bought a slice of ice cream cake and decided to save it for later because they didn't have any space left in their stomach and then in the morning they forgot it was even there and opened the fridge and realized that it was there and they hadn't even eaten it yet and I know that Kathleen's, she shared, she said, "From you personally I've spent so many holidays completely consumed by food and by thoughts about my body. Every meal was an event I leave feeling too full and too heavy in more ways than one. The idea of having a special treat nearby and simply not thinking about it, that version of me would not have believed this was possible. I'm so proud of both of you girls. You know how much I love you and for anyone listening I want you to know that this can become your experience as well when you actually heal at a nervous system level. And so we all know that moment when you feel out of control with food. For me this often happened at nighttime but it could happen at any point of the day where you feel like you're full, like you know your physical body doesn't need any more food but somehow you just can't stop eating. A lot of times we say things like, "Screw it!" or "I don't even care, it doesn't matter, I'll just start over tomorrow." Maybe you feel like you're eating a larger amount of food but not even realizing that you're eating it until the bag is empty or the bag is gone or maybe you're super aware of the fact that you're overeating but you just feel like you can't stop yourself. It feels like somebody else's hands are putting food into your mouth. I want you to know that you're not addicted to food. Food addiction is not real. I'm going to make a whole episode about why food addiction is not real. And if food were truly addicting then every single person on this planet would struggle with this and like I'm going to share with you there are lots of naturally thin people, natural eaters who do not feel addicted to food and also you can heal from this. So I used to think that I was addicted to food. I used to think that highly palatable foods were designed to make me feel out of control with them but now I can eat these foods and not overeat them and forget that they're there and leave half of them without even thinking about it which tells me that it's not my brain that's addicted to the food. It's something else going on. You also don't have a willpower problem. The reason why you can't stop overeating has nothing to do with the amount of willpower that you have. We all have the same amount of willpower and naturally thin people have the same amount of willpower that you do. I went through a phase in my food healing journey where I was still overeating in binge eating even though I wasn't restricting. I know a lot of times we talk about how a big root cause of overeating in binge eating is restricting. When you are intentionally eating less maybe you're tracking your food, you're cutting out certain food groups. You have this holding back energy around food. Think about that as like a slingshot that is getting pulled back. It's inevitable at some point that it's going to fly forward in the opposite direction. The restricting pulling back is going to fly forward into the overeating and the binge eating. And so we could talk about the nervous system all day long. We could talk about all the emotional, mental, subconscious root causes but if you are still restricting your food, if you're still obsessing about your calories or cutting out certain foods or trying to eat as little as possible or ignoring hunger, that is going to lead to desires to overeat, urges to overeat. And we need to address that restriction problem first before we can address the nervous system side of things. There was a point along my journey where I wasn't restricting anymore. I was no longer trying to eat 500 calories a day like I was as a teenager. I wasn't necessarily cutting out food groups but I was still overeating. I was still binge eating and a lot of times like I mentioned before this would happen for me at night time where I would feel like I had eaten quote unquote good all day. I had eaten within the boundaries of my body all day but then night time would come and I would feel like a bottomless pit where I would have one dessert after dinner and that would turn into another and then more snacks and more snacks and snacks all throughout the night. And I realized I'm not going to share all the details of my story because I've shared it in other episodes and there's so much to it but I realized that the reason why I was still struggling with overeating was because I had ties in my brain. I had neurological pathways in my brain linking food to regulation. I was using food as a nervous system regulator and I couldn't find anybody who was talking about this. I was studying polyvagal theory, the works of Dr. Stephen Porgis who created polyvagal theory and really deep diving into the three different states of the nervous system and how it impacts our perception of reality and life and our behaviors and thoughts and feelings. And I realized that there's this huge overlap between the nervous system and disordered eating or out of order eating disconnected eating. And I couldn't find anybody talking about this. This is why the years of therapy that I went to and coaches that I worked with never actually healed me permanently is because none of them were actually addressing the nervous system. And ultimately this is why I ended up creating heart-led eating. I created my own method, my own system which was the only thing that actually worked for me and now has worked for 400 plus clients which is so crazy. I'm obsessed with what I do. And let me explain this to you. Let me break this down to you in a really practical way so you understand what's actually happening. You're using food, you're using excess food as a buffer from your feelings, from sensations in your body. That might sound kind of woo but let me actually explain this at a science level. When you eat anytime you put food into your mouth, the motion of your jaw moving up and down and your teeth biting the food, it actually engages different muscles in your face, your head, your neck, your jaw that are connected to your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body and it is connected to your autonomic nervous system, especially your parasympathetic nervous system, the nervous system that's responsible for rest, digest, safety. So when you're eating, you're stimulating this nerve and you're helping to create a feeling of safety in your body. So think about if you are not feeling safe in your body or if you're feeling dysregulated, if there's fight or flight, freeze, fawn, shut down flop, if any of those states are existing, and you start to eat, you actually create a little temporary moment of relief of regulation, just from chewing. And then if we follow the food down deeper into your body, once the food actually lands in your stomach, especially once you stretch and crowd your stomach full and you start to stretch the actual stomach organ itself, it presses on and stimulates the vagus nerve again, which creates another feeling of safety and groundedness in your body. This is temporary because of course after the high of the eating experience wears off, you often feel worse and it sometimes sends your nervous system even deeper into dysregulation, which is why a lot of times we have something that I call fixing food with food where you overeat, you binge, you experience relief, but then the relief wears off and you feel guilty, you feel worse, you feel bad, and then you have another urge to keep eating because your only mechanism for creating safety is their food, so you're eating more food to try and fix the problem that food created in the first place, fixing food with food. The buffer that you get from eating wears off eventually. So it's brilliant because your brilliant nervous system is just trying to create safety and regulation, but it doesn't actually work in the long run, which is probably why you're listening to this episode because you want to stop doing this, it doesn't feel good in the long run and of course it's going to create excess storage on your body, which also doesn't feel good. When we overeat, when we crowd the stomach, we're creating a feeling of safety internally and for me it always felt like putting on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. If you've ever put on noise-cancelling headphones, it's like all of that intense annoying, stimulating sound around you just kind of dissolves for the moment when you put on the headphones, especially if you've ever worn these headphones on an airplane or in an airport where there's like so much annoying noise going on, it feels so good when you put those headphones on. The same feeling can happen when we overeat. It's like all of that background anxiety or stress or emotions that you don't feel like looking at or feeling temporarily dissolve and all you can feel and focus on is the pleasure in your mouth, the feeling of the food, the relief and regulation that you're getting in your nervous system and it actually dulls your ability to feel as easily. When we are full, when our stomach is stretched and crowded, there's no space left for us to actually feel and be with our emotions. If you want to feel your feelings more intensely, get nice and hungry because hunger is an amplifier when our stomach is empty. We have so much space and if we actually look at this from a nervous system level, we have more sensitivity in the nervous system and we can actually feel things more deeply when we are not full, which is why, as a side note, this is why a lot of religions and spiritual practices they often encourage fasting for when you really want to feel God, you really want to hear God, you really want to connect with God, because when you are nice and empty, you can really feel the intensity of your emotions and of your life because there's no buffer, there's no noise cancelling headphones. So you're probably not aware that you're doing this. It's not like you're getting to the end of the day and saying, "I need to use food as a buffer or I don't want to feel my feelings or I just feel stressed so I want to crowd my stomach out so I don't have to feel that stress." You're probably just thinking, "Mm, cookies sound good or chocolate sounds good, like let me eat, I have this desire to eat and you think the reason why you're overeating is just because it tastes so good or because you enjoy the pleasure, but subconsciously beneath your conscious awareness, your nervous system is orchestrating this and knows, okay, there's sensation here that she doesn't feel safe to be with, we don't really have the capacity to tap into it or to hold it. And so let's use, let's create this urge for food, let me give her a desire to eat so that way we can dull this sensation, we can dull the intensity and we can survive another day because it feels like danger, feels like your life is at threat or at risk. Can you relate to this? Can you think about the last time that you overeat? Did your emotions kind of dissolve? Did you feel less stressed in that moment? Did you feel like your life kind of faded into the background and you were just immersed in the pleasure of the food and maybe the TV or whatever you were watching at the same time? I would guess that you can relate to this and if you're not sure, the next time that you're overeating or binge eating, I would encourage you to just connect in with your body, give yourself permission to keep eating, you don't need to say, I need to stop overeating, I need to stop bingeing, that's gonna actually make you want to do it even more. Give yourself permission to use food as a regulator and just notice how your emotions feel less intense when you're full. I know I had many experiences like this once I discovered and understood the connection between eating and my nervous system where I would give myself permission to overeat or to binge in the beginning of my healing journey and I realized so clearly how much less intense my feelings were when I was full. It's like suddenly the only thing I could focus on was the pressure in my stomach or the food in my stomach and all of the life problems that I had before or the emotions that I had before didn't even seem to exist anymore and that was a huge aha moment for me because I saw firsthand how my eating issues were actually solutions to my problem. I always say you don't have a food problem, you have a food solution, you're using food to solve the problems in your life, you're using food to solve the dysregulation or to try and create relief, a buffer from feelings, it's actually brilliant that you're overeating. So in order to actually heal from all of this the answer is to quote-unquote regulate your nervous system and I have so much to say about this because I feel like it's trending all over social media people are saying you need to regulate your nervous system but like what does that even mean? What are we talking about? Let's get really practical here. Regulating your nervous system does not mean taking bubble baths, face masks, meditating, journaling, taking a deep breath. These are great self-care things, they're maybe helpful tools but these are not going to actually move the needle if you have nervous system dysregulation linked to overeating. This is what a lot of the coaches and therapists that I worked with before told me to do. You know it was like okay you need to take better care of yourself, you need to have more self-care, you need to maybe meditate or do breath work or journal your feelings or when you have an urge to overeat you just need to take a deep breath and tell me comment in the podcast comments or tell me on Instagram like did those things actually work for you because they definitely did not work for me. The goal of nervous system regulation is not to just make ourselves feel calm. Naturally thin people like you know your friends who don't ever struggle with their weight they are always thin they eat whatever like they just seem to be these magical unicorns. These people if you're not new here you know I say this all the time these people are not magical they just have a very different relationship with food than you do and they're not overeating or not binging and so therefore they're never in this massive calories or plus and they don't gain weight. These people are not calm all the time. They experience nervous system dysregulation and they still don't overeat. The reason why is because naturally thin people don't have neurological pathways linking food to regulation. When they experience dysregulation their brain doesn't say oh let's use food to solve this. They haven't created those neurological pathways they can create them which is why sometimes you might know people who were naturally thin maybe in their younger years and suddenly they are struggling with their weight now and they're like what's going on I used to have such an easy relationship with food and now I'm gaining weight it's because the same thing happened to them that is maybe happened to you where suddenly their brain learned that they could use food as a regulator and then they repeated that and it laid down these neurological pathways in their brain and now they have urges to overeat that weren't there before and so you can heal or let go of these neurological pathways you can weaken them and get to the point where they don't exist anymore and you can experience nervous system dysregulation without having an urge to overeat. This is my reality now. It's hard for me to even explain it or believe it because it just feels like magic even though I know it wasn't magic it required a lot of work but now if I am stressed anxious sad lonely I don't have urges to binge or overeat. I'm experiencing nervous system dysregulation but I don't want to eat on top of that dysregulation think about I was thinking about this earlier this week think about the word overeating like what are you eating over you're overeating because you're eating over your feelings you're putting food on top of your feelings you're eating over them which is why you're doing it you're doing it to try and cover up or sugar coat that actual feeling I don't have urges to do that anymore because I unlinked those neurological pathways by growing my nervous system capacity and this is really what I mean when I say learning how to regulate your nervous system what I mean is learning how to be with sensation in your body and create safety in that sensation so that way you don't need to escape whatever state that you're in. It's not the anxiety that's the problem or the stress that's the problem or the sadness or the depression the goal the goal that I have for my clients isn't to just get them happy all the time so they never overeat. It's to allow their system to ride the waves of life, to be with the full spectrum of life, to feel depressed and lonely and sad and anxious and scared and feel safe in that experience, feel okay in that experience and to have a flexible nervous system that can actually get back to safety when the threat dissolves. Your chronic nervous system dysregulation happens when our nervous system gets locked in a state for a long time. So this is where you feel like you are stuck in fight or flight or you're stuck in freeze or you're stuck in shutdown for long periods of time. That is what I would call real nervous system dysregulation. But just experiencing emotions on a daily basis is not a problem that's actually healthy. The goal that we want to have is flexibility in our nervous system where we can experience dysregulation but then come back to safety quite quickly. That's the resilience that we're looking for in the nervous system. You can kind of think about it like a highway. Like you're driving down the highway, a healthy flexible nervous system is a highway that has a flow of traffic. Like you're in the car, you can switch lanes. That would be like you switching nervous system states like you can go into your anxiety, you can go into stress, you can go into shutdown, into sadness. But you're still, there's still forward movement. Like there's still flow happening. Your system can get back to the other lane when it feels ready. It can get back to regulation when it feels ready and there's, there's flexibility. There's flow to it. A dysregulated nervous system, an un-flexible nervous system would be like a traffic jam where all the cars are stuck. No one can move. You're, there's not a lot of flow. You can't really change lanes. Like everything's just kind of locked down. And overeating is like you just getting on the exit ramp to leave the highway. It's like I can't, I don't know how to deal with this. Like I don't know how to get it flowing again. So let me just exit. Let me get off the highway. And that would be like you being stuck in a nervous system state, not knowing how to get back to safety and just using food over eating to try and create temporary relief. But it doesn't actually solve the problem long term because you're not getting where you need to go. You're not moving forward. You're just leaving. You're leaving your body. You're putting the buffer. You're putting the noise, canceling headphones on, on top of the actual problem. And so the answer here is not to feel calm all the time. The answer is to grow your capacity to be with your life, to be with sensations without needing food to regulate your system for you. You can regulate your system. You can get back to safety. You don't need food to pull you back to safety or cover up the feelings that are in your body. So how do you actually do that? The big question is how do I actually grow my capacity? How do I actually grow my ability to be with sensations? There are three things that you need to do. I'm going to share them with you right here. These are the three things that I did. This is what I've guided hundreds of women through. This is exactly what I teach inside heart-led eating. So if you're wanting to do these things, if you want me to personally walk you through them, click the link in the show notes to join us inside heart-led eating. But I'm going to share them with you right here. The first thing you need to do is heal your root cause. Because a lot of nervous system dysregulation is actually the result of unprocessed emotions and trauma from your past. This is what I call the root causes. And there are seven of them or eight of them. I can't even remember right now. Seven or eight of them that I discovered and shared inside heart-led eating. And we can't just address your nervous system without figuring out why is your nervous system getting locked in these states of shutdown or fight or flight for long periods of time? Like what actually triggered that? Because you were born and created with a healthy nervous system. And what probably happened is you had parents who didn't have a ton of nervous system tools or a lot of resilience and flexibility in their own nervous systems. And as kids we actually just copy and paste the nervous system capacity of our parents onto ourselves. And so your capacity is just a reflection of your parents' capacity unless you've done a lot of work on growing it and healing it later on in your life. And so that could be one possibility is that you just didn't have capacity, great capacity from your parents, all the love to your parents, but just the truth. Also if you experienced trauma at some point in your life, which most of us have, whether it's capital T trauma or lowercase T trauma, these things can sometimes get stuck in the body, they don't get processed properly and it creates this chronic state of dysregulation. It's like you have all these tabs open on your computer that are all frozen or loading, like they haven't, the pages haven't actually loaded and you can't close the page until it loads. So a little trauma happens or a big trauma happens and it doesn't get processed, it doesn't get moved through the body and it just creates this little loading page in your system. And eventually you have all of these pages open and loading. And it overwhelms the computer, the computer freezes, the computer's not working. That is chronic nervous system dysregulation. All of these unhealed traumas, unprocessed emotions are just hanging, loading in your system. And until we actually process them, feel them, move them through the body, not just talk about them in therapy, but actually some medically release them through the physical body, that's when the page can finish loading, we can close the tab and your system can actually come back online and it will respond more easily. It's not going to get that doom beach ball loading thing that never goes away. So that's the first thing you need to do to grow your capacity is actually heal the root cause. The second thing is you need to learn how to access safety in your body and in your life. The felt feeling of safety is something that a lot of us maybe haven't experienced. And if you're listening to me saying that saying like, I don't really know, have I felt safe in my body? If you're asking that question, you haven't. Because you will know when you do. I still remember the moment where I was in a coaching session with one of my somatic nervous system coaches and she was guiding me through a practice that now I share inside heart led eating to help access safety in my body. And I remember finishing that practice and saying to her, I think that's the first time I've ever felt safe in my body because it was such a felt experience. It wasn't a thought. It wasn't me like affirmationing my way to safety. It was just this deep feeling of I am here. I am safe all as well. God's got me. Everything is going to work out. It was an internal feeling of peace, bliss, connection with all. And until you learn how to actually access that on a daily basis, it's going to be really hard to grow your nervous system capacity or feel emotions, feel sensations because you have nothing to anchor you. You have nothing to create a baseline underneath the waves of life to hold you. We can't just force ourselves to do these crazy somatic releases and throw pillows and punch pillows and scream and cry if we don't have a baseline of safety. We need that first and then we can venture out and start to be with more intense emotions or traumas in our life. The third thing is you need to learn how to actually feel these sensations in your body from the neck down. And like I said before, this isn't about journaling or talking to your therapist. This is about learning how to actually feel feelings in your physical body. Sometimes when I talk about this now, I'm like, duh, this is so simple. Of course, but I know when I first started doing this, it felt revolutionary for me. It felt shocking to me. It felt like this whole new experience that I was going through and I know that I hear that from clients all the time where they say, I feel like this is the first time in my life where I know what you mean when you say, feel your feelings. Like, I know how to actually do that and what that looks like. And I was definitely not doing it before me too, because that was the story of my life. When you learn how to do that and you can only do that once you have actually learned how to access safety in your body, then everything starts to change in your life, not just food because this is really the root cause of all of it is you don't want to feel. You don't feel safe to feel. So of course, once you do feel safe to feel and you want to feel, you're not going to want to eat on top of the feelings. You would rather feel than eat, which is how naturally then people are. They get the ick from overeating because they don't like the way that that feels in their stomach. They would rather feel their life. They'd rather save space for feelings in their life than eat on top of them. So that's going to change for you. But beyond that, your entire life is going to change. Your relationships with your family, your friends, your romantic relationships, your business, your job, your career, your relationship with God. I cannot think of a single area of my life that has not changed from growing right nervous system capacity. It has drastically changed how much money I make, the friends I have in my life, my business, my romantic relationships, every single area has changed because of this one thing. It truly feels like magic, even though it's not magic. This is exactly what I teach inside heartlady eating, how to actually grow your nervous system capacity, heal your relationship with food at a nervous system level. Nobody else is talking about this. And it's literally the most important thing. You know, eat like a naturally thin person, learn the very practical, and practical is the best word, like nuanced ways of eating. I'm not going to hear to just tell you, eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full, because that never worked for me either. We need to actually learn the nitty gritty details of eating like a naturally thin person. So you know exactly how to know when, what, and how much food to eat and how to process urges and feelings and emotions when you have desires to eat outside of those boundaries. The link to heartlady eating is in the show notes as always. It would be an honor to support you there. And I can't wait to talk to you. next Tuesday. [BLANK_AUDIO]