181: How to grow your nervous system capacity (so you don't need food as a buffer)

If you feel like you can't stop eating once you start or you have random urges to snack throughout the day, eat when you're not hungry, you feel a lot of control around food. It's not a food problem, food is not a dicting, it is a capacity problem. Your nervous system can't hold all of the sensations existing inside your body and your life. And so food is acting like the life preserver, like the buffer to rescue you. And the answer is you need to learn how to grow your nervous system capacity. So in this episode I'm gonna break down what that is, how to actually tell if you have a small capacity and exactly how you can grow your capacity so you don't need to use food as a buffer. Ashlyn, I'm the owner and creator and CEO of Heartlead Wellness and Heartlead Eating. And this is a podcast where I dive into how to become naturally thin and heal your relationship with food on a nervous system level. If you're loving these episodes, please give the show a rating and a review. It means the world to me. It helps these episodes reach more people like you who can be impacted. So thank you for taking the time to do that and let's dive right in. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to talk about today on this podcast and I was thinking about the things that I talk about every single day on Instagram and one of them is nervous system capacity. I'm always talking about how the reason why you struggle with food is because you have a small nervous system capacity. And then I realized that I haven't actually made an entire episode dedicated to how to actually grow your nervous system capacity. So that is why we are sitting here. I'm looking out of my apartment window at the sun setting over the river. It is so gorgeous. And I'm just feeling really grateful to be here recording this episode with you. So if you've been a long time listener, thank you for being here. If you're new and you just found this podcast, I'm also grateful that you're here as well. Let's start with talking about what nervous system capacity actually is and simplify this. So you can understand it. Think about capacity like your ability to hold sensation, like feelings, but not just like the emotional language of I feel stressed. I feel sad, but like the actual sensation of it inside your body. And the best way that I can always explain this to my clients is by thinking about a cup. Your nervous system is the cup. And the feelings, the sensation is water that drops into the cup, little water droplets that fall inside of that cup. And so when the cup is really small or when it's already really full of water, water starts to spill over the edges. And when we say growing our capacity, we're talking about getting a bigger cup. We're talking about having a bucket instead of a shot glass or a giant mixing bowl instead of a tea cup. And when we have a bigger container for the water, we can actually hold more sensation. We can hold more of life without it spilling over. And when the water spills over, that is when we end up using things like food, which I'm going to talk about in a minute, to try and mop up the mess or try and regain some sense of safety. So whenever I say you need to grow your nervous system capacity, I'm referring to getting a bigger container, a bigger cup, so you can be with more sensation. It's not actually about being calm all the time, feeling zen, being in this meditative state all the time, absolutely not. I would say I feel way more emotional and chaotic than I ever felt before in my nervous system capacity is bigger than it's ever been before. I just feel safe to be with the feelings inside of me instead of trying to avoid them or run from them. So here are some signs that your nervous system capacity is small and has room for improvement. And I had almost everything I wanted these before. So if you resonate with these, you're not alone. Controlling tendencies. If you feel the need to have things be perfect, be a certain way in order to feel okay. You really like things to be super structured and organized and scheduled. If you feel numb or checked out, especially from your body, maybe you feel like you can't really access your feelings, you feel kind of disconnected, disassociated, feeling just disconnected from your body in general, living in your head, being an overthinker, really loving to journal and talk about your feelings and not really feeling them through your body, but just thinking them through. OCD like patterns is a really common one, putting everything in perfect order in order to feel safe, having a lot of rituals and routines that you need to do in order to feel safe. And I know sometimes when we say the word OCD, that can feel really medical and big, but almost all of my clients have some form of OCD. This is not diagnosed, but when I'm talking to them, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's totally an OCD thing because we are doing that to try and create a sense of control and safety. All are nothing thinking, really living in extremes, black and white, easily spiraling over small things, having a hard time sitting still or resting, liking to fill your schedule super full all the time, working all the time, not needing or not being able to take breaks and rest, needing to stay busy so you don't feel your feelings, even just needing to constantly be stimulated. So having your phone always on, music always on, listening to podcasts and music all the time, eating all the time, chewing gum all the time, working all the time, just needing constant stimulation, fidgeting all the time, not being able to tolerate uncertainty or mess, really not liking moments where you don't know what's going to happen, but I know. But this is one reason why I used to hate watching movies when I was younger is because I had no idea what was going to happen and that uncertainty, the big build up, the whole movie of what's going to happen would just stress me out so much, feeling raw or too much or just completely depleted after a normal day, and then of course using food, scrolling, work, alcohol, drugs, other habits to take the edge off in your day. So if you resonate with any of these things, you're in the right place because you can absolutely grow your capacity and these behaviors will naturally shift as you do that. So let's take this over to the world of eating and food because when you have a small capacity and you don't feel safe to be with sensation in your body, food becomes the way and eating becomes the way that you actually attempt to create the safety and the regulation. So imagine your cup is overflowing, the water is spilling out the edges. That is the moment that you have an urge, an urge to binge, an urge to overeat and urge to grab a snack, even though you're not hungry because subconsciously, you're not going to be aware that this is happening in the moment. I know anytime I used to overeat, I was never thinking, "Okay, I feel really anxious right now and I don't feel safe to feel anxious so I'm going to eat something." It was never like that. It was always just, "Mmm, these look good or this tastes good. I want to keep going." Oh, I want to bite of that. I was never thinking about my feelings, which is actually the problem. I was just focusing on the food and so I thought it was just a food thing. But behind the scenes in my subconscious and my nervous system, which you don't actually have conscious access to, my nervous system was saying, "Alert, alert, alert. We don't know how to feel this feeling. This feels too much. We're outside of our window of tolerance. Our capacity is full. We've maxed out. We need immediate relief. We need something to rescue us." And when we eat, when we chew, it actually engages the muscles of the face, the neck, the head, the jaw that are connected to the vagus nerve, and it stimulates your vagus nerve. This is crazy. And so by doing that, it actually helps your nervous system feel safe. It gives you a little relief, a little hit of safety. And then if that's already not blowing your mind, once the food comes into your stomach organ and it stretches on your stomach organ. So this happens when you overeat and we crowd the stomach full. It also stimulates the vagus nerve and it decreases our sensitivity to feelings. So just notice this next time that you overeat, notice if you actually feel less emotional after you overeat. And the reason why this is happening is because you're so full, all you feel is the physical fullness and the way that that physical fullness is shifting your nervous system, it actually buffers you. This is what I mean when I say food buffers you from your feelings. It actually creates this fuzz over your feelings, over your nervous system and you don't have to feel what's actually there for you. But the feelings don't leave. So those water molecules that were spilling over the edge of the cup that you've just mopped up with food, they don't actually disappear. They get trapped in your body as excess storage. If we eat an excess, we will create excess on the body. When capacity maxes out, overeating begins. So we're using food to try and mop up the mess. We're trapping the emotion onto the body and we're creating excess storage and we're going to have to deal with it at some point in the future. And what that point in the future is when you join HeartLead eating and you learn how to release energy off your body and also tap pain off your body, you're going to have to go through a retroactive feeling process of feeling the emotions that have been trapped on your body. And so hopefully you can see that when we are overeating, when we're eating outside the boundaries of our body, this is happening because our nervous system capacity is overflowing and it's like the emergency break. It's the last ditch effort that the system has to try and create relief. And this isn't just a food thing. So this can show up with other buffers so some people don't have food problems. They use alcohol. They use drugs. They use cigarettes. They use scrolling. They use work. Anything that numbs you or takes you out of sensation can be used as a buffer. So we're not trying to remove all the stress from our life. That's actually impossible. Sometimes I'll have people reach out to me and be like, Ashley, and I have five kids. I'm a stay at home mom. I also have this job that I'm working and I'm doing all of these things. I'm too stressed to heal. And I always say, well, we can't get rid of your kids. We can't get rid of your stress. Instead of getting rid of the stress, we need to actually grow your capacity to be with the stress. So you don't need a buffer, not just a food buffer, but you don't need a buffer at all. And this brings me to the next thing that I often get asked is, do all naturally thin people just have a big capacity? Like if we look at the people who don't have issues with food and are naturally thin, do they just have this big capacity? Not necessarily. Some of them do, but some of them don't. So some of these naturally thin people, they do have a big capacity. And this might be because they grew up without a lot of trauma, they grew up with parents who also had big nervous system capacities because our capacity is often just a direct reflection of our parents capacities unless we've done work on it. And so maybe that's the case for them. They grew up in a really healthy home environment and they do have a big capacity and they don't actually have a lot of buffers in their life. But there are definitely naturally thin people out there who have other buffers besides food. They're not using food as a buffer, but maybe they use drugs, maybe they use alcohol, maybe they use other more socially acceptable buffers, like scrolling, shopping, working, things like that, working out even. And so my goal for you when I want you to heal is not to just become thin, that's so lame. I don't want you to just be thin. I want you to be a whole more evolved, more healed version of you. I don't want you to just swap food for another buffer. I want you to grow your capacity so you can live your life with as few buffers as possible. And over time, as you keep going through your life once you learn how to do nervous system work and learn how to grow your capacity, which I'm going to get to in a minute, you can keep decreasing the buffers you're using. I really don't think it's possible to have, I don't know, I might change my mind about this at some point, but right now I really don't think it's possible to have zero buffers. I think maybe the only person who's had zero buffers is Jesus. I don't know if there's anybody else. I think that as humans, we are imperfect and we're going to have flaws and we're going to have buffers. And of course, we can decrease the intensity of the buffers we're using. So maybe you start out as a heroin addict and then you move to alcohol and then you move to food and then you move to shopping and then you move to scrolling and then you move to working and then you move to, I don't know, something less intense than that. It's like, let's decrease the intensity of the buffers that we're using. But we don't have to use food as a buffer. We don't have to use drugs, we don't use alcohol. We can like really address these bigger buffers that are present and as you keep growing your capacity, you'll need less and less and less of those buffers. And so yeah, I want you to become naturally thin. I know I talk about that all the time on social media. There's not a lot of room for nuance and context, which is why I love chatting on the podcast. But more than that, I want you to grow your capacity so you need less buffers in all areas of your life, not just with eating. Another really common myth that I hear when it comes to nervous system work is people think that growing your capacity just means trying to calm yourself down or bubble baths or walking or meditation. A lot of times I'll get DMs from people saying, "Ashlyn, I've been meditating all this time. Like I've been doing all this nervous system work by meditating." And I'm like, "Meditation is great. Like no hate on meditation, but it's not necessarily going to grow your capacity in the most effective way, at least from what I've seen through working with clients and in my own life." These sorts of self-care practices like bubble baths and walks and essential oils, they're great, but real nervous system capacity work is not about being calm, it's not about doing a spa day. It's about leaning into the mess of your feelings in your life safely and learning how to stay with sensation. So it's actually gonna look a lot more chaotic and crazy and more tantrum-like than a bubble bath. And we need to be able to go into the mess of that to actually grow our capacity. In the same way that you don't get stronger by just focusing on recovery days at the gym, you have to actually put load on your body, you have to increase your strength, you have to hit that point of where your muscles are shaking. Same thing with our emotional capacity, we have to actually get into the mess and fuel the pain that's coming up, not just try and be calm all of the time. I definitely had a super small nervous system capacity in my past and that is why I had an eating disorder and I struggled with self-arm and lots of other coping strategies buffers to try and help me feel safe. But after I started learning how to grow my capacity and figured out why my cup was so full in the first place, which I'm gonna talk about, I am now able to tolerate so many things that used to send me into a spiral. Almost all of my OCD patterns have gone away, my ability to be with mess is so much better to be with uncertainty. I can watch movies now if you still do that. So many things I made a post on Instagram a few weeks ago of my apartment because when I was a kid, I always needed my room to be so perfectly clean all the time. Everything had to be exactly where I wanted it to be. I would never leave anything out. It had to be perfect, perfect, perfect. And if my mom came in and just moved one thing to like an inch to the left, I would know immediately. And I came home the other day from, I think I was at the co-working place to my apartment and there was stuff everywhere. I had drawers open, clothes on the floor, things all over the counter. And I looked at it and I was like, wow. I'm so proud of myself. Like this is places a mess, like I love this. And it wasn't bothering me at all because I've done so much work on my capacity. I'm not saying that you should leave your place a mess all the time, but for me, my ability to tolerate mess and chaos was something that I've worked a lot on now. And being okay with things, not always being perfect, not always being in order has changed my life in so many ways. And the last thing I want to talk about before I talk about how to actually grow your capacity is why is your cup so full in the first place? So if we come back to the cup analogy, we're trying to grow your cup, give you a bigger cup. But also, if we just have tons and tons of water inside the cup, we need to drain it out. And sometimes it's not that you have a tiny cup, it's just that you have so much water inside the cup that has nowhere to go. And that water is unprocessed emotions, unintegrated traumas, things that your body is still holding onto, your nervous system hasn't fully processed them. And so imagine you take like a needle or a knife and you poke a bunch of holes into the cup so the water can finally drain out. Even before you've grown your capacity, you're gonna feel better because you've drained some of that water out. And the way that we poke the holes, like what the holes represent, is learning how to process feelings, learning how to complete trauma loops, learning how to create safety in the body, letting the body release the charge that has been built up that hasn't been processed. And that's really important because we want to have both things. We want to have a drain in the cup and we want to grow the size of the cup so we can hold more in life. And so how do you actually go your capacity? I really can't actually just tell me how I actually do it. Here are some of the things that I use, things that I've done inside, or teach inside Heartlet Eating and what I found to be the most effective. Number one tool above all is somatics. I have another podcast episode that talks way more about somatics. So check that one out, just scroll. It's pretty recent. Look for the one that says somatics and you'll find it that goes into way more detail. And I also have a somatics master class. It's only $28 that teaches you the exact method that I've created that I use. I still use this every single day. But even if you don't purchase that, what you need to know is that somatics is essentially learning how to feel and express sensation in the body instead of thinking about it, journaling about it, talking about it, we learn to express it and process it and move it through. It's not dancing, you know, dancing is choreographed. There's steps, there's like a whole process. It's think of like a kid expressing an emotion. They're just feeling. They flail their arms around, they shake, they cry, they laugh, they giggle, they crawl up. I teach you how to do that in that somatics master class. So you can express and release the trapped pain inside of you. The second thing that's really, really, really important is learning how to create safety in the body, learning how to get your nervous system into that state of ventral vagal, that state of rest and digest, the state of safety. Because when we are safe, the body naturally releases pain. It's like, okay, everything, all the threats are gone. We can clean house, we can reboot the computer, we can get out of this dysregulated state and release the trapped pain inside of us. It just naturally happens when we can get ourselves into safety, but also in order to grow our capacity, we need to have safety. So just forcing yourself to feel intense emotions over and over and over again could actually re-traumatize your system. Instead, what we wanna do is feel safe inside the emotion and find our edge, but not push too far past that. If you try to force yourself to feel feelings that you aren't ready to feel, it can actually do more harm than good. We need to find the edge of sensation that we can be with, find safety there, and then over time, we slowly stretch the amount that we can be with. This is such a nuanced process. It's hard for me to even explain it inside one episode 'cause there's so much to it, and that is why I created the semantics master class and also why Heartlet eating exists because we go into. more detail with all of this. And it's also important that you have a practitioner, a coach, somebody to support you through this, because you're going to have questions. You're going to be like, "Am I doing this right? Should I be feeling this? What should I be doing in this situation?" And having somebody to bounce that off of is very supportive. So whether you end up joining heartlet eating or you end up working with someone else who's trained in somatic experiencing and nervous system work, I just encourage you to get support. And also check out that other podcasts that I have about somatics. I wanted to read this one win from one of my clients that is about somatics and growing her capacity because I think this really relates to what we've been talking about today. She said, "Somatics has been life-changing. I figured out how to integrate it into almost any activity like while driving in the car or even while at the amusement park with my son. I'm so tapped into the feelings within now that it's usually really easy and fast to take myself from fighter flight into ventral vagal. And I can see and feel when my nervous system is expanding its capacity in real time. So cool. Things that used to push me over the edge of my window of tolerance, which was very small. Hello life long anxiety. Do not phase me nearly as much. I have never been in touch with my emotions in my entire life until now." And that is just from somatics and heartlet eating. So if that's something you also want to experience, if you want to be able to feel like you're in your life, you don't need life to be less intense. You just feel like, "I'm here. I've got my life. I don't need food to rescue me from my life." Then you need to learn how to grow your nervous system capacity. And I'd love to support you with all of that inside heartlet eating. So you can clear out what's filling your cup up, poke holes in it, learn how to drain it out, learn how to get a bigger cup. So food doesn't have to be the buffer for you anymore. The link to heartlet eating and all the information that you need is in the show notes below. You can always DM me, email me if you have questions. I answer all of them. So you'll hear back from me personally. And I can't wait to see you there. And if not, I'll just talk to you next week on another episode. you