One of the biggest breakthrough moments for me in this whole healing journey that we've been on was when I learned that I might be binge eating because my brain and my nervous system needed that stimulus to function well, for fuel inactivation, to feel safe moving through the world. And maybe I needed all of that food to help my system modulate out of a high stress state into rest and recovery. And that was really transformative.
Welcome to Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host, Elizabeth Christof, founder of Brainbased.com Comma, an online community where we use applied neurology and somatics for behavior change, resilience and trauma resolution. And I'm also the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence coaching certification and ICF accredited course for therapists, coaches and practitioners to bring
transformation from the body to the brain. And I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace, a neuroseomatic psychedelic preparation and integration guide. I help people prepare their nervous systems to experience the healing benefits of peak somatic experiences and then bring those experiences safely into your body and into your life, working through the nervous system to create sustainable, lasting integration. And I'm also an educator at the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching certification and
disordered eating that we're going to explore today. This is one of our favorite things to talk about on this podcast. Not only do we talk about disordered eating in almost every conversation that we have, but this is our 6th dedicated conversation to disordered eating. So if you're new listener to this podcast, then you should know that we do a couple of recordings a season to talk about disordered eating, the relationship that we've had with it, and the relationship to the healing that we've
had. What Elizabeth was saying in the beginning was just massively transformational to understand and have a higher altitude on why I engage in binge eating and stress eating behaviors. It's a really big topic. There's so many layers to this topic, and today we're going to dive deep into the sensory processing components and brain health as it relates to
disordered eating. And how then that disordered eating pattern affects our nervous system health, our gut health, our mental health, our physical health outcomes. And it's going to be a little deeper on the neuro side and then looking at how that impact to the nervous system impacts our mental and physical health. So we will be talking about trauma and the role that that plays. But
this is is a little more science heavy one. Yeah. We'll be going a little bit more deeper on a physiological level on the impacts that our behaviors have and come from places of a trauma response or a protective place that's just trying to keep us alive and also that place of deficits in our brain, like, in our actual development. And how can we resolve those places or fire in new places to experience a different relationship with food and with our bodies
and disordered eating? To understand it from the place of a sensory processing deficit or issue is to almost have a little bit more self compassion for where you've been with your food narratives and how you experience food in your daily life. And it can be hugely empowering to have another understanding of a root cause approach to this instead of having to look at your food. Right. Because that's what it always is. Count something, do something, do more
of something, do less of something. And it's like, well, what if I just worked with my brain and my nervous system? I mean, there are so many components that come together in this topic. That's why it's so fascinating to explore, and I think why we have so many conversations about it. One of the things we talk about in NSI is, is willpower. And that 70% of Americans state that the reason they can't
achieve behavior change or achieve their goals is because of a lack of willpower. And it's kind of mind blowing to think, like, we don't think about structural stress or socioeconomic stress or developmental trauma, but it's like, it's on me. It's about my
willpower. Even beyond that, even deeper than that, what is really going on in the brain and the nervous system that's causing these behaviors in a survival response, and really, our brain and our nervous system's best way to try to get the stimulus that it needs to stay activated, well fueled. And when we can start to understand that, just like you were saying, it's a real shift into self compassion and to looking at, like, there's more going on than just my willpower. And I the
behaviors that come from that. And one of the biggest things is you want to jump in here and say something. Before I dive into, I think about the system as, like, how it can be so abusive to us, and then we enact that abuse onto ourselves. And the idea that, like, it's my fault that I don't have the willpower is just like, such an abusive narrative thread where the abuser can't look at themselves and puts everything onto the oppressed and the abused to deal with. Like, it's.
So that's just sort of what was going through my mind in that moment actually was like, of course, it's all on me. Like, why would the abuser take any accountability? And one of the biggest components underlying eating behavior is our interceptive system, and having deficits in that. And when I think about diet culture just really broadly, it really fosters interceptive deficits because it takes us away from feeling our own sensations of hunger, of thirst, of even
needing to go to the bathroom. We really start to rely on these external frameworks to tell us what we should be doing when that information is also coming from our body. And we get very disconnected. And then in the world of neuro, if you don't use it, you lose it. And so you stop having good functioning interceptive skill if you're developing and growing your life under a diet culture paradigm. And our interceptive
system is the system that tells us what's going on inside of us. It helps us maintain homeostasis, and it reads the signals that come from inside of our body. Then our brain interprets them, and it generates a reaction to try to keep our body in balance and running well. And this system is predictive in nature. It's always building an autonomic plan for our body so that we can succeed in whatever we're
about to do. So we get in the information, our insular cortex especially interprets it, and then we generate an output that's like, including an output of, like, what should my heart rate be? What should my body temperature be? How much muscle tension should I have? Should I be in rest and digest? Should I be preparing for action and more of
a sympathetic state? And we've talked a lot about the importance of being able to read those signals and interpret them accurately, because when we can do this, it makes every single situation that we encounter less stressful because we can predict accurately. But when people have interceptive deficits, and there's a lot of research behind this, it manifests as physical outputs because the stress load increases and also gut
function decreases. We have irritable bowel syndrome, disordered eating, discomfort with the sensations that we feel when we eat, or maybe were not able to feel full or satiated. Learning about interoception was really a huge game changer for me because I was someone who did not understand my hunger cues, because I had created such a disconnected relationship with my body. And I think that we talk about the way that we are kind of programmed in our subconscious
ways. And I think that the way that we are in our bodies is also trained into us. And the way that we are with our food gets modeled around us. And food is a really. It's such a. To bring the agency back to myself through my brain is like a really empowering place to be. And with interoception, I find it really interesting to think about the predictive nature of it. And then, like, how does it predict your food? How does it predict your nutritional intake? And food is such a place of
safety for our bodies. It is such a. It's such a. A substantial, deeply meaningful place of safety for our bodies to connect to. And when that safety is a threat, like, our bodies are going to go into a threat response when we don't feed it, when we don't provide for it. And so when we restrict, when we don't listen to the internal cues that are coming from our body and we can't make an understanding of the sensations, we further
that disconnection. And then we uphold the systems that keep us bound into these oppressive narratives with our body into our bodies, and really systems that are built to keep us in those places. And it's a huge revolutionary act to embrace your nervous system and to learn about systems like your interoceptive system.
Something I think would be curious to explore would be, like, make the connection for people of how, like, the prediction narratives would come from the interoceptive system, from the insular cortex around food. Like, what does that prediction look like? Or that maladaptive predictive system. Can we unpack that a little bit more? Yeah. Okay, let's do that. So I think, one, it's important to recognize that our
interception, it's not just about hunger and fullness. It's interpreting, like, this really wide range of body sensations, fatigue, temperature regulation, emotions, all of these signals coming from in our body. And when we start to develop interceptive dysfunction in one area, it can lead to that in a bunch of other areas as well, too. So, for instance, like you're talking about with. With food, right? Maybe we develop a really
adversarial relationship with eating, right? We've been raised in a high stress environment, dysregulated from an early age, had a very difficult time coming down out of a big sympathetic state. And one of the ways that we found to do that was through food, right? We used food to help our system move into more of a parasympathetic state to come down, rest, and digest. But then we're also living in this culture and this narrative that that's not okay. There's a lot of shame linked with
that. There's a lot of hyper vigilance that comes around. Like, what do I put in my body? And so these sensations of food start to get coupled somatically with shame. When I'm eating, I'm creating shame response, and now I'm creating, perhaps an inflammatory response in the body. I'm compounding stress because there's social stress that comes from that
behavior. There is, like, even just the interpretations of the sensation of fullness, when we're patterning that over and over again in this narrative, like, I'm a binge eater, and when I eat a bunch, there's something wrong with me, I'm bad. And so we start to feel those sensations, fullness. They are interpreted in our brain, and we feel gross, we feel uncomfortable in our own body. Maybe that pushes us into a state of dissociation. Like, our brain is, like, these signals are too threatening,
too overwhelming for the system. They cause too much stress. So when I eat a bunch of food and I have a binge, I also dissociate, and that leads to more of that numbing, and that whole pathway becomes more well worn. And then I'm. Those are the outputs, right. The dissociation, the shame, the inflammation, and the stress response that then comes from that. And then that also becomes the input. Right. So the nervous system is always working
in loops. So then the behavior that was being used to reduce stress also starts creating more stress. And now that's new inputs coming in. And so I can't get out of the behavior because I don't have other tools to interrupt that stress response. Mm hmm, mm hmm. And the beliefs around the patterns that get baked in around food have happened so early in life that it's just so unconscious. Plus, you add in the dissociation that comes with the
binging. And that's how I think binging gets really so out of control is because you're not present in your body to experience the fullness of the food that you're taking in. And we talk about gut function, gut dysfunction,
in ways of, like, how the vagus nerve would be working with that. But when we talk about the interoception system, it goes into so many other places, because when you think about temperature, our temperature is being read by our gut through the interoceptive system, through what we're experiencing right now. Right. That temperature is being communicated through the body, which in turn lets our gut know and affects our gut motility. Leaky gut and IB's
Sibo, all sorts of things. The interoception just plays such a vital role and is the way it's patterned is essential to the way that we. The way that we re pattern, really, because that's what we're talking about. The way that we can re pattern is really essential to so many layers of our existence as a human. Yeah, and I want to circle back a second because you were talking about dissociation.
And there's an interesting thought that's coming up for me with dissociation too, and how that continues to perpetuate the cycle with an intercepted deficit. We might eat excessively because we misinterpret various body signals as hunger, but we might also restrict food intake because we're so uncomfortable with the sensations. So there's just this
general misinterpretation. But if when I eat, or if my developmental trauma or my stress response is leading me frequently into dissociation, that impacts how much sensory stimulus is coming into my insular cortex. And we'll talk a little bit more about the insular cortex in a little bit. But every brain area needs sensory input and to get activation, like the two things that the brain needs to stay really healthy is fuel,
glucose and oxygen. So that also too, is related to our food. And then activation, it needs to be activated by the sensory information coming in so that it can stay healthy. And so if I'm in a constant state of dissociation, eating a bunch of food is going to give a lot of stimulus to my insular cortex. It's going to activate my celiac plexus. That information is going to come up to my brain where my insular cortex is going to integrate and process all those
signals. And so my brain may be seeking stimulus for my insular cortex, then driving me to eat more food. Right. And you're not present in your body to understand. Also, like, I'm full. Like, the deficit, it comes at a twofold because, like, I. The interoceptive deficit probably reads that you can't understand your satiation cues and you're not in your body to feel them anyway. So there is really a fullness that never gets experienced by people who have
this side of disordered eating. Yeah. I mean, for myself, it was like I never felt full. I never felt full. I did not feel those signals. I could kind of tell, like, my skin would feel tight around my stomach, but I never really got cues of satiation and fullness in that way. And yes, there's. That again, is layered because there's probably an emotional component to that. And what am I trying to feel emotionally, or am I using it for emotional repression? And I'm
relying on something external to create that safety. And so there's never going to be enough. So there's all of that. But at a real physical level, I did not register satiation because I was so disconnected from my body and probably deeply patterned to misinterpret or not even be able to hear at all interceptive awareness, those signals, or to feel bad. In my body that
I just consumed what I had consumed. Even, like, you know, when we talk about what about caloric deficits that we've all been under this crazy programming of, like, any adult woman needs 1200 calories a day. Like, and breaking through that and understanding, like, it's not shameful for me to take in more food, even when it's healthier food or food that is nutritionally aligned with my body and my being, you know, like, that was
a lot to break for me, too. And, like, understanding that, like I am, I don't have to fake my satiation because I was also doing that in my restriction was I was faking it. And then on the back end, when I would leave people or be in private, I would have to consume more calories. But then by that time, the stress inactivation was so much, I was not consuming something that was, you know, nutritionally aligned for my greatest being. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The hunger signals also were muted and
turned on because I spent so long ignoring them. And when I did feel them, it was like, this is what it would look like for me. I would not feel hunger, but then I would reach a place where I was really emotionally dysregulated, lightheaded. My blood sugar probably was too low. I would get kind of faint or just feel really tired. Like, I had to lean against the wall. So I couldn't tell the hunger until it was so far that it was presenting in these
other ways. But I never actually felt the hunger cues because I had to push those down so much. Yeah, so relatable. It's really relatable. So just so that people have a little bit broader of an understanding, what we're talking about with the interceptive system, there are a couple key areas to think about. So we have the insular cortex, which is an area of our brain that's kind of deep within the brain. It's actually being called another lobe
now. And it's an area of our brain that's responsible for taking in and interpreting the sensations of our body, giving meaning to these sensations, and then deciding what output to create. And we have emotional regulation here. Pain perception, taste processing, internal temperature perception, sensations like it. So all of that is, that's an interceptive insular cortex spot. And then we have the vagus nerve. And that's the primary pathway through which the signals from our brain are
communicated to the body. So our brain will interpret stuff. And then I let the body know how to adjust autonomically based on those sensations. And it's a very crucial component in the regulation of our parasympathetic nervous system, which helps us with rest and digest. It's that communication superhighway between the brain and the body. So when we're talking about disordered eating, the insular cortex
plays a huge role in this. Because, again, this is the area of our body that interprets internal sensations and gives meaning to them. And when we don't have a lot of stimulus coming into our interceptive cortex, it really wants that fuel and activation to stay alive. So again, we might find ourselves eating a lot of food to get more sensory signals coming in. For example, to give people an idea of what this might look like. I had a really
stressful situation the other day, and it did. It left me in a little bit of a dissociated state. That is a well worn pathway for me. And I found myself eating a lot more than usual. I wouldn't say it was like a binge, but I was just having a harder time. Not like constantly going back and grazing and getting some food. And I mentioned it to a friend of mine who's also a neuropractitioner. And her response was, yeah, that makes
perfect sense. I'm sure your insula is just seeking a little more activation to come out of that dissociated state. And I thought, duh. Of course, this is what I talk about all of the time, but it can take a moment to catch it in real time for yourself. And then I could just reframe and also be like, oh, I should use some of my tools to help my system get the stimulus that it
needs so that I can come out of this pattern. And we just have to understand that there have to be other ways to give that area of the brain the stimulus that it needs, or else we're going to move into those behaviors, especially if we're prone to dissociation or living in that chronic state of dissociation. And you mentioned that you were in a stressful situation. And the insular cortex has so much responsibility in emotional regulation. And the interoceptive system is an emotional
system by nature. And it applies emotion to everything. Is this good? Is it bad? How do I feel about this? And then it's impacting so much of our autonomic functions. And it's such a multimodal system that we work with already in the body. So to have deficits in it could be really in
really multiple places. And I think another really big thing for us to talk about here, which we've kind of touched on, is that diet culture drives a lot of these insular deficits, especially when we're talking about dissociation. And the idea that we are pulled away from our bodies and told how to eat, what to eat, and when to eat. And then that just pulls us away from our body's natural
sensations. And when we grow up in patterns of restriction, not only are we putting ourselves into caloric deficits and making it harder for our body to maintain homeostasis, so then the pendulum, it swings the other way. But then we're also starting to change how our brain interprets signals from our body around hunger in fullness. We're conditioning ourselves to perceive a threat response to hunger or to override those signals. And that is
numbing those signals out over time. And we pattern to not hear the signals that are coming from our body. And this conditioning, it leads us to rely on external sources to tell us how to live our lives. And then with this continuous patterning that comes from growing up in a system of diet culture, disconnecting from these signals, the interoceptive system can become very dysfunctional. And that's a natural response to this
conditioning. And in order to move out of these behaviors and practice something like intuitive eating and embodiment to mend our relationship to food, there is a cognitive component of deconstructing diet culture. But there's always work to be done to heal these deficits at a neurological level. And this healing is essential so that we're not driven into the same behaviors repeatedly. And I think nervous system regulation and the tools that we use is really a key component to
not just healing in a particular brain area. It's also vital to the awareness that we need on the cognitive level to be able to stop ourselves in a behavior, to catch it, to stop it, to pump the brakes a little bit on the stress response. That's even causing the maladaptive protective behavior that we're going into. There's so many things you just mentioned that I want to touch on. One is that I think it is one of the most disempowering things the way we're
disconnected from our body culturally. And it's so big because it doesn't just have to do with our relationship with food. It affects our ability to process emotions, to live an embodied life, to find safety inside of ourselves. It is a huge. It's just so big. And I work with a lot of clients that don't necessarily have, like, a clear, complex trauma history, but maybe they were really brought up in a strong diet
culture. They were born into a body size that's a little bit bigger, experienced that conditioning all of the time, and then developed really strong interceptive deficits. And the outputs are real. The anxiety, the confusion, the sensory mismatch of the interceptive system, the panic that comes around all of this. And it is this chronic stress. And it does have a long term impact on the way our brain functions for emotional regulation as well. And it can be really difficult. Like you
said, we might cognitively know. Okay, so I see this. I see that this is messed up. And I want to start to come out of this paradigm and reconnect to my body and intuitively eat. But again, without the tools to train our nervous system to have capacity to start taking some of those new actions and even entertaining different beliefs, different thoughts, different identities about ourselves, it's really hard to extrapolate yourself from that
conditioning, from that paradigm. It feels very scary and activating inside of the body to do that. I'm in a place in my life where I'm experiencing loss of, like, soulmate loss and death of a being that I loved very deeply and a deep loss of myself and who I was in my life with this soul and that I am no longer with in this realm anyway. And as much as I know about disordered eating, and I've been working on it for years, it is rare that I go
into a binge. I've gotten very close over this past eight days of grief and loss. And it's just so deeply programmed in me that food makes me feel better. Food is the answer. Food, and just in the disorderedness is just like eating anything that's available. Like, okay, I don't have the capacity to cook for myself, but there's a jar of peanut butter there. So I'll just eat this jar of peanut butter all day long. And is it like,
disordered eating? Can I just want to highlight that? It can just look like so many, many different things. And there is such a deep emotional. While we're talking about emotions, like, I'm. I am finding safety from my emotional state in food, I can tell that the grief is so heavy within me that it is kind of scary. And I'm pushing it down with food. It's an unintentional way to repress and to get activation, to get stimulus into particular areas. And it's an
intentional. Even though I'm not intentionally trying to repress the grief that I'm experiencing, I actually have the space to be in deep states of grief. And I'm trying to do that. And I can witness that my behaviors, through food are trying to repress the grief. Yeah. And to numb me out. Yeah. And I think part of the healing is that that can happen. And. And there was such a different way to look at it
now. You know, like that behavior, like I said the other day, I was in stressful situation and got snacky. And it doesn't come with the same spiral that it used to. I don't start spinning out about it. I don't start thinking about how I'm going to move into deprivation. I'm just like, it makes me honestly just be like, oh, this is exceeding my capacity. I have to rely on some of my old tools that I need. And that grief that you're experiencing is huge.
It's massive. It was one of the loves of your life. And while cognitively there's so much understanding of processing that grief and this beautiful viewpoint of it at a somatic level, maybe it's a little bit beyond the capacity of the body. And like, okay, I'm gonna have some peanut butter. I'm gonna, you know, and it's just this. I can talk about it on the podcast and not feel ashamed about it, you know, and that's so different. It's a wild place to be. It's so
different. I just don't feel any shame to even tell you guys that I have not provided for myself well in a nutritional way, but on the backside, I have also not engaged in deep shame spirals. I'm like, you know what? I'm eating this. And this is just what it is. This is where I'm at. I need the stimulus, I need the regulation, I need the support. It's an old tool, an old friend.
And every day I'm telling myself, my body, how much I love it, which is also, I think, so important back to maybe even the compassion narrative around disordered eating, is that oftentimes we don't love our bodies because of the way that we've punished it in the disordered eating narrative. And what I have learned in this space of healing over this decade is that a hated body
doesn't heal. A loved body heals. And so even if I'm engaging in a behavior that I wouldn't judge necessarily or that I might put a little judgment on of myself, I really now come from it at a place of like, I'm supporting my body and I love my body. And even if I'm going to do something that I don't think is maybe the best thing for us, I'm going to love us the whole way through this piece of cake. It's radical. And it is incredibly important, right? Because when I. If I
don't start to. And again, I had to really support my nervous system a lot before I could get to that place. Because it's scary to. To deconstruct all of this. And it's taken time to have that different relationship with my body and not go into the same spirals. The shutdown, the freeze, the dissociation, the panic, the overtraining, whatever it
looks like, the deprivation it follows. But it's really important, because if I let that pour more stress into my bucket, I'm going to suffer health consequences. But I'm also going to stay stuck in the paverse, right? That's going to create more stress, more dissociation. And then I don't have these other tools. I don't have the capacity to reach for them. My body's already telling me this is the best I got right now. This is what you need.
This is what's going to keep you safe. And I'm just going to spiral more and more into the behavior and shame and stress. The behavior, the shame, stress until it gets to a crazy, painful place. It's a vicious cycle. I mean, it's just a really vicious cycle to engage in. And when I especially think what I'm just thinking of, the emotional implications. No, I think a real critical component of the interoceptive system is the vagus nerve. It gets a lot of airplay in this space of
healing. But it really does mean something in the rest and digest. And it's intentional. Parasympathetic activation are tools that I engage with on a daily basis to support my rest and digest. Either. Either one of those states that I'm. I'm going into is just a critical component to speak about. When we talk about the parasympathetic nervous system, the vagus nerve, it helps to regulate internal organ functions such as
digestion, heart rate and respiratory rate. And when it's activated, it can help to reduce stress and promote a state of calmness. That state that we want. Want to be in for our food to be properly digested, for that system to even be turned on. And many people, as we're talking about today, learn to use food for that regulation early in life, especially if they lack, or like we lacked, other means of self soothing. This behavior becomes deeply ingrained as a coping
mechanism. And using food for immediate relief, it is effective, but it leads to long term issues like the disordered eating patterns that we're talking about today. But working intentionally with the parasympathetic nervous system, this is a way to provide our nervous systems with the stimulus it needs to shift out of those high states of
activation, right? That like pumping the brakes that we really need to come from high arousal into now it's time to digest our food, where a lot of people don't understand those states of activation and more beyond that, how to come down from those states. And so the food that we intake, it becomes sort of a. It kind of becomes a burden in the system in its lack of processing and the lack of motility that we experience through the vagus nerve connections that come from the brain
into the body. And so, yeah, yeah, I feel like. There'S two really big, like states that can be underneath driving disordered eating. There's the dissociation that we've talked about and needing that input. There's also when we're really stuck in a hyper vigilant, overly sympathetic state, right? We need these. We don't have good modulation skills of our nervous system to be able to come down and rest and
digest. And we've talked about in several past episodes about how hard it is for people with complex trauma to be able to rest, right. It doesn't feel okay in the body. And, you know, we're living in that heightened activated state that is our homeostasis. And we also have beliefs that it's nothing safe to rest and to not be so hypervigilant. The sensory, we have so much heightened
sensitivity to sensory stimulus. And for many people, including myself, for a long time, one of the only ways that I could get myself to rest would be to eat a bunch of food. And my system needed a break. And so it was this intelligent way of my nervous system. It really saved me in many ways from other chronic health outputs, I think because I was able to come into a different state of being, get some rest and recovery,
even though it also maybe compounded the stress later. But in that moment it was safe because too much stress for too long is dangerous. That's right. I mean, it's survival. It's survival, not in the way that, like, you just need food in your body to survive, but eating behaviors are survive. Yeah. You need the behavior to keep yourself alive. So, yeah, it's so deeply layered, the food. It's so complex to speak about.
And that's why for us, like, diving into this and this level of healing trickled out into all other areas of life because it's really a very root cause to a lot of the behaviors, the beliefs, the, the internal states. Yeah. And so it's just, it's a deep layer of the healing process. And our biggest sensory system, our most reliable, top of the hierarchy visual system, has a lot to do also with disordered eating. So I think that would be fun to explore.
Fun is the word. Yeah. I think it's an overlooked area where there can be deficits that people are working on their disordered eating, but they still have these visual deficits. And so re patterning that training visual skills can have such a big impact because all of our sensory systems are important to consider. But our visual system in particular is, is really important in this area. If we have deficits in our visual processing, it actually
changes the way we see our own body, the way we perceive ourselves. And there is a lot of research that shows a strong connection between visual deficits and body dysmorphia. There was a study in the Journal of Vision that found individuals with body dysmorphic disorder have abnormalities in visual processing leading to disordered body image. There was another one in behavior research and therapy that looked at people with visual processing issues are
more likely to misinterpret visual information about their bodies. That then contributes to negative body image and then disordered eating behaviors. So rehabilitating that system is crucial in changing how we relate to ourselves and our bodies. And improving visual processing can help correct these distortions. And then again, at a really physical level, change our body image, change our
relationship to food, because that's changing. Because if I'm constantly seeing something that is distorted, that is also going to be a big driver of my behavior. Distorted is the perfect word, like you, for anyone listening. You really can't trust what the mirror is showing back to you, not only just from, like, maybe the manufacturer of that mirror and whatever the mirror that comes from, but like, literally from what you see
from your eyes. And it was my own experience, and I do have a visual deficit in my, my left eye, particularly, and also some depth of field, depth perception deficits in my visual system. So how close or far away I am from the mirror would make a difference. And then also not being able to see what is probably more of a realistic perception of how my body inhabits space and the space that
I take up. Also, that's part of your interoceptive system, understanding that relationship to you and the space that you occupy and your own sense of boundaries, if you will. But I can really personally testify to the impact of training my visual system to the positive state that it had on my body. And where I think I realistically, like, am in my body, which is huge, because for years in the struggle of disordered eating was distorted perception of
my body. And it was significant in the way it impacted my self esteem in my relationships, not with just to food, but with myself, relationships to other people and their relationship to their bodies. That really had nothing to do with me and my body whatsoever. And I didn't realize for many years that my visual processing deficits were contributing to the threat of the perception of my body. And through training my visual system, when I got real serious with
it, I noticed change. I can't even explain to people the profundity of change that I experienced in the visual system. And it was a profound shift, really. And it wasn't just about seeing my body differently, but it was about feeling my body
differently. And that caring for my body became the function and the care and the compassion that I shared for my body and wanted for my body became the more important narrative over the way my body looked and presented in the expectations of the eyes of other people. It literally became back to my eyes. I mean, it's huge. And what we're really talking about here is all different types of sensory mismatch. We've talked in past episodes with Matt on the anxiety episode about sensory mismatch. And
how that contributes so much threat to our nervous system. Because it's getting through conflicting signals and unclear information is not predictable. It adds a really high stress load to the brain and to the nervous system. So then again, that's going to drive those behaviors. And we're really having sensory mismatch from our interceptive system and our proprioceptive system and our visual system.
And it's very confusing and stressful for the brain. And so then we get a lot of these stress outputs that then drive the behaviors as well. And that also has a lot to do with how we process sensory information. We always want to remember that everything in our brain and our nervous system has a reason behind it. Everything that we do has a reason behind it.
And if we have differences in our sensory processing, whether that's because we're overwhelmed by the stimulus coming in or we're not getting enough stimulus to maintain a healthy, well functioning brain and nervous system that drives our behavior. And it also makes me think of our into neurodivergence. And we've talked about the many differences in sensory processing that can lead us to develop relationships with food to manage these differences when we're living in an overwhelming
world. And that can lead to disordered eating. And research has shown, for example, people with ADHD are at a higher risk for developing disordered eating. There was a study in eating behaviors that found adults with ADHD are more likely to engage in binge eating and emotional eating compared to those without ADHD. And that's due to difficulties. Yes, in executive function and impulse control, maybe, but also definitely has to do with emotional regulation. And that heightened need for sensory
stimulation that we're talking about. Overwhelm is going to require a coping mechanism. And we are always practicing something. We are practicing neuro every day. And just like we talk about these subconscious patterns that are deeply laid into us, we are practicing those patterns every moment of our lives until we intentionally get that awareness, which is why nervous system tools and regulation is so important. And we talk about this daily practice
because the overwhelm needs to be managed. And how do we do that? What. And I'm asking you this question as a listener. Like, what do you practice each day? Where are we intentionally engaging in a practice to how we are managing our behavior, your behavior. Right. And so, like, if all skills are trainable and our nervous system is rewirable and we can manage the stress, then
what practice are we engaging in each day to do that? Or are we practicing deepening the pattern, the pathway, and the maladaptive way that we're engaging? And so I think these tools are really empowering to say, no, I want to be on this path. Absolutely. It really doesn't have to be so
complicated, so big. It can start very small. I, you know, I was doing my neuro this morning as I was out getting my morning light, and I did, I had a thought of just like hundreds of people doing neurodromes in the morning, deconstructing these systems inside of ourselves. What a massive impact that that would have. And it. It's like ten minutes a day, maybe 20 minutes a day if you're, you know, doing your training in the morning, but then you're also weaving them throughout the day.
And it is the way to the way that we have found. There are many paths to healing, but it is the way that we have found to make it possible to to. Change, to live another way that isn't self punishing. Thank you for spending your time with us today and listening to this podcast. It means the world's best if you get a lot out of these conversations. We would love it if you could. Head over to your favorite podcast platform, leave us a rating and a review, and then share share this
podcast with people in your life that you think might also benefit. These things really help us expand our reach and keep growing this collective conversation about the nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what we can do to heal. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice.
We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call 911. For specific services relating to mental health, please see the full disclaimer in the show. Notes.