What Does the Nervous System Have to Do With Binge Eating?

If you've been trying to use willpower to stop binge eating and it's not working, there's a reason. Your binges aren't about discipline or control - they're about your nervous system trying to bring you back to safety. In this foundational episode, you'll learn a simple framework for understanding your nervous system and why it matters so much for your relationship with food.

What You'll Discover:

• The "Home Base" framework for understanding your nervous system states

• Why binges are actually your nervous system's attempt to regulate itself

• The cycle that keeps you stuck (and how to start breaking it)

• Simple tools for checking in with your nervous system throughout the day

If you've ever felt like you know what you "should" do but can't seem to make yourself do it, this episode will help you understand why - and what to do instead.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode: The Power of Co-Regulation
• The Gathering: Monthly experience to slow down and listen to your inner wisdom

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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If you've ever wondered why willpower doesn't work when it comes to binge eating, today's episode is going to change everything. We're exploring the nervous system, the missing piece that explains why binges happen even when you desperately don't want them to. Understanding this one thing might be the breakthrough you've been searching for. Welcome to Binge Eating Breakthrough, the podcast to help you stop feeling out of control around food and build trust with your body. If you've tried everything but still feel stuck, you're not alone. I've been there too. I'm Jane Pilger, and I'm here to help you see binge eating in a new way so you can finally break free. Each week you'll get the tools and insights to create peace with food and your body. Your breakthrough starts now. Hello, trusted listener. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you're ready to look beneath the surface. I trust that you're willing to understand your struggles with food not as failures of willpower, but as information from your body that is trying to help you. So today we're talking about something that was absolutely the missing piece in my own recovery. And I've seen it be the same for so many of my clients. We're talking about the nervous system and what it has to do with binge eating. Now, I know for some of you, when you hear nervous system, this might sound clinical or complicated. But I promise you, by the end of this episode, you're going to have a clear, simple understanding of how your nervous system works and why it matters so much when it comes to your relationship with food. Now, here's what I want you to know from the start. They do not mean that you are broken or that you lack willpower or discipline. Your binges are your nervous system's attempt to regulate itself, to bring you back to safety. And when you can see them through that lens as information rather than failure, everything changes. And even if you're somebody who doesn't really resonate with binge eating, but you do sometimes eat food when you don't want to. Oftentimes it is a result of the nervous system trying to use food to regulate the nervous system. So let me start by giving you a really simple framework for understanding your nervous system. When I first learned about the nervous system, I learned through various models: polyvagal theory, the window of tolerance. And these, there's they're super helpful. And I still use them to this day. But when I was learning and when I was trying to get all of this information in my mind, I had such a hard time remembering which was which. Now wait, the sympathetic, the sympathetic branch, is that the is that that one or which one's the parasympathetic? I couldn't remember, I couldn't keep them straight. And I had such a hard time with it. So because of that, if I thought, if I can't figure this out and I have been reading this and I have been listening to this, I'm probably not the only one who has a hard time kind of remembering which branch use which and what does this mean and what is that. So I have simplified it in a way that made sense to me. And this is the way that I teach it to my clients. And it's what I'm going to teach you here on the podcast today. So I like to think about your, the, the main kind of area of your nervous system when you are grounded, when you are regulated, when you are calm. I like to think of this as home base. So you can think of your nervous system as having a home base. Some people call this the window of tolerance. This is the range where you are grounded in your body. You feel present, you feel safe. And when you're in home base, you feel more calm, more able to access your intuition, your thinking brain. You can think clearly, you can access your prefrontal cortex. You can make decisions that align with what you actually want. You can make progress towards your goals. You can have a conversation with somebody and really hear them and be able to see different perspectives. Now, before we go on and I talk about the other areas within the nervous system, I want to just back up one step to talk about what the nervous system is, what it does, and what its purpose is. So think about the nervous system as really the command center of your entire body. It is a two-way communication superhighway between your body and your brain and your brain and your body. So constantly, all the time, 24 hours a day, there is communication that is going from your body to your brain and also from your brain back to your body. And these are signals constantly scanning. Am I safe? Is this environment safe? What is happening both within the body, both in my external environment? This two-way communication, the brain, the body, the nervous system, the overall command center is constantly scanning. So if the nervous system is like, yep, everything's safe, we're good to go, we're in home base. We can be calm, connected, clear, able to make progress towards our goals. That's home base. Now, if we go above home base, your nervous system perceives a threat. Above home base is your fight or flight response. So when you're above home base, there's too much energy in your body. You might feel anxious, you might feel jittery, you might feel overwhelmed, you might feel worried, you might feel on edge. Your heart might be racing, your thoughts might be spinning. This is your body trying to mobilize you to either fight the threat or run from it. So our nervous system has perceived danger. Yes, there is definitely a danger here, but this is a danger that I can take action on. I can either fight against it or I can run away from it. But in order to do that, I'm gonna need some energy in my body so that I can fight, so that I can flee. That's what happens and why it feels like we do have this like additional energy or we can feel our heart racing, because it really is. That does happen. Our body is being mobilized to take care of this threat by either fighting it or running away from it. Now, so that's above home base. Below home base is the freeze response. This is what happens when your nervous system perceives a threat that is so big, it doesn't think you can fight it or flee from it. So instead, it shuts down. It conserves energy. And in this place, you might feel numb, disconnected, foggy, exhausted, or just checked out. This is when you are on the couch scrolling your phone, watching Netflix, even though you know you have so much that you need to do. But what's happened is that your nervous system has decided that this threat, it's too much. It's more than I can bear. So what's really interesting is that it feels like there's less energy happening in the body because there really is that freeze response. There is less energy in the body, but a freeze response is often an indicator of an even larger perceived threat. It is so big, I can't fight this. I can't run away from it. So I'm going to have to literally just play dead. And you see this in animals. Most animals will run from a threat or they will fight if they believe that they have the ability to fight back. But you see a lot in the, well, I don't know if you actually see it, but you see videos of it anyway, of animals in the wild who literally play dead when there is a threat that is more than they can run away from. We do the same. Now, there's another response, which is called fawning. And this is a kind of hybrid response. So fawning happens when there is a perceived threat, but your nervous system doesn't think it can be handled through fight or flight. So instead, you try to appease, to keep the peace, to make yourself smaller or more pleasing. And there's often a detachment from yourself in order to survive the situation. So you might know that this is more than you can bear. You might know that this isn't something that you want, but it also feels really dangerous for you not to appease or do the thing that somebody else wants you to do. So this can happen in a lot of different ways and in a lot of different environments and relationships. Now, so that's those are kind of the basics about the nervous system, home base, above and below, and then fawning, which is kind of that hybrid response. But here is the key thing to understand. This is all about perceived threat of the nervous system. It actually doesn't even matter if there is an actual threat or not. Your nervous system is constantly scanning the environment and your internal world, what's happening inside. And it's asking the one question, am I safe? And based on what it perceives, it will move you above home base, below home base, or it will keep you in home base if it perceives safety. So you might be asking, okay, like that's nice, but what does this have to do with binge eating? Well, the answer is everything. So let me share a story about a client of mine that really illustrates this. When I first told her about the nervous system and these different states, something really clicked for her. She started checking in with herself throughout the day and just noticing where am I right now in my nervous system? Am I in home base? Am I above home base, feeling anxious or activated or angry or frustrated? Or am I below home base, feeling shut down, feeling hopeless, feeling depressed? And here's what she discovered. She realized that almost every time she had a craving or an urge to binge, she was not in home base. She was either way above it, feeling stressed, overwhelmed, like she had too much energy coursing through her body and she wanted to do something about it, or she was below home base, feeling numb and disconnected and exhausted. So once she could see this pattern, she started experimenting. And when she noticed she was above home base, instead of automatically reaching for food, she would pause and ask herself, what do I need to bring myself back to home base? Sometimes it was movement, going for a walk, doing some sort of quick motion, shaking out her body. Sometimes it was breathing exercises, calling a friend or journaling, things that helped drain some of that excess energy in a way that actually regulated her nervous system. And here is what is so important to understand when you're above home base with all of that activated and excess energy, food actually can help bring you down. Eating, especially certain types of food, can help calm your nervous system. That's why it works. It's why your body learned to use food this way. But here is the problem. Often, especially with binge eating, we don't just come back down to home base. We eat and eat and eat and we go straight through home base and we drop below it into that freeze response. And now we're shut down. Maybe we're feeling guilty and ashamed, feeling low energy and disconnected. And what does your body need when you're in freeze? Energy. So what does it do? It sends you cravings for more food to try to bring your energy back up. And this is how you end up in a cycle. You're above home base. You eat to come down, but you go too far below, and then you need to eat again to come back up. But that sends you above again and round and round you go. And this whole time, it doesn't feel safe. I don't feel safe to be above home base. I don't feel safe when I'm binging. I don't feel safe when I think about all of the negative impacts to my body when I do binge. And so this entire thing, I'm just not feeling safe. So when I don't feel safe, I'm either above home base or I'm below home base. I'm not in that calm, connected, grounded place in home base. This is not a failure of willpower. It's your nervous system trying to regulate itself with the tools it has learned to use over the years. And those tools, the food, they work in the short term. They do help regulate your nervous system in the moment. And that's why your body keeps using them. But they're not the only tools available. And they're not the most effective tools in the long run because they don't actually help you build the capacity to stay at home base on your own. Here's the thing that happens with home base is your home base is a range. It is not just one moment in time. It truly is a range. This window of, if we if we talk about it as the window of tolerance, it is the window in which the range in which you can tolerate discomfort. You can tolerate other things while still keeping your thinking brain on board. But here's what's great to know about your nervous system. You can increase your window. That range that you are in home base right now might be very small. Mine used to be so small. Small, small, small. So there wasn't a lot of time that I was actually in that grounded, connected place. And it didn't take much for me to go way above. I spent most of my time above. And then I would spend a lot of time below, but I had this little tiny, tiny window. And with this work, and over time, you can expand your window, you can expand the range of your home base, which is so powerful to know. So I've mentioned this before, but if you are new to the podcast, I want you to think about your binges, your experiences with food that you don't love as lights on the dashboard. So you know how when a light comes on in your car, it's telling you something's going on under the hood. The light isn't the problem. The light is information. And your binges are the same way. They're your nervous system's way of saying, hey, something is happening here. I am not at home base. I am dysregulated and I need help getting back to safety. And when you can see your binges this way as information about your nervous system state rather than evidence of your failure, everything shifts. You stop fighting against yourself. You stop the war with the part of you that binges. That part is not trying to sabotage you. It's trying to protect you. It's trying to bring you back to regulation the only way it knows how. Okay, so what do you do with this information? First, you start paying attention to your nervous system throughout your day. Check in with yourself and ask, where am I right now in my nervous system? Am I in home base? Do I feel grounded? Do I feel present? Do I feel able to think about my goals, what I want for myself? Am I above home base, feeling activated, anxious, worried? Am I below home base, feeling shut down or disconnected? And just noticing without judgment is the first step. You all know if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, awareness is always the first step. You're gathering information about your patterns. When do you tend to move above home base? What triggers that? When do you drop below? What are the signs in your body that tell you where you are? Second, you can use my three powerful questions. What do I notice? What do I need? What's next? What do I notice? I notice I'm feeling really anxious and my thoughts are racing. I am above home base right now. What do I need? I need to release some of this energy and bring myself back to calm. I need to send my nervous system a signal that I'm safe. What's next? Maybe I go for a walk. Maybe I do some deep breathing. Maybe I call a friend. Maybe I do eat something, knowing that is one way to bring energy down. But now I'm doing it with awareness, and I can also try other things alongside the eating or instead of it. The goal isn't to never use food for regulation. Food is one tool and it's not a bad one. The goal is to have multiple tools. So you're not reliant on just one. And the goal is to build your capacity to return to home base and stay there more consistently. So your nervous system doesn't constantly feel like it's under threat. I want to tell you a story really quick. Right before I recorded this podcast episode, I checked in with my husband and I asked him how he was doing. And he was like, I am feeling really overwhelmed right now. We didn't specifically talk about the three powerful questions, but literally, that is the conversation we just had. He told me, he said, I'm really overwhelmed. I'm feeling pulled in a lot of directions, and I can feel myself just wanting to escape. And so I asked him what he needed. We had a conversation. Uh, we had a meeting planned later today where we were gonna go over some things. He was like, you know, I think I I need, I need to just free up that space for myself. No problem. He went and did a couple of little things, he went outside, did a couple of things outside. He said, Then I'm gonna come back in. I want to hug, and then I'm gonna go back to work and I know that I can put in a solid couple of hours before the end of my day is done. And it was like such a beautiful thing to really see. He was watching himself. He saw himself. He was above home base. He was feeling overwhelmed. He watched he youth, like, I see myself wanting to escape that fight or flight, right? He was wanting to flee, but he could see it. He could talk about it. He gave himself space. He went outside. We talked through it. He got a hug. And then he was like, okay, I actually feel capable of doing this just for this little period of time. And then I know I'll get another break. It's a beautiful example of recognizing your nervous system and doing something to regulate it as opposed to just escaping, which could have been very possible. This is deep work. It's the work of learning to feel safe in your body, of addressing the underlying reasons why your nervous system gets triggered in the first place, of slowly expanding your window of tolerance so that things that used to send you above or below home base don't have the same effect anymore. Now, here's something that I want you to know. One of the most powerful ways to regulate your nervous system is through co-regulation. That means being around other people who have regulated nervous systems. Their calm helps regulate you. This is why having support matters so much. This is why working with a coach or being part of a community can be so transformative. This is why that brief Three minute conversation I just had with my husband, he also was able to get there through co-regulation because my nervous system was calm and regulated. He was able to borrow some of that from me. Your nervous system learns regulation not just through your own efforts, but through experiencing what regulation feels like in the presence of someone else who is regulated. That is co-regulation. I've actually done an entire episode on this topic, and I'm going to link it in the show notes if you want to go deeper on the topic of co-regulation. Now, speaking of co-regulation, I want to tell you about something I am really excited about. I am launching a new offering called The Gathering. The Gathering is a place where you can slow down and start listening to your own inner wisdom so you can rebuild trust with yourself. It's a monthly experience where you practice being in your body, getting quiet enough to hear what's really true for you, and learning to trust what you hear. And one of the ways that the gathering supports this is through co-regulation. Being in community with others who are also doing this work helps your nervous system experience what safety and calm feel like. Even if you feel like you can't regulate your nervous system on your own right now, being in the gathering will give you that experience. And over time, your nervous system learns. It learns that it can be safe. It learns what home base feels like. And that is when sustainable change becomes possible. Now, I also want you to know the gathering is not specifically about food. It is about learning to slow down, to create safety and to listen to your inner wisdom, to start trusting yourself more. It is not a food-specific place, but it is a place to regulate yourself, your nervous system, to create safety so that you can hear what is really true for you. So if you're interested in joining us, you can find all of the details at janepilger.com forward slash gather. We start next week. And if you join before our first call, you're gonna get special founding member pricing. But whether you join the gathering or not, what I want you to take away from today is this your nervous system is not your enemy. Your binges are not your enemy. They're information, they're your body's way of trying to take care of you to bring you back to safety and regulation. And when you can approach your struggles with food through this lens, not as a battle to be won, but as information to be understood, you open up entirely new possibilities for healing. You stop fighting against yourself and start working with yourself. And that changes everything. Next week, we're gonna build on this foundation by talking about how to set goals that work with your nervous system instead of against it. Because when you understand your nervous system, you can approach change in a completely different way. One that actually feels sustainable and supportive. And until then, just practice noticing where are you in your nervous system throughout your day? What do you notice when you're in home base versus when you're above or below it? What do you notice about your eating patterns in relation to these states? And remember, you are gathering information. You are not trying to fix or change anything yet. You're just learning the language your body speaks. And that is the first step toward everything else. That's what I have for you today. I'll see you next week. If you know you want to rebuild self-trust, if you know you want to stop looking outside yourself for answers and start listening to the part of you that already knows what you need, but you can't seem to do it on your own, I want to invite you to join me in the gathering. It's a monthly space where you can reconnect with yourself and rebuild trust from the inside out. Learn more at janepilger.com forward slash gather.