22. Nervous System Capacity - The Good, The Bad, and The Navigated

In this episode, we discuss the two main parts of the nervous system and what they are responsible for. We also explore what shapes our capacity for how much we can handle before we reach our “breaking point”. What forms our baseline? Can we improve our ability to manage stress? How do we recognize the distress whispers of our body before they become screams? We’ll cover all of this and more in episode 22. See ya on the inside! 

Don’t forget to follow me over on Instagram @chloe.being.human for a peek behind the curtain! If you like what you’re hearing, I’d also love it if you’d follow, turn on notifications, leave a review on your listening platform and share Creator Putty online or with friends & family. Thank you! 

I am not a therapist or a doctor. I AM someone who is passionate about self discovery and education in order to better understand ourselves and the world around us. The goal is to lead with vulnerability so you feel comfortable doing the same (if ya wanna).

Sources mentioned in the episode: 
Missy Bunch - IG @missybunch15 and The Movement Mentality Podcast

National Library of Medicine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542179/

The Mel Robbins Podcast - Episode Highlight with Dr. Becky Kennedy: Why Am I So Triggered? 3 Steps to Control Your Emotions & Rewire Your Response to Stress 

Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast - Episode Highlight: Dr. Becky Kennedy: Wire Your Children for Resilience

Dr. Gabor Maté

Transcript

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Hello, my virtual pals. My name is Chloe. Welcome back to the roundtable of Creator Putty, where we learn and share and laugh and remember and grow together. Today I'm going to be tackling the topic of nervous system capacity and asking ourselves pragmatically, not dramatically, how much can one person take? What determines that? Do we have any power over changing it? And as a general reminder, I am not a therapist or a doctor as we dive into some mental health-related topics. I am, however, a human who is passionate about self-discovery, self-education, and self-understanding that is willing to lead with vulnerability in sharing my experiences to get you thinking and speaking about your own. I have researched and metabolized so much information on the topics that we are going to cover today. I'll point you to a few of the people that I have learned from. But again, this is a round table setting. So I hope you get a little bit of food for thought and let's go ahead and get into it. Welcome to Creator Putty, a space where the invitation is always open to call upon the higher power that breathes you. And remember that there is strength in surrender. Now let's go explore the expanses of consciousness. Okay. So, like I said in the intro, I kind of want to go over uh how much can you carry? How much can one person take? What determines that? So there's this thing that's floating around online. I've seen it a bunch of times, that says the opposite of depression is not joy, it's expression. And that has stuck with me because I think that our capacity is also partially determined by how much of our storage space is being taken up by unmetabolized experiences, whether it be trauma or um even happy things. Like sometimes we struggle to metabolize the happy stuff because there's like this negative bias that we have in our brains that is always kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop or believing that something is too good to be true. And I just, man, I want to challenge that. I want to swim upstream and shake things up a little bit and do everything that we can do to uh be joyful, like intrinsically, internally, externally, share that joy with other people. There is plenty of the junk going around out there, um, circulating in the media every single day. And I think one of the best things that we can do to fight that uh on a personal activism level is to be someone that is joyful and primed for joy and sharing joy. So, how do we attain that? Couple of things. Missy Bunch, she is one of my favorite people to follow on Instagram. I've been following her for a couple of years. She has a podcast I've mentioned on here before called The Movement Mentality, and she is the cranial nerve queen. She's all things neuro. I got to take a masterclass from her this past week on showing up confidently online, which is a big part of what I'm trying to do in order to get this creator putty podcast out to whomever it's meant to get to. And something that I have learned from her that's been really valuable is something she calls our threat bucket. So again, she is uh all things neuro, so nervous system. And she talks about this threat bucket, basically meaning that it can be full from old injuries, from different arguments, from so many different things. And when it reaches a certain point, it kind of tips over and it all spills out, right? So our bodies kind of, if we don't take time to rest and metabolize things, our bodies will kind of make a break for us. So that threat bucket also speaks to another idea that I have heard. Uh, and this is something that I hear a lot more like in discussions surrounding neurodivergence, and that is the window of tolerance. So when we put these two things together, we understand that in our nervous systems, we've got this threat bucket and things can be added to it. We're gonna talk a little bit later about how we can pour some of that out. And then if we look at the window of tolerance, uh, you know, there's like that lower range where your body is going to physiologically kind of give you some signs of like, hey, um, I'm a little uncomfy right now. And then if we ignore those things, it's gonna start screaming at us like, oh my gosh, I can't stand this pain and I'm about to crap my pants right now because I have not listened to my body's cues and now it is screaming at me. That's why I love energy healing. If you haven't already, go back and listen to my seven-part chakra series. It's kind of a step-by-step walking through the different layers of our energy body on a very basic level with really easily applicable tools to help learn how to care for our energy. So, nervous system is yes, if it's a physical part of our bodies, but it's also this buzzword that just gets thrown around in spiritual healing platforms all over the place. And I want to educate us on kind of what that is. So I looked it up on the National Library of Medicine and found out that our nervous system actually has two main parts. So there's our central nervous system, which is our brain and our spinal cord. And then there is the peripheral nervous system, and that is gonna be everything that is not your brain and spinal cord. Think of like when you see an image of a brain with all those nerves coming out like roots of a tree. All those roots of the tree, all those nerves are your peripheral nervous system. And that is how your body receives sensory information, touch, sight, smell, hearing, that kind of thing. So our central nervous system, according to the National Library of Medicine, receives, integrates, and responds to sensory info. And it also generates motor output so that we can coordinate our behavior and maintain a state of homeostasis. Now, let's move into talking about capacity. So, what is capacity? Capacity is that threat book bucket. How much can I take before I flip my lid because I just can't take any more? Well, our capacity is gonna be shaped by a handful of things, both internal and external factors. So external would be things like environmental things, right? Uh, interpersonal dynamics within somebody's inner circle, sensory stimulus, like noise, light, smell, touch. And there's gonna be this baseline that you have of how much you can take, and it's gonna fluctuate for women. That can be tied to our menstrual cycles, but it can also be tied to things going on in the world. Just think of anything from the outside coming in that would kind of change the level of which your threat bucket is filled. And then it's also shaped by our internal factors. So things like our hormones, the rhythms of our brain waves and of our heart, and whether or not those are in coherence. Something else that I think that is important to take into consideration for internal factors is how much sleep have we been getting and what is the quality of that sleep. We know sleep is important, but most of us don't realize exactly how important our sleep is. When we sleep, that is when our brain is able to integrate the things that we have learned, including our memory. In fact, when babies are little, I learned this when my son was a baby. There was this app that I had, and it used to track what was called leapsions. And that was in terms of his development and how it could impact his sleep. And basically, it would tell me when he would be reaching an average milestone, whether that was crawling or teething or walking or whatever the case may be, even just rolling over. And every time that he would be learning these new skills and practicing them, it would come along with this leap in development and a regression in his sleep because his brain was on overdrive. It was taking on so much more information about how to process his experiences and show up in the world and how he could move his body through space, but that was impacting his sleep. And so there would be this time where sleep would be really difficult or his sleep needs would be a little bit higher. And honestly, I feel like that was helpful for me to learn not just as a mom, but as a grown adult, because it reminded or it gave me the opportunity, I should say, to look at myself through that lens. Like, oh, you know what? That makes sense. Like when we are, let's say, training for a new job, right? And you know that feeling. Like you go home from work and you have no music playing in the car because you are just so tired from all of the information that you are trying to process and integrate. So again, sleep is a big factor there in making sure that we can properly integrate and remember the things that we need to. Also, food. Are we properly nourishing our body? Exercise can be a factor too. Are we properly uh expressing any pent-up energy so that we can show up um clear of mind and heart? Also, neurological processing. So for people that fall on the neurodivergent spectrum, and I think that we all have our, I know that we all have our own ways of processing information. Again, it is a spectrum, but for those that fall more heavily onto that neurodivergent spectrum, this is going to affect them maybe a little bit more because of heightened sensitivities with the way that their brain metabolizes and processes information. So I was listening to a podcast yesterday. It was actually the Mel Robbins podcast, and she was interviewing Dr. Becky Kennedy. And I've heard her interviewed also on the My Embiolics Breakdown podcast. She is a parenting expert, but she has a book that she's authored called Good Inside. And she was specifically talking about the nervous system in this interview with Mel Robbins that I listened to. And something that she said stuck out to me. She said, the nervous system wires early, but it's never too late to rewire. The nervous system wires early, but it's never too late to rewire. So this is talking about environmentally, like how do our caregivers respond to our basic needs when we are very, very young, when we are crying, when we are screaming, when we are having big emotions, and being taught by the grown-ups around us how to deal with those and express those in a healthy way. But then the second part of what she says is it's never too late to rewire. And that speaks to the idea of neuroplasticity. That's something I have a whole episode about. If you go back, you can find it. It is our naturally occurring superpower, and it literally can change the function and structure of our brains through consistent input. It's tricky in the beginning because we are creatures of habit. We like habit, we like familiar. Familiar is safe to our bodies, but familiar is not always healthy. And so when we make a new choice, that can kind of register as a threat. But when we consistently give ourselves new input or consistently engage with new, more healthy ways of thinking, we can change the structure and function of our brains to better support our nervous systems and our experience of this life. So go check out the neuroplasticity episode if you are interested. So, anyway, I thought that that quote from Dr. Becky Kennedy was such a standout for me personally because it is really encouraging and really empowering that it's never too late to rewire, no matter what, no matter what you've been through, no matter how old you are, all the things. So, anyway, this morning I actually woke up thinking about um kind of just the Western view of wellness. And I want to detour a minute to talk about that, and it'll all circle back to our nervous system capacity and how we can best learn to care for ourselves in a holistic way, not just when something goes wrong. So, what I woke up thinking about was just my own experience. You know, in the first couple episodes, I talk about the first time that I had smoked marijuana and became very paranoid. At the time, I was eight weeks into being on Paxel CR, which is an SSRI. In other terms, it was an anti-anxiety, anti-anxiety medication. And I, you know, I think that I thought I knew how to care for myself, but that experience really taught me something valuable, which is that we grow up, we go through school, and we have this middle school, high school level understanding of our bodies through the perspective of biology, anatomy, and physiology, whatever courses we take in school, but there's really no continuing education about the bodies that we live in for our entire lives unless we find ourselves on an educational path that informs us of that. And so I think that a lot of us become, I don't want to say dependent, but maybe reliant upon experts or people in white coats or with letters behind their names to have our best interest at heart and to kind of be like our walking library of information. I know that we all kind of do this to a certain extent. There's someone in our family that has a nursing background. And so anytime that there, especially when my son was little, there was something that seemed to be going off the rails. I knew that I had this person in my back pocket, which was so valuable and still is, to kind of just run things by as a sounding board. But the experience that I had also taught me that I needed to really educate myself on how to learn the signals that my body was sending me so that I could start to interpret the whispers before they turned into screams and how to respond to those things so that, you know, now I have the language to say so that I could pour some of the stuff out of my threat bucket and return to a baseline where I was calm and at ease so that my body could stay in a coherent state of repair, rest, and digest instead of being on high alert all the time. So, anyway, I think that it's very common for us in the West to be focused on things like how skinny are you? What diet are you on? You know, how hard are you going in your workouts? And go to the doctor when something is wrong so that we can treat the symptoms and get back to work as quickly as we can. Right. I think that that sounds really familiar to a lot of us and it sounds so normalized. But when we look at it through that lens of like, oh wait, it's my responsibility, like I talk about in the conscious accountability episode, to know that I need to learn how to care for myself so that I can hopefully prevent uh things from going off the rails to the best of my ability and know what to do when it's time to repair. So, all of that to say, I go through my Reiki courses, I dive headfirst into educating myself on all of these things, and I find people like Missy Bunch, I find people like my embiolic, I find people like Dr. Becky Kennedy that can help me learn the language of the nervous system and provide me with tools so that I can start to recognize when I am feeling uneasy about a situation. Now, one of the things that stood out to me when I first sought out a Reiki healer for myself after I had been in therapy for about two years, you know, I had really kind of unpacked things and metaphorically put all my cards on the table and just kind of got like an overview, a zoomed out view of what was going on. But then I got to this point in therapy where it was like, okay, I don't feel like this is helping anymore. Like it's not, it's not doing any harm, but I feel like I need a little bit more oomph, right? So I sought out this Reiki healer. And something that I learned during that time, I don't remember if it was from her or from the Silva method courses my husband and I attended, is that dis-ease or unease in the body turns into eventually disease through a compounding effect over time. So that can be from an injury that you never quite take the time to heal and recover from properly, or maybe you don't have the right tools and resources to do that. It can also come from unmetabolized trauma. So Gabor Mate is another very prominent figure in the wellness space. And I've heard him speaking about how when we experience trauma, and that's another buzzword, so I'll unpack that in a second. A part of us becomes suspended in time until that event is expressed or metabolized. Now, I'm paraphrasing. If you want to know more about that from him specifically, go and seek out that information. He has a wealth of knowledge. But trauma is, again, another buzzword that gets thrown around and it's it's frustrating because it is a really important term, but I think that it gets used so flippantly that people get annoyed and brush it off. And honestly, that dismissal can also lead to dismissal of our own experiences that are unmetabolized. So here's what I mean. I talked about the compounding effect, okay. Um, you may already know this, but I'm gonna explain it for anybody that might not. There is big T trauma, okay? Um, like you lose a limb in an accident, somebody dies unexpectedly, um, any kind of attack on your physical body. Those are big T traumas, a one-time big life-changing event that creates this kind of before and after era of your life. Now, there is also complex trauma. Also, uh, if we're talking about like labels, there's PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and then there is CPTSD, and that is complex um post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, complex post-traumatic stress disorder is like a pile-up of little T traumas. So, for example, if you grew up in a home where there was a lot of uh verbal or physical abuse or violence, those kind of things tend to stack up, right? So let's say, for example, you wake up in the morning and your parents are fighting and it's like a screaming match, but you need to go to school and doors are slamming, you're just trying to make yourself scarce so that you can get out of the door and go to school. You go to school, but you've got learning to do. So you are carrying the experience of that tension from at home, but nobody's really talking to you about it, and you're not talking to anyone else about it. You're just kind of storing it in your body and not metabolizing it. So then you get through the school day. Maybe you have like an uncomfy encounter with friends on the schoolyard, a misunderstanding socially. Again, you don't have anybody that you feel like you can talk to about it. And then you go home and it's kind of rinse and repeat, right? Like your mom is mad at you because you didn't clean your room, or you know, whatever the case may be, tension is high, it escalates. Now you're getting screamed at, you don't really know what you did wrong, but things just kind of keep piling up. And when this is your daily life over and over again, and you are not being taught how to tend to your nervous system or how to find healthy expression for your emotions, we begin to just repress and shut those things down. We sweep them under the what rug, sweep them under the rug, sweep them under the rug. But it makes me think of that story, the princess and the pea, right? Like she could sense that there was something under her mattress, but she didn't know what it was. And when we continually sweep things under the rug, eventually that rug becomes sky high to where we can't relate to people on the ground level because we have our shoulders raised up to our ears with all the tension that we've been carrying and not speaking about because we didn't feel like there was anyone we could speak about it with, or we just didn't have the language to understand it. Maybe there was no safe space where you just felt like you could take a deep breath and maybe cry a little or scream a little or shake it all out. Okay. So I can't diagnose anything. I'm just trying to, again, as a lay person, share with you the things that I have learned to put language to different experiences. But again, if we look at the compounding effect of carrying our life experiences, and you just ask yourself, when was the last time that I just took a quiet moment to take an inventory of the things that I've been carrying? That question alone is gonna shift yourself from go mode into carrying. Curiosity mode. And when we get curious, that is a really, really great first step to healing because we're not looking at it as a problem. And again, I think that's a very uh common way to look at things in a Western view. We're just societally taught to be uh productive and get to work and get the job done, get to school, pass the test. And so a lot of us don't have or create the space for ourselves to slow down and take that energetic inventory. Something that I talk about in the chakra series as well. Just doing those little check-ins with yourself. Okay, stepping off of my soapbox for a second. I get fired up with just again passion, excitement. Um, I really care about this stuff. It really genuinely has changed my life. And I can honestly say that because it has changed my life, it has created ripple effects in a positive manner for the people that are around me. Because if I can honor my capacity and what I have been carrying, and I can manage that without being dependent on somebody else to make me feel okay, then I can create space for other people to express what they have on their mind or on their heart. So, how can we first become familiar with our own baseline capacity? Um, if you've been to therapy, you've already done it. If you've had a conversation with a friend where you open up your heart and kind of just pour it out and be vulnerable, you've already done it. The first step is being curious, asking yourself in a quiet moment, what have I been carrying lately that maybe it's time to set down, maybe for good, or maybe just to examine it through a lens of lowered emotional sensitivity, because in the height of the moment I was freaking out about that thing, but now I can see through a different perspective that everything worked out in the end. Okay, so what have I been carrying that no longer serves me that I can set down for good or to examine and unpack? Also, just start to kind of take an inventory of how you're feeling. I've mentioned this in previous episodes before, during, and after different experiences. So whether that is going into work, going into a kid's birthday party, going into any kind of social event, just take the temperature of your energetic feeling. How do you feel in your body? Do you feel calm and relaxed and like your vision is expanded and you're joyful? Or do you feel scarce and small and nervous and anxious and worried that somebody's mad at you, but you don't know why and you're messing everything up? These are signals that your body is sending you because, in the viewpoint of holistic wellness, we believe that your body is working for you and not against you. That the signs that it is sending you, it has evolutionarily, biologically developed itself to protect you and send signals for your brain to process so that you can respond to those threats that get added to your bucket in the best way that you know how with the tools that you have available. So once you become curious, the next step is having a few tools that you can pull from in those moments when you are feeling stressed the heck out, right? So again, I'm going to point you back to the uh chakra episodes because I do have at least three, sometimes as many as nine practices per episode that I share with how to tend to your energetic body and by proxy your nervous system health as well. But some of those things include getting a good night's sleep, going for a walk, making sure to nourish your body properly, not just on the fly, you know, we all have those days, like you're running behind, you just eat a granola bar. Um, but I'm talking about like on the average, do you know how to nourish your body properly so that it's getting what it needs for healthy development, memory retention, um, physical performance, all of the things. Also, um, how often are you engaging in creative expression? That's another great way to just connect with your emotions. If you have a really difficult time doing that, create something. I don't care if you draw a stick figure and a little square with a triangle on top look in house like you did in kindergarten, draw, paint, sing, dance, do something creative to help express things without having to dig into the stories and experiences. In fact, just before I recorded this episode, I posted a reel on Instagram being goofy and silly, dancing around like a fool to She Bangs by Ricky Martin, because that is how I have learned to reset my nervous system when I have a chance to do that. I got my son dropped off to school this morning. I came home, I posted something to our uh business, our plumbing business page, and then it was time to lock in and get ready to record this episode for you. And so I needed to just kind of like shake off the morning, reset, recalibrate, and like I said, lock in for this episode. So there are a couple of ideas that you can apply to start just checking in with yourself, getting curious, and tending to your energy when it feels a little bit out of whack. If you want more information, I'm going to put in the show notes all of the people that I mentioned that I have personally learned a lot from on my own journey. And if you want to see a little bit more of the things that I do to tend to myself, go follow me over on Instagram at chloe.being.human. It is a space where I lead with vulnerability to encourage you to do the same if that is what you are looking to do, so that you can deepen your capacity for the joyous experiences of this life, because we all know that we are flooded with that negativity day in and day out. And I think one of the best things that we can do to rage against the machine is to find and create joy for ourselves and for other people. So thank you for listening to this. As always, thank you for being here. If you are enjoying these episodes, the best way that you can support me, aside from listening, is sharing this, whether that be online or texting it to a friend, leaving a review on whatever platform you are listening. And I always love hearing your feedback as well. So I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your week. See good, be good. I'll see you next time.