How do you regulate your nervous system when you're overwhelmed? A Q&A with yoga teacher Ashley Stachon

Ashley Stachon is the director of Metta Mama, a yoga studio for new and expecting moms in San Rafael, California. She teaches prenatal, postnatal and fertility yoga, as well as oncology yoga and Yoga for Healing at Metta Yoga San Rafael. She is a trauma-informed nervous system movement instructor and coach, has taught yoga since 2012, and founded But You Are So Healthy.

This conversation is general education, not medical advice.

This is part two of our conversation. Part one covers the mental load of motherhood, from the missing village to the pressure to have it all.

What does a nervous system yoga teacher do?

Ashley: I am the director of Metta Mama, which is a yoga studio for new and expecting moms in San Rafael. I teach prenatal yoga, postnatal yoga. I'm also a trauma-informed nervous system movement instructor as well as a coach. The foundation of all of my yoga teachings is based in finding safety in your nervous system and really understanding more about your physiology, so you don't have to have a lot of judgment for yourself when you're not feeling great or you're going through a transition or something in your life is shifting.

I also teach oncology yoga at Metta in San Rafael and a class called Yoga for Healing. I have my own business called But You Are So Healthy, which is somatic practices to help support people going through a transition, or just getting to a point where they're like, I don't feel like myself, I don't feel 100%. We work through an understanding of what's actually going on in their nervous system and sort of unwind whatever we need to unwind through physical movement. A lot of it has to do with finding strength and stability within your body and physical movement that's connected a lot of times to just getting stuck in a stress response.

What is the freeze response?

Kristina: We talked before about limited capacity. We only have so much, but we keep adding another extra thing on top until our cup is so full we can't hold it all together. Is that what was happening when you were so overwhelmed? Too much for you to handle?

Ashley: Yeah, it was too much. The stress response into the trauma response. And we're going to talk about trauma with a little t, in the sense that sometimes there's a huge trauma that happens: a breast cancer diagnosis, a big car accident, an important person dying. That is trauma. But you can also go into a trauma response in your body, physiologically, mentally, emotionally.

If you're talking about the stress response into the trauma response, you have the startle, the fight or flight, this wall of overwhelm. Once you pass this wall of overwhelm, you go into freeze and shutdown. I'll use myself as an example. I was going, going, going, no recovery time. I thought I had to go harder, and that was what would make me more productive. And I went straight through this wall of overwhelm, and then I was stuck in this freeze shutdown.

Freeze and shutdown is also if you feel lack of motivation, if you have a hard time recognizing yourself. I hear a lot of women say, I don't feel like myself anymore, I get annoyed easily, I'm irritated. That is our body having so little capacity and energetic capacity because we're in this freeze shutdown to protect ourselves.

Kristina: So we're stuck. I'm the overwhelmed one too, and I also don't feel like myself, and I hear my friends saying similar things. As women, we think it's hormones, it's this, we try to find reasons. But the reason might be we are doing too much, we're deciding too much.

Ashley: We're taking in too much information.

How do you stop feeling overwhelmed?

Kristina: How do we undo this? What do you recommend for women like me, like so many other women who are overwhelmed and want to find their way out and be back to our happy self?

Ashley: Do less. And I'm not throwing that around cavalierly. Stress plus rest equals growth. With that wall of overwhelm, if we can stay in the startle, fight or flight, and then complete that stress response before we get over the wall of overwhelm, then that needs to be rest and recovery. Then we close the stress response, and we stay in this growth part of the stress response. Cortisol, adrenaline: we need it. We get up in the morning, we have our cortisol awakening reaction. That gets us going. When we do too much, do too much, we get stuck in that trauma shutdown. So if we're needing to move back over the wall, we need to start practicing rest and recovery.

If you've been stuck in the shutdown freeze for a long time, you might need to work with somebody who can really support you. It might be supplements, it might be changing your diet, and all of that is nourishing. We want to nourish ourselves. How do we do that? We do that with good food, real food. We do that with figuring out if we need any supplementation, because we're low on vitamin D, which a lot of us are, and that's a hormone that supports everything in our body.

What are micro moments of safety?

Ashley: If we're just talking about what we can do every day as a starting point: we want to start building stress resiliency. How we build stress resiliency is we start using stress hormetically, using our cortisol release to get us to the goals that we want to meet, and then we come back down into safety. We come back down to a moment of rest. Can we stop our life and run away and go on vacation every ten minutes, every day? No. But can we take three times a day, let's start with three, to say, I'm going to protect these ten minutes, or this half hour, whatever we have? It can even literally be ten seconds, as we're just practicing micro moments of safety. So can we protect this ten minutes? Can we protect this one minute? What does that look like? It looks like taking a pause. Maybe you can do this this evening: you take a pause and you write down things that bring you joy.

What I've been doing lately: I've discovered those face masks that come in the packets that you unfold. I didn't think I liked face masks. I'm sort of that hippie-dippie, I don't do makeup, I don't do girly stuff. But I went on a lovely weekend away with some girls in June, someone brought face masks, and I was like, I think these are my new jam. They're the throwaway ones, which usually I'm very anti. But sometimes you just have to meet yourself where you are. So maybe at the end of the day, or maybe I have ten minutes at home in the middle of the day, I will put on a face mask and I'll put my legs up the wall.

Kristina: I have a ritual like this. I keep a cream in my fridge, and that's my night ritual. I take it out, put on the cold cream, do a massage. It's a couple of minutes, but it's such a form of self-care. It's love to myself.

Ashley: My legs up the wall ritual with my mask, your cream: that's a beautiful end-of-day ritual. But let's back it up even more. How do we do it when we're in front of our computer? Maybe you work from home and you have blue sky and green in your backyard. Then you go outside and you take five deep breaths. That can be safety. We can do somatic exercises to find safety, like we were talking about earlier, just taking a pause and giving your eyes a rest. All of these sort of add up, and when we can add these up, we can start to realize the benefit.

How does dopamine help a new habit stick?

Ashley: The beautiful thing about changing a habit is that dopamine is produced when we are thinking about the reward, not after the reward has happened. So when we want to start to make these micro shifts, and we start to pause and tune into what my body is feeling right now, like when I go legs up the wall and my body goes [exhale], that is starting to become the dopamine release. When I pay attention to that, I'm actually getting a moment of ease in my body. I start to think about that throughout the day, my dopamine starts to rise, and then that becomes a habit. We can do that with really anything: going outside, taking a breath. Tea time is me time, like making tea a ritual. I would start with writing a couple things: what brings me a feeling of ease, and what brings me an exhale in my body? Those are tiny little things you can incorporate throughout the day.

Does restorative yoga actually do anything?

Kristina: We used to go to the gym and work out hard, and now I see myself and my friends softening to other practices. If you had told me about restorative yoga ten years ago, I would have said, why? Just laying down? But I rediscovered it recently and it's been really transformative. In reality it's not doing much at all, but it's so good for our nervous system.

Ashley: Well, it's doing a lot. I teach a fertility yoga series as well, an eight-week series, and there are two poses that we do in every single class. One of them is legs up the wall, because legs up the wall is awesome.

What are the benefits of legs up the wall?

Ashley: If you think restorative yoga isn't doing anything, here's the reasoning behind legs up the wall. Your calf is known as your second heart, because when you pump your calf, when you move your calf, it moves the blood back to your heart, which you need to get reoxygenated. Your calf has these valves: every time you move your calf, the blood goes to this valve, and then you move it again and this valve closes and it goes up. It's a way that your blood can get back to your heart with gravity pushing it down. So you put legs up the wall, you take that effort out, and the blood rushes from your feet to your heart. It tricks your body into thinking your blood pressure has been raised, and to counteract that, it clicks on your parasympathetic nervous system. So you're tricking your body to drop into a restorative healing state. Yoga's so cool, because this was created before that science knowledge was known. Yoga is thousands of years old.

Then we do Supta Baddha Konasana, which is the soles of the feet together and you're open like this. We do it restorative, so we support you so you can soften. In fertility yoga, we're trying to nourish this heart-womb connection. So we lay and we find softness, and we just sort of let the energetic layers melt away.

Is rest productive?

Ashley: It's beautiful that you have opened yourself up to restorative yoga, and it's beautiful that you see friends and other women realizing the benefits of slowing down. My mantra these days is rest is productive. That new mantra did not come easily, because it was an unlearning that rest equals lazy, rest is not productive. I want everyone to give themselves grace as they're trying to figure out how to move away from this overwhelm. We are not told by society to slow down. It's even faster. So when we're trying to come to this place of peace, safety, and really drop into our intuitive attunement, we're going against the grain. That takes a while to step into, and to give ourselves the grace to be like, okay, maybe this is not what I thought equaled productivity, but this feels really good in my body. It's also the acknowledgement that we can't do it all, and doing it all is not serving us.

Why can't I relax when I finally rest?

Ashley: If you look back at the physiological stress response: if you've been in shutdown freeze, in order to get back to safety, you have to drop into the activation phase first. You have to go the other way. So if you come to a place of rest and you're like, I can't, my mind won't stop, there must be something wrong with me: there's nothing wrong with you. That is your literal body doing exactly what it needs to do to find safety. We're working with a lot here to get to the place where, laying in Supta Baddha Konasana, not only do we say, that feels yummy, but we also allow ourselves to receive it. So it's not a change that happens overnight, which is why I like the micro doses.

What's the difference between wanting and pushing?

Kristina: We're all pretty ambitious people, and it's so hard to learn where to push, and whether we should even push, when we want something and we're working towards our goal. Where's the difference between wanting and pushing?

Ashley: Forcing something is never going to work, whether it's in your own life and your goals, or in your motherhood journey trying to get your kids to do something. I think just coming back to the idea that stress plus rest equals growth: is that pushing? Or is that having a certain goal in mind and giving yourself the grace and space to achieve it in a sustainable, authentic way?

If you think about a day, not in our current society but more traditionally, we used to be outside a lot. We used to be working with our body. We grew our food, we had to wash our own clothes. We weren't stopping, but we had support. We would be outside, and it wasn't constant brain fatigue. We weren't on computers. It was hard work, but our body at the end of the day was tired and our brain was a little less tired. So we've sort of switched it. Our brain is exhausted, we have brain fog, we have fatigue, we have overwhelm. Our brain feels tight a lot.

Kristina: And our body is not doing enough, in a way.

Is movement medicine?

Ashley: Movement is medicine. Movement can be really nourishing. Trying to realize that stress plus rest equals growth, and the rest can be taking a pause, it can be taking a breath, it can be standing up, it can be circling, it can be covering your eyes, it can just literally be laying on a bed for a minute and asking yourself what this sensation feels like, because I'm supported right now and I'm not holding myself up. And movement is medicine. It pumps blood, it pumps lymph through your body, it supports your immune system, it supports your circulatory system, it supports your blood sugar, heart rate, all of that. If you're heightened and you're like, I just need to go for a run, that's a great thing to do. You're listening to your body, and that is supportive. If you are trying to nourish yourself, then maybe slower yoga, not necessarily restorative, but yoga where you're moving in a more rhythmic way, like a hatha yoga practice.

Where can you find Ashley Stachon?

Ashley: My website is butyouaresohealthy.com. I also write a blog on Substack under But You Are So Healthy, and it's all just about, again, finding safety. It started as my breast cancer journey, and now it's come more into the practices that we incorporate daily into our lives. And I teach at Metta Yoga in San Rafael. Mondays at 9:15 is my Yoga for Healing class. Tuesday night at 6:45 is my Yoga for Oncology class, which is both active treatment patients and survivors. Tuesdays and Fridays I teach a combination of prenatal, postnatal, and mom and tots, which is a mom class that they can bring their toddlers to. And my fertility yoga series is also going on right now, and it will start up again in December.

Ashley's micro moments of safety are the idea I keep returning to as a teacher: ten seconds, three times a day, practiced until the body starts to expect them. The Etalon Posture Bra is meant to be worn the same way. The Progressive Wear Protocol starts at the lightest strap adjustment, two to three hours a day, and moves to the next strap level over several weeks as your postural muscles build endurance. The patented scapular guidance system stabilizes and guides the shoulder blades toward their optimal anatomical position, so slouching starts to feel subtly uncomfortable while your shoulders stay free to move.

Links

• Part one: Why is the mental load of motherhood so heavy?
• Etalon Posture Bra
• Metta Mama
• But You Are So Healthy
• Ashley's Substack