Transcript

Kylie: Hello ladies. Welcome back to the Hormone Hub. This week I’m very excited to have Dr. Ashleigh Moreland with me. Now, Ashleigh is a passionate [00:01:00] neuroscientist and she’s a therapist, and her mission is to support others in overcoming their past challenges and traumas and to transcend the struggles impacting their daily lives.

So this is individually, in relationships, within families and within team environments so that you can start living the rest of your life and thrive rather than survive. Welcome, Ash. It’s great to have you. Thank you for coming. 

Ash: Thank you so much for having me here. I’ve been really excited about this. 

Kylie: Yes, it’s been a, been an interesting, now I always sort of introduce my guests with how we met and it was quite funny. So Ash and I, I basically, you know, of course it was on Facebook cause I meet all my new best friends on Facebook . But you know, when you’re in sort of these business groups and, you know, sort of clinical groups, you kind of you vibe with people or you just don’t. And Ash and I sort of had commented on, or I think [00:02:00] Ash had posted about someone sort of becoming, you know, and you know, talking about their anxiety and you know, how that was sort of like consuming for them. And I sort of commented back that I actually hated, and I know this is gonna go against popular opinion, but I couldn’t stand Brene Brown’s new book. I think it’s called Matters of the Heart. I had to stop listening after 10 minutes because all it was all about, you know, her anxiety.

And I just thought while I was listening to that, I just thought, you know, you are more than that. You know? Yes, that is a part. But you are not your diagnosis. And you know, and then Ash and I had this great conversation, you know, that followed that. And you know, here we are today with Ash to continue a great conversation.

So Ash, do you want to tell us a bit about you, a bit about your background, you know, and just so we, we can get to know you a bit. 

Ash: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a really convoluted background. I’ve been an academic for 12 [00:03:00] years and my PhD was in neuroplasticity and I actually did my PhD in aging. So the exciting thing about that was I had participants in my research in their eighties and nineties, and their brain literally changed as a result of the interventions.

And so that was really reassuring for me because neuroplasticity can continue to happen throughout your entire life. It is never too late whether you have a diagnosis, whether you don’t have a diagnosis, whether you have behaviors that are challenging, whether you have thoughts that are challenging. All of that is coming from mental and brain activity.

They’re kind of different, but related, and it’s never too late to change it. From an academic perspective, that was my background and personally, I had been in therapy myself for 20 years, talk therapies, and I had been on a whole number of different medications, for anxiety, depression. [00:04:00] I had had suicidal ideation and, and attempts throughout my life and I was really struggling mentally. And one day, my first child was born when I was 23 and he ended up being diagnosed with a whole heap of things. So asd, adhd, various ds, I call it the D soup. And it was really interesting because he was pretty typically developing until a medical incident and within three days he was completely gone. He was like a shell of the kid that he was. And I took him to pediatricians in three different states and basically everyone just said, ah, you know, that that’s just how it he is. And boys will be boys and just a whole heap of, just really dismissive.

And I had on three occasions doctors try and prescribe me [00:05:00] anxiety medication because I was the problem. And it was really challenging for me because I knew my son for the first 12 months of his life and I knew that this he, this kid was not, you know, he had regressed in every aspect of his life and… have you ever seen the movie Taken? 

Kylie: Yes. Yep. 

Ash: You know, when the dad gets on the phone, it’s like I have a very particular set of skills. So it was actually my son’s journey that inspired me to just learn absolutely everything that I could about neurological function, because I could identify that a lot of his symptoms were neurological.

And so I went down rabbit holes relating to nutrition, relating to device use, relating to emotional regulation and all kinds of things. And actually the scary revelation was that so much of it had pointed to me because my nervous system was really dysregulated, and co-regulation [00:06:00] requires the adult to be regulated. 

Kylie: Yeah. Yeah. Well they, you often hear, you know, and I think it’s sort of a cliche, but not a cliche, is, you know, how we show up in the family impacts the whole family, you know, and that old happy wife, happy life. Yeah. You know, it’s sort of, you know, rings true, really.

Ash: Absolutely. It’s so true. The interesting thing for me though, was how much of this was related to autonomic dysfunction, and like the autonomic nervous system and having dysregulation, I’d had hormonal problems my whole life. I had had emotional and behavioral issues my whole life. I’d had, you know, binge eating disorder and all these kinds of things.

 And when I started to actually unpack what was going on in my nervous system and why, and actually looking at intergenerational trauma through generations and generations in my family and even [00:07:00] my own childhood and how that played out in the development of my brain. I’m the youngest in my family, and I know that there were stressful things happening in my my family home even when my mom was pregnant with me.

Yeah. And so what I’ve learned since is that even obviously when you’re pregnant, the fetus is being developed and that brain is being developed based on your bloodstream. And so if you have high concentrations of stress hormones in your blood, the baby’s brain as a survival adaptation will preferentially develop the stress centers of the brain, because that’s an indicator it’s going to be born into a stressful environment.

Even before you’ve had your own life experiences, you’re already predisposed to those things like anxiety and those things, like the dysregulation stuff. 

Kylie: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so true. And you know, I speak to sort of women, you know, and they sort of say, oh, I’ve [00:08:00] been this, like this my whole life, you know?

So I, you know, and that indicates what’s going on. Now, just sort of to backtrack a bit and you know, we’ll come back to this. Can you explain to me like I’m a five year old, neuroplasticity. 

Ash: Yes. So neuroplasticity is just in the most simple terms, the ability of our nervous system to adapt in response to something new.

So it’s, it’s learning, our nervous system, our cells that constantly respond to the stimuli that come in. And in response to those, It will continue to change and adapt in a, in a few different ways, but it can change literally the structure of the brain. So literally brain structures can change and get bigger and the volume can get bigger, but also brain function can change the, the functions of specific neurotransmitters and physiologically what’s upregulated and downregulated can completely change.

[00:09:00] And so part of the problem is that so much of our life is automatic and unconscious. And when we, and that’s kind of just meaning that it’s habitual. And when we’re doing things that are habitual, we are just literally firing the same old neuro networks. 

Kylie: Yeah. Cause our body thinks we’re safe, or our brain thinks we’re safe.

Ash: Totally. Yeah. Totally. And so what neuroplasticity is about, is about from a bottom up experience, through the experiences of our body, being able to then change the brain and the whole, the nervous system, the whole way up so that the output from the brain is completely different. And it’s, it’s spectacular.

Kylie: Yeah. Yeah. I just find this whole, you know, area of, because I guess it’s a relatively new area of research as well. 

Ash: It is comparative to, yeah to biological sorts of researchers, research.[00:10:00] Yeah, it’s fairly new and also just rapid development of technology, like there is so much we still don’t know about the brain.

And even with the development now of functional MRIs and being able to literally stick people in an MRI and get them to physically do things and literally watch which parts of the brain are lighting up and why. And it’s so exciting. 

Kylie: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, you know, so fascinating. And I recently read a, oh gosh, perimenopause brain over here.

I recently read a great book called A Brain for Life by Dr. Nicola Gates, and she was sort of coming at it from a different angle. So she was looking at it more from, you know, the impact of hormones on brains and, you know, and how it is such a new, new area because to do research on women [00:11:00] full stop is, you know, they don’t like to touch us because we’ve got those hormonal fluctuations and hormonal changes, so they can’t get a stable, you know, group because we’re all changing all the time. So, you know, but there is, you know, and it is good to know that there’s more and more research coming out on women and the, the impact of the changes, particularly of estrogen on the brain, because a lot of women that I work with, you know, they sort of hit their sort of early forties, mid forties, early fifties, and then all of a sudden, they think they’re getting dementia or they, you know, just have this overwhelming brain fog or this anxiety that is, that is quite new to them.

 So, you know, and a lot of them are quite panicked by it, so do you know sort of like, is that an area that you sort of work with? 

Ash: Not specifically with the hormones, but the interesting thing about it is that I look at it the other way. So from an autonomic nervous system perspective, there’s a whole lot that we’re starting to understand.

And look, I only learned this at a conference [00:12:00] just a few months ago around, again, because of the capacity that we have to measure brains. The data that they were demonstrating was that within, when information comes into the brain, if we have adapted, if we have a brain that sends that data down into the deep bottom parts of our brain, that’s also indicating that that person relies on cortisol and stress hormones in order to release dopamine.

As opposed to oxytocin to release dopamine. And so then behaviorally that’s gonna have a lot of implications in how we relate and respond to others. But specifically for women, one of the interesting things that I do find is that a lot of the women that I have come to me are in that perimenopausal or menopausal stage of life, and I, I wonder how much is, obviously there’s hormonal elements, there absolutely is, but [00:13:00] also stage of life, like at that stage of life, often kids are leaving home and there’s huge change, massive change. And so looking at the nervous system as like a window of tolerance, if you imagine a cup, and you can be completely regulated while ever the, the water in the cup is still contained within the cup, but it’s when that water spills over that we go into dysregulation where there is anxiety and there is mood disruption and those kinds of things.

And so the, the life changes and uncertainty and, you know, there might be lack of connection or identity stuff that’s coming up. And so all, all those things contribute to the stress load meaning that our capacity before we become dysregulated is, is so much less. 

Kylie: Yeah, definitely. I see that all the time.

You know, women just have less resistance to stress. Yeah. You know, it comes from that, the stage of life a hundred percent because you’ve got, [00:14:00] you know, teenage or even young adult children who are still demanding of you. And I think as moms, you know, we’re always going to, we’re always a hundred percent invested regardless of what stage of life our kids are at.

You know, we might have parents who are getting older, so their needs are changing for the first time. So we have to step up in a different capacity to sort of support our parents. You know, a lot of us are still working, you know, we’ve got careers, we’re still trying to like literally hold our shit together because, you know, and then with these, the brain fog and the overwhelm and that anxiety, you know, and it’s, it’s definitely loss of confidence that I see all the time because there, there’s, there’s too much, that cup is overflowing a hundred percent. 

Ash: 100%, and you’re spot on. There are a few things that will be worse in terms of nervous system dysregulation than others, and some of the things will be anything to do with [00:15:00] uncertainty.

And as you already mentioned, when you are aging and you’ve got elderly parents, there’s so much more uncertainty because you, you also got uncertainty about their, their mortality, you know? And then as you’ve also raised with your own children in that teen years, they’re in ad, so adolescents from a neurological perspective is a very, very interesting stage of life because their brains are pruning like crazy, absolutely pruning like crazy, and those adolescent years, they also don’t have the capacity yet, they don’t have fully developed prefrontal cortex and their executive function, their ability for impulse control is probably at the lowest it’ll ever be. So the stresses as a parent are so significant. But then you’ve got the, I, I’ve raised identity before. This seems to be one of the most common things that I see coming up. If we, if our identity has been somewhat noun-ified throughout our [00:16:00] lives where I am their mom, their wife, their daughter, their friend, their colleague. And we don’t have our own identity outside of all those things, when there’s a threat to one of those pieces of us, like our children leaving home, or maybe our sons getting married and they’ve got a significant woman in their life. Or maybe, you know, like I said, about our parents facing their own mortality… 

Kylie: Or a child at schoolies right now.

Ash: But all these things, so from a dysregulation perspective, everything points to that. And look, some of, you can just Google symptoms of nervous system dysregulation, and those symptoms are really, really everything that you’ve just described. There’s brain frog, there’s anxiety, there’s symptoms of adhd.

There’s forgetfulness, there’s complete dissociation, Procrastination. There’s all these things. 

Kylie: [00:17:00] Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. And you know, and those symptoms crossover with the symptoms of perimenopause, menopause. So you’ve got nervous system dysregulation, you’ve got perimenopause, menopause, you know, and you’ve just got a lot going on right now.

Yeah. So what would you say to these women who just are feeling overwhelmed? Anxiety, you know, anxious and not themselves, you know, and where they’ve gone down this, this sort of path that they, they don’t know who they are anymore. 

Ash: Oh gosh. I just got goosebumps over my whole entire body. We, we just released a book a couple of weeks ago called, it’s, it’s a collaborative book, so there’s many authors from all around the world and it’s called Navigating Motherhood.

And in my chapter in that book, I spoke pretty bluntly about this and I said, self care, the narrative around self care needs to change. It is insulting to suggest that a bubble bath and a massage is go, is gonna be enough [00:18:00] to regulate your nervous system. It’s absolute bullshit. 

Kylie: Absolutely. Absolutely. I did a whole podcast on Selfcare Is Not Bubble Baths and Massages.

Ash: I remembered seeing it going, oh, we’re so aligned and so for me, what my role is when I’m working with these clients is about really, it’s, it’s multifaceted. So the first thing is it’s about reducing the load in that cup. So that might be stored, unresolved trauma in our nervous system. And you know that you have unresolved trauma because that’s the body symptoms.

That’s like, it might be heaviness on the chest or tightness in the neck, or like a, you know, a, blocked throat or the queasiness in the tummy. Those kinds of really physical things are signs of unresolved trauma that’s literally stored in our body. 

Kylie: Yeah. And is that trauma that we may not even be conscious of?

Ash: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. And that could [00:19:00] be stuff that has been unresolved and partly may not even be ours. So it can be, as I said, the intergenerational trauma can be huge. And so that’s the first thing. The other thing is chronic stress. So if we’ve been under chronic stress, being able to navigate that and kind of doing life audits and going, well, what is happening in your world and how, what strategies can we implement?

And I use the example of like, okay, use a computer. I’m a Windows computer girl. If someone tried to give me a Mac, I’ve got no idea how to use it. And now, ok, so that’s the first thing. Don’t change my operating system because if you change my operating system, I’m stuffed. And that’s effectively what’s happening with hormonal changes in that stage of life, right?

You’re getting a kind of operating system shift. But then also what happens if my Windows computer gets viruses? Or you know, is compromised in some way. Well, what happens? It slows down. It’s starts glitching. It forgets things. It shuts down [00:20:00] spontaneously. And so that unresolved trauma is like the, the viruses in that operating system.

Kylie: I love that analogy. That’s great. 

Ash: Yeah. Everyone can relate to it, right? And so it’s multifaceted so that that first bit is about really dealing with the chronic stress and the whole heap of processes that I have to be able to release the trauma from people’s bodies. And it’s a bottom up approach. And then it’s about really feeling safe to engage in true self care.

And part of that is identity, if I don’t know who myself is, because yes, I have children and yes, I have clients and yes, I have family, but I am Ash. And if I don’t know who I am, what my needs are, what I like, you know, I found myself grocery shopping, coming home going, I actually didn’t even buy anything I liked because [00:21:00] I’m so used to just meeting the needs of everyone else, you know?

Kylie: Yeah. Yeah. And I think as moms, you know, we put ourselves last, we’re great at, you know, we’re, we are good girls and we’re people pleasers and we please everyone else except ourselves, you know? 

Ash: Yeah. And that’s the thing that has to change. The self care is about feeling safe enough in your nervous system.

Cause fawning, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this stuff, but fawning the, the stress responses in our nervous system are fight, flight, and freeze, but people throw fawning into that as well. 

Kylie: Ok. I have not come across that. 

Ash: So fawning is exactly as you just described. It’s the people pleasing and placating and all those kinds of things.

And the interesting thing about fawning is that it’s not physiologically a stress response like the others are. It’s more of a higher order brain function, and it’s learned behaviors. So if we need to, if we have a human need to connect, and be significant to our [00:22:00] caregivers as, as children say, which we literally do because we’re mammals and for our survival if we don’t have a caregiver to feed us and clothe us and shelter us, then we die. So that means that biologically we will suppress our own needs, even as children if our needs can compromise the connection that we have with a caregiver. It’s a survival mechanism, and so we learn these behaviors to please others and make sure everyone else is okay, because if everyone else is okay, I’m safe.

But the reality as an adult is that actually, we’re safe. We are safe. We can meet our own needs. And even if someone else isn’t okay, we can still be okay. 

Kylie: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really important message. You know, we don’t have to keep everyone happy. Yeah. And I think it’s, you’re right, it’s breaking that, that pattern, like we’ve always done it.

We’ve always been [00:23:00] the good daughter, the good daughter-in-law, the good wife, the pleasant friend, you know, even with the people we don’t really connect with, and it’s just, you know, this, it’s almost like a, a mask that we wear. 

Ash: Totally. And this is, this is the hard thing, right? So it’s very easy for me to say, oh, self care is learning to say no to things and setting healthy boundaries and all these things.

But I look back at my childhood and, and my mum, and I’ll use the example I remember. I’ve been married twice. So my first marriage, the day that we got married, I remember looking around going, there’s not a single relationship here that I hope mine turns out like. And that, and I had this realization that I didn’t know what a healthy relationship looked like.

How do you talk? How do you fight? How do you resolve conflict? How much sex are you supposed to have? What’s the, how do you deal with finances? How do you deal with that? I didn’t have a program for that because I had never seen it. It was foreign. And, the same thing [00:24:00] goes for setting boundaries and saying no. That was never modeled to me. Never. And so I understood the concept that I had to set boundaries, but then when I went to set a boundary, I was like, I’ve got no idea what, what words do I say, in what order and how do I say this and when and how, you know, it would freak me out. So the idea of setting a boundary was a stressor for me.

I didn’t have the program on how to do it. So that’s one of the, that’s the another facet of, of this is about developing the programs to be able to go, I really don’t wanna go to that dinner party. I don’t, it, it’s not my thing. And how, how can you deliver that in a really loving way that feels safe for you? But it’s honoring that boundary where other people are not taking constant withdrawals from your capacity. 

Kylie: Yes. Yeah, those, those energy vampires that, you know, just suck [00:25:00] away at at bits of you because yeah, partly, and it, I think it’s a reflection of their behavior as well, because they know that you’ll give it to them, so they’re gonna keep asking for more.

Ash: Absolutely. And I love the saying, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept, because that to me is yes, their behavior’s not acceptable. But unless I’m doing something to stop it, change it, it’s actually on me. I, I can’t blame them for their behavior because I have the capacity to set a boundary and say, I’m not walking past this standard of behavior. I’m not in agreement with this and I’m not accepting it. 

Kylie: Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I love that. That’s, that’s, yeah, really good. So thank you for coming on the show today. Is there anything sort of final words or, you know, we’ve got no time limit really. I’m just very respectful of your time.

Ash: No, that’s fine.

Look, my final words would be that you are worth it. [00:26:00] Yeah, and you know, I, I invested so much of my life because I had perfectionist tendencies, and that was a trauma response because I learned at a really young age that, again, that the people pleasing, I learned at a really young age that if I was winning BMX races, if I was getting A’s at school, if I was performing at a really high level, I had connection.

Kylie: Yes. And recognition. 

Ash: And recognition. So that significance piece. And so that just because I left home doesn’t mean to say that my nervous system goes, oh, you are not at home anymore, so you can ditch the perfectionism. You’re safe. You don’t need to be perfect in order to be worthy of the oxygen you’re breathing anymore.

And so, that carries with you, there’s, in your mind, this is actually an interesting thing, is that as a neuroscientist, I wanted all the answers to be about the brain, but in fact, the definition of mental is relating to the mind. And the mind and brain are not the same thing. They’re related, but I’ve seen and scanned a lot of brains and I have never [00:27:00] located a mind, it doesn’t exist in the physical.

So, so from that perspective, I kind of look at it and go, My, my body has time and space. My body physically in this space that I’m sitting right now is very safe, but my mind has no time and space. So if, if you might have said something that remember, or, or my mind remembered a memory from my past that was upsetting or activating for me, the mind influences the physiological response of the body, even though the body in this time, in this space, is safe.

And so, as much as the work that I do is about changing the nervous system and resolving trauma from the nervous system, we, we do that via the mind a lot of the time. 

Kylie: And that’s, there’s so many rabbit holes we could go down. Oh yeah. But also too, like the mind controls our perception of, you know, so there could be a [00:28:00] stressful, you know, but stress is really perceived.

Ash: Yes. You know, it’s, and women have a higher, a greater physiological response to perceived threat than men, or perceived stress than men. And there’s a whole, that’s a whole other rabbit hole, but there’s a whole lot of meaning making around that. And so, yeah, my point would be that, You’re worth it. And when I was trying to be the best mum I could be, the best wife I could be, the best colleague I could be, the best practitioner I could be, I actually ended up dropping all the balls. And I, I was cooked by the end of it. But when I put all those balls to the side and I focused on being the best me that I could be, already I was the mum that my kids wanted. I was the wife that my husband loved because I was me. He fell in love with me, not with everything that I did.

Kylie: The labels. And you know, you’ve gotta fill your own cup first, because if you don’t, [00:29:00] you’ve got nothing to give everyone else, you know, that’s when you become cranky, bitchy, you know, and snappy and you know, all of those things is because you, there’s that depletion. All right, and Ash, where can, you know, if ladies wanna find out more about you, where can they, where can they get in touch or, or read more about you and the book as well. 

Ash: Yeah, so, my website’s just drashleighmoreland.com and I’m on, you know, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all, all the places, all the usual places. 

Kylie: And we’ll put the links to your website and socials, we’ll put all of that in the show notes. 

Ash: Yeah. Awesome. And the book, Navigating Motherhood was launched on Amazon first. We’re still waiting on hard copy releases that we’re expecting them either late this week or early next week. And the next book is called Conscious Revolution. So that’s launching next month and that… 

Kylie: Congratulations. 

Ash: Thank you. That is a complete oh man, [00:30:00] that, if you wanna start understanding your behaviors and the rabbit holes of our unconscious mind and all those kinds of things that I dive really deep into that, in that book.

So yeah, I’m really, it really challenged me. That’s another thing that I’ve written, but that’s another collaboration project, so.

Kylie: That’s amazing. Congratulations. 

Ash: Yeah, thank you. 

Kylie: All right, well all of those will be in the show notes. So thank you so much, Ash, for coming and joining us today. I think this is a really great conversation.

I think it’s conversation, yeah, we can pick up where we left off and do this again. 

Ash: I would love that. And thank you for hosting me and to all of your listeners. Thank you. 

Kylie: My pleasure. All right everyone. Well thank you so much for listening. You can, yeah, as I said, grab Ash’s details and follow her.

We’ll put all the links in the show notes. So thank you and we will see you on the Hormone Hub next week.