Nervous System Rewiring for Eating Disorders
Eating disorder recovery is a self-exploratory learning process whereby we come to understand what the signs of stress are in our own bodies, how or bodies communicate what it takes to survive and thrive, and what happens when we miss these cues.
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Eating disorder Recovery is not just about eating more intuitively. It’s a process of understanding our own physiological responses to safety and stress - what makes us tick the right and not so right ways.
This requires learning about our own autonomic nervous system, how it’s wired, why it’s wired in ways that it is, how it is currently resiliently working for us right now.
This requires becoming more self-aware and embodied - being able to have a more accurate gauge of our internal responses to life - rather than how we may look on the outside, or how we may think we are doing.
For many people with eating disorders, disordered eating, or living in diet culture, we have become used to pushing through stress, pushing down feelings, and have become used to saying, “Everything is fine.”
I remember in the depths of my early eating disorder days, I strongly identified with being superhuman. I believed that by eating small amounts, exercising a lot, pushing through, and not feeling any sort of big emotion, I was some kind of superhuman. However, my physiology was struggling, my nervous system was stuck in a deep freeze, and I had no idea because this go-go-go had become my norm.
This norm had resulted from a history of:
Suppressing my appetite and tiredness cues so when I finally wasn’t able to go anymore, at least I had an excuse to slow down.
Learning early on to hold back my tears because of fear of being judged as too sensitive.
Observing that it wasn’t nice to get angry, so I developed grudges and feelings of resentment instead.
Remembering the golden rule “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill” so I doubted my reactions and feelings.
Fearing to speak up or express myself because it was better to please others than to cause a show or conflict.
Nervous system rewiring for eating disorder recovery
Blocking my truth and my biological impulses, as well as pent up survival energy and stress chemistry in my system, resulted in the development of an eating disorder.
A large part of my own recovery has been about pausing and checking in with my body, and asking questions of what it may need, where may there be held tension, and how can I attend to myself moment to moment?
This process of acknowledging and pausing at intervals throughout the day gives the habitual go-go-go energy to reset, metabolize, and ‘come down’ so it isn’t on high all the time.
We may realize how starved our bodies are for self-care and nourishment (on different levels, not just food). When we pause, this creates more space and flow in the system, and we may start to realise that we can hear our hunger or fullness cues more easily, or that we can identify what foods we genuinely want to eat, or that we have more capacity to socialize and engage in more joyful activities because the system is no longer in a state of go-go-go or shutdown.
Shutdown is what happens to our nervous system when we’ve been going for so long, and often shows up in eating disorders as depression, low metabolism, or low energy).
The eating disorder recovery process will ask us to change, heal, grown, unlearn, and relearn.
The way we are wired, which is often towards unhealthy patterns, as is with the case with disordered eating, will be stretched, disentangled, and rewired towards healthier patterns and choices with nervous system education and support.
This is a somatic-based approach to eating disorder recovery that can sometimes feel painful and threatening to the person’s psyche, as well as their physiology and biochemistry.
When something has been done the same way for so long, when change is imminent, we may feel resistant, suspicious or doubtful. We may even want to hold on tighter to the eating disorder strategies because we know deep down, they are slipping from our grip.
This is when we need to remember why we are on the path and call in all the positive resources, because it is possible rewire the habitual firings of the nervous system.
And it takes patience, perseverance, courage, and commitment to face the undoing and shifting of old stress survival patterns into new patterns that supports our multidimensional somatic welling.
We all have the healing capacity to do this work. It requires a knowing that the body can heal, that you deserve the healing, and a willingness to embrace the process, however bumpy it may get.
Over time, areas in the body that were stressed from the eating disorder, like the digestive system, immune system, and tissues heal and recover.
Old programming and conditioning rests and rewires.
Intuition and self-trust emerge as we return to our natural capacity to heal.
As we learn the language of our biology, embody them, and become more attuned and self-aware to our internal and external environments in the present moment, the recovery process leads us to the medicine we have been looking for: ourselves.
Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash