PART 4: The torturous position of knowing and not doing.
Without further ado, I am going to continue on from my last post which began to detail what you must stop doing if you wish to stop sitting on your knowledge and begin make progress in your recovery.
Some of these may be hard pills to swallow, so brace yourself. As the previous post outlined, reading this blog is indeed a recovery action. But it’s safe and cosy because it’s only furthering your insight. It’s not costly. So as you’d probably guessed I might say, right now, in this moment, you have to pay up and spend big. See the value the practical actions and grab yourself some food to snack on as you read.
3) Stop seeking peace or a calm mind in this moment
Similar to the last point I made, this point involves stopping attempting to evade discomfort. But, more specifically, I want to draw attention to the fleeting (and thus safer) nature of thoughts, compared to the more permanent nature of action.
Take the example of trying a giant bowl of new cereal. Planning to add it in – at some point - is safe. But pouring yourself a bowl of cereal, covering it with milk and diving in with a spoon is not. Thoughts can be one-offs, unfulfilled, mere sketches of possibilities; actions usually can’t. They are done. Concluded. Concrete.
The disparity between the permanence of insight and actions therefore contributes to making the former seem easier. With insights, though they may take time and effort to formulate, once you’ve completed the thought, it is ‘done’. So, let’s say I am pondering my recovery. I read a blog post that tells me that I should stop picking the smallest banana from the bunch because it is reinforcing the disordered idea that ‘lower is better’. Once I’ve reached that conclusion, it has a certain satisfaction. There is insight into what needs to happen in the future. Great! A plan! But, it stops right there without any consequence whatsoever. There is relative satisfaction with cost.
Conversely, there are very few one-shot actions that get you high satisfaction in one go. Truly conclusive actions are rare, and many pivotal actions (i.e., always picking the bigger banana) are merely the starting point for the multiple repetitions with variation and progression that are needed to get you what you want (e.g., full recovery, or a rewired belief that less is not better).
What you must attempt to do is seek out full recovery actions that have as many of the benefits as possible of one-shot ruminations, and force yourself to follow through with them without an option of an alternative. The more wholly you do them, the more immediate the payoff. You can feel a genuine sense of pride after doing it, rather than the strange recovery guilt you often experience when you only toe-dip.
4) Stop using your wealth of insight to fiddle with irrelevant frills.
It’s pretty convenient for your eating disorder when you just think, because thinking continues to cocoon it in a reassuring and cosy blanket of passivity.
As you reflect on previous therapies or occasions of broadening insight, I want you to consider if the verbalized intellectual insights you have come across have tended to operate at a high level of generality. Maybe you’ve been told that your eating disorder revolves around your lack of esteem, or like me, that you are so much of a perfectionist, you absolutely couldn’t cope with the prospect of not having a perfect diet.
If this sounds familiar, I wonder if you agree with me that it is rather interesting (and convenient)that these types of insights seem to generate something that feels like a plan of action. In these instances, I need to bolster my self-esteem / I need to allow space for imperfection.
However, what is overtly clear, is that this ‘macro’ level of attained insight still isn’t particularly useful to use as a direct guide to action that will tackle the core behaviours upholding your eating disorder. What will happen is you’ll do some fantastic self-esteem-boosting morning affirmations and go to the kitchen to prepare your same old disordered breakfast as you have done for the past several months (which in my experience, then undid any of the self-worth work I had just done because felt disappointed at my efforts towards of recovery).
Whilst self-esteem work is good and necessary, and reducing the need for perfectionism is vital, what you really need is to set goals that mean you will take and sustain meaningful action towards ED behaviour combatting. In any life domain where stasis is the default (e.g., recovery), you must practise developing your insights into goals at a useful level of specificity. Insights that are indirect and apply at the wrong level of detail will result in behaviour change.
Instead of just committing to doing peripheral work like boosting self-esteem, you must directly confront the work that you’d rather delay. The work that will hurt. The work that costs.
One goal that checks both levels of insights might be: “I commit to doing my morning affirmations daily after I have eaten my well-loaded peanut butter and honey bagel with a large milky drink, and the largest banana from the bunch.
5) Stop keeping your relevant insights quiet
One of the wonderful things about Eating Disorder recovery is that you know your ED’s tricks better than anybody else in the entire world. In order to translate this close insight into something helpful, you must be proactive and open about it. This is easier done with a support system, but is not impossible to also use to hold yourself accountable, too. Due to new situations causing the brain to perceive threat, it is probably best to anticipate the potholes you might stumble into, and cover them, far in advance of entering that moment. And as I said, the good thing is, by now, you do know the potholes you frequently slip into and cannot play the ignorance card each time you do.
So, to put this in practical terms, you need to ensure you are paving the recovery pathway forward to be free of roadblocks, or at least the foreseeable ones. For example, if you know that when you go to the supermarket to buy a new kind of bread you will trip down the restrictive staircase and come out with your same old loaf (because that’s happened 5 times now…), you must share this likely eventuality and safeguard against it happening. Could your partner pop into the store and select bread for you under the instruction to opt for a very un-you bread? Or, if nobody is available to grab a new option for you, can you do an online order in a calm mood which will arrive on your doorstep? Or, if you know that you enjoy cheese with your meal-prepped pasta lunch but that your head will summon up a very valid sounding excuse as a reason not to add it (e.g., an extra 7 seconds washing up! / I am not in a cheesy mood because I had a cheesy pizza 2 nights ago!), can you buy pre-grated cheese? Can you create a monitored tick list which is stuck on the fridge that ensures cheese is had at least once daily, at an absolute minimum? Further, can you put it directly on your pasta in evening before rather than keeping it in a separate Tupperware which may give you the choice to add it or not when it comes to lunch time?
In short, the aim is to kill every bird with your one pre-emptive stone. Your insight makes you a prime anticipatory, proactive and preventative machine. When there is no escape route or option B, the only door to take is the recovery option. No, this doesn’t make it ‘easy’, but it sure does make it simple.
6) Stop neglecting the value of previous action, that has left you far from square one.
Unless you are reading this blog post on the first day you have developed an eating disorder, you are not at square one. What I am absolutely certain of, is that reading this blog post today, you now have at least some more mental resources and insights than you did when you first became ill. And for many of you, it will be much, much more.
When you feel as though the gap between your insight and your ability to do action is a vast gulf, I invite you to recognise that the gap makes itself look wider than it is. And before you tell me it genuinely is wide, I am not saying it isn’t. However, I am saying that it will always be exaggerated and you will always undervalue your ability.
Alongside deferring action, another thing humans are good at, especially those of us who are undernourished, is overgeneralization with a negative slant. My bet is that your previous recovery attempts haven’t been utterly useless, but were under-resourced attempts which provided very, very valuable learning points. When you reflect on them, your years of passivity or toe-tipping or peripheral fiddling up until now weren’t completely fruitless. When you observe them more carefully, fairly and with more self-respect, you can see that you made some cautious steps down some correct healing avenues. When you pretend you haven’t done anything of use at all, you prevent yourself from learning from what you have done.
Instead of self-deprecation, I urge you to spend a short amount of time performing an audit of your recovery attempts so far, asking questions like “what went right that time?” or “what does that tell me for this time?”. By acknowledging that the gap has never been as enormous a gulf as you might otherwise have pretended, you make it much easier for yourself to bridge it for real this time. Action will not be born out of self-hate, so take a short while to acknowledge that whilst your past self has indeed fallen short, they haven’t fallen face down without leaving a few pointers.
And that wraps up this series. I do hope you found it insightful and that it was long enough to action digging into several courses of food beside it.
Key takeaways from this series:
The prevalence of a split state can be partially accounted for by the simple evolutionary imperative, “If you’re alive, change nothing."
Thoughts are typically less effortful (cost less, require less repetition) than actions. If you want change, you have to be prepared to take the option of more resistance.
Intellectual insights often aren’t useful guides to action.
Be forceful with actions. Forcing yourself to take action, directly in the face of fear, over and over and over again, is what will begin to establish new neural routes and new automatics for your brain.
Be proactive and pre-emptive.
Be specific.
Be honest and open about your insight (with yourself and with your support system).
Be kind.
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