Can You Slow Down? The Importance of Rest and Digest in Eating Disorder Recovery
Eating disorder recovery requires rest, not hustle. We cannot force our way through recovery.
We cannot override our body's current tolerance and nervous system capacity; otherwise, this leads to further dysregulation. The overriding, forcing, and hyper-achieving may have been what resulted in nervous system dysregulation in the first place.
This dysregulation can subsequently lead to food and body-based coping strategies to squash and numb the high demands of a world where hustle, hard work, perfectionism, and burning the candle at both ends are revered.
Why Eating Disorder Recovery Requires Rest, Not Hustle
Eating disorders often require a high amount of white-knuckling and override. Restrictive eating, diet plans, over-exercise, eating at specific meal times, and avoiding food groups or ingredients require a large amount of focus, planning, and energy.
This means that when we focus on healing, we have to step out of the hustle paradigm (aka diet culture) and prioritize rest, slowing down, and attuning to our body and its needs. This is what recovery needs.
For people who desire to step out of diet culture, where high-functioning, high-performing, and high-achieving get a badge of honour even in the face of burnout, the real hard work is resting and pausing. For people with eating disorders or disordered eating where functional freeze is most likely driving the show, this is hard work.
Functional Freeze: When Slowing Down Feels Unsafe
Functional freeze occurs when fight and flight energy hasn't been able to express itself at the time of a traumatic event and becomes trapped, usually from childhood. For people navigating eating disorders, early developmental trauma may have been present. These early experiences are overwhelming for young humans where there wasn't enough, reliable or attuned co-regulation to help make sense of a scary, bad, traumatic event, resulting in the survival energies of flight, fight and freeze remaining trapped in the body.
This is one way dysregulation takes root in the nervous system. And we find many ways, such as eating disorder strategies, to avoid the discomfort of that dysregulation and the pain of the past traumas lying dormant underneath.
When we are young, if we don't have attuned or safe environments in which to authentically express and emote our inner world, we learn early on to hold back our emotional expressions and authentic impulses. Over time, the holding back of these energies and expressions results in a shutdown or freezing. We may feel numb or disconnected from our inner world. Instead of receiving validation from our authentic expression and sensitive emotions, we find ways to get validation from the external world, achievements, performance, success, and the aesthetic of the body.
As such, slowing down, doing less, and feeling an internal sense of enoughness in those moments of pause is where some of the deepest healing lies.
When you hear the words "do less", what comes up? Do you sense some resistance, a tightening up in the jaw or eyes, or a little cringe or scoff?
I know I do. And that's how I know that this is where some of my deepest wounds and work reside.
What Resistance to Rest Looks Like
We have learned that staying busy is an attempt to avoid our own inner challenges or trauma. On some level, busy feels safe. When we are busy, we can avoid or distract ourselves.
In order to heal, we need to slowly re-wire that somatic organization and re-write the internal script that we are safe, that it's ok to rest, and that we are enough in the non-doing.
Our capacity to pause and rest is related to how much we feel within ourselves about our sense of worthiness and enoughness.
When we insert a supportive pause and a moment of rest, we indicate to our whole system that we have done enough on a somatic level and that "I'm enough, there's enough, there's enough for enough, and I belong".
And of course, many of us (who live in diet culture) have learned that it's not ok to pause. We learned that in order to be validated, worthy and good enough, we had to keep achieving and doing. We developed strategies to override our bodies and to keep it together, including holding back our emotions.
If it's hard to pause and rest (and digest), it can manifest as:
Bingeing because if we stop eating, there's a fear there won't be enough, so it's hard to complete a meal. There's a belief around "there isn't enough for me."
Restricting because the fear lies in starting something and not being able to execute it well enough or perfectly, so it's hard to even begin a meal. There's a belief around "I'm not enough."
Excessive exercising because if we pause, we will have to be with our thoughts and emotions, so it is only through exhausting exercise that we give ourselves permission to finally stop but only by collapsing. There's a belief around "my enoughness comes from how much I do."
Rest and Digest: How Pausing Restores Digestion and Body Trust
When we aren't able to fully reach a sense of pause, rest, and completion, we keep going. And in this go-go-go state, it is hard for the body to digest food. This can lead to physical digestive issues like bloating, constipation, diarrhea, fatigue, brain fog, cramps, and mood swings.
When we start to practice slowing down and when the body begins to trust that things are safe in the here and now, the body may feel exhausted, tired, and may need more space to do the healing work it hasn't had time to do.
When we yield, we can integrate and digest our food, emotions, interactions, and experiences with clarity. When we build the capacity to pause, to rest (and digest), we signal to our system that we are enough, simply because we are.
If you're finding your way toward rest and want company in the slowing down, EARTH (A Place to Land) is a free monthly online support group—a soft landing for exactly this kind of work.
Continue Your Journey
EARTH (A Place to Land) — free monthly online drop-in support group
1:1 Coaching — personal eating disorder coaching for deeper, individual support, focused on embodiment and nervous system health
Somatic audio practices — a free grounding audio meditation to download
Eating Disorders Are Not the Problem: Understanding the Nervous System Beneath the Diagnosis? — related reading on the nervous system roots of eating disorders
Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash
