Tools To Help You Learn To Rest & Relax in Eating Disorder Recovery

I recently made a couple of podcast episodes on my podcast series, 'Feck it, Fun, Fabulous and Free in Eating Disorder Recovery', about what compulsive exercise and movement is and why it is important to learn the skills of rest and relaxation in eating disorder recovery.

Following those episodes, I was asked by a couple of listeners to make an episode with some tools and tips to help put the need to rest, relax and overcome those intense movement compulsions into practice. The episode has just been released on my podcast, so please have a listen to it, but because it does include a number of practical tips, I decided to also create a written post for the episode as it might be easier for you to refer back to.

Resting and relaxing is a skill and when you have had an eating disorder for years or even decades with strong exercise and movement compulsions attached, then it is not just learning a new skill in being able to rest and relax... it is overcoming huge fear reactions when you do rest and it is changing very ingrained habits.

But even if it was just a new skill to learn, without the additional fear creating anxiety, panic and other intense emotions and without the habit change complications, skill learning in itself does feel clunky and wrong and hard on the brain.

However, in eating disorder recovery, unless you do put yourself through the process of allowing yourself to rest and relax, while still eating enough food (i.e. lots!), then you won't recover. Sadly, it is as simple as that.

Below then are the tools and tips that I have put together of things to help you with this incredibly difficult process of learning to rest and relax. Nothing will completely take away the emotional response, the fear response or the amount of mental focus you will need, but these tools might just help reduce those responses so that you can keep yourself on course to push through with resting, despite the powerful urges to move.

Tools to Help You Learn To Rest & Relax in Recovery

• Eating enough food... and by enough, I mean A LOT!

This is the tip your eating disorder is going to get mad about... that eating a lot of food in itself will make all the difference to your movement compulsions. I found that to be true in my case and I know others for whom the same is also very definitely true.

If we bring an eating disorder back to being an evolutionary flee from famine response which is the theory of eating disorders that makes the most sense to me in so many ways, then eating a huge amount of food being the one key factor that will almost 'switch off' those urges to keep moving makes absolute sense.

Let's dig a little deeper here.... Your brain at the moment believes that there is not enough food in your environment for you to be safe to stop and rest and eat where you are because you are not eating enough (and remember, evolutionary brain does not understand why you are not eating enough, it just knows there is not enough food coming in!). Therefore, your brain believes food is scarce in your current environment so it needs to push you to move away from this environment and get to somewhere that there is food available in enough quantities for it to be safe to stop there, rest and eat it for a while to restore.

This response explains why people who are very malnourished and below their set point weight (and I'm not talking BMI here!), who are restricting their intake to a large degree, are still able by some miracle of Mother Nature to keep moving, exercising and existing on so little. But if they start consistently eating enough (and this often takes a heck of a lot of food consistently), then their brain understands it can stop pushing this poor underresourced body to keep moving and hunting and the brain learns it is safe to let their human know just how depleted and exhausted they truly are.

And it is at this point, when you have been eating a lot of food consistently for a period of time that you will find that your brain will start to switch off that constant drive to make you keep moving and that is when you will likely also feel more exhausted than you have before and when your hunger will also kick in (which you have to respond to by the way!).

Therefore, tip number one really does have to be eating huge amounts of food, no matter what the fear says, no matter that your disorder is telling you that if you eat a huge amount more, it will make you exercise even more to compensate. Just do it anyway. Eat large amounts, use more of the tips below to keep as sedentary as possible and with enough consistency, you might just find that those urges and compulsions to keep moving lessen of their own accord.

• Make a Sedentary Plan!

In the early stages of trying to make yourself rest more in recovery, it can help to create a plan for what you will do during the times of the day that you are usually most active, of things that are sedentary and will distract you…. And, be specific with this at first.

Lay out times for the day so that you can keep yourself accountable and so that you know, for example, that at 11am you will be sitting down to phone your mum (with snacks in hand) and at 3pm you will be watching the next episode of Gilmore Girls on Netflix with a tub of ice cream etc... (I choose Gilmore Girls as that's what I watched in recovery but you can choose something more suited to you!).

• Be Accountable

It is true that ultimately in recovery you need to be accountable to yourself but when in recovery, just being accountable to yourself is often not sufficient because your brain has a powerful eating disorder at the moment telling you that it is actually really ok to go on long walks or to be vacuuming the house every day and that eating disorder can be very believable if you don't have external validation that those thoughts are not true.

Therefore, I would advise you to be accountable to someone, whether that is a family member, friend, coach or other professional. Have someone apart from yourself that you have to be honest with about what movement you are doing or have done as it can help to make the need to stop the movement real, make stopping feel more important and help you remember why you are doing this.

• Feet off the Floor Challenge!

This is a great game to play with yourself in recovery... the feet off the floor challenge.

The object of the game is to keep your feet off the floor entirely for as much of the day as you possibly can. And the only times you are allowed to have your feet touching the ground is if you are walking to the kitchen to get food or back to the couch / bed with food.... Trips to the bathroom are also allowed, as long as you are only going when you definitely need to go and not just as an excuse to get up and move about!

Making recovery a game in this way can take the seriousness out of it a little and might also help reduce the anxiety around it. Of course, it should go without saying that while sitting / lying without your feet on the floor, there should be no other sneaky forms of exercise / movement happening!

• Physiological Sighs to Help with Anxiety

We have all been told or told others to 'just breathe' when feeling anxious or scared. However, physiological sighs are a breathing technique that neuroscientists have now found are one of the quickest ways to bring the body out of a stress response when afraid and worth trying in recovery when making yourself rest more and feeling anxious about doing so.

Physiological sighs are two quick inhalations (through the nose) followed by a slower exhalation (through the mouth). If you have ever seen a child crying then you will see them do this as they reach a peak and start to calm down (you probably have experience of doing it automatically yourself).

Two or three deliberate physiological sighs are thought to be one of the fastest ways to return the body to 'normal' from a stressed and anxious state - worth a try!

• Respond To Your Hunger

This tip is similar to the first one, i.e. EAT, but for different reasons.

Very often with an eating disorder, movement, exercise and keeping busy has become a learnt response to block out hunger signals, so the restriction was easier because you blocked out the signals from your body telling you that you were actually hungry.

When you do start to rest again and your body comes out of that high alert state where you have adrenaline and cortisol racing around blocking your hunger signals, you are likely to start to feel the hunger signals that were always there but that you could not recognise before. When this happens, it is really important that you respond to those hunger signals and eat, no matter how much food it takes to fulfil that hunger.

By eating and responding to the hunger when it strikes (and it might be extreme when it does), you will make the process a little less miserable for yourself, because sitting and resting is really hard and torturous when you are also hungry and not letting yourself eat. And the other big benefit of eating when the hunger strikes as you are resting, is that it will be rewiring those old disordered habits of moving to blunt the hunger and as a means to restrict.

• Reassure Yourself!

It is always great to have someone else to reassure us when we are anxious and doing hard things, but sometimes that person is not there and it is just as important (if not more so) to be able to reassure yourself when you are anxious and doing something hard.

So, tell yourself that you are doing the right thing by resting and relaxing, even if you don't believe it at first. Just keep reassuring yourself and sometimes it can be more effective if you talk to yourself in the third person to do that, for example, I might say to myself, "Helly, you are resting and relaxing because this is your future and your recovery and you want a future in which you can sit and rest and relax whenever you like. Helly, you are a recovery superstar!". Yes, I know it sounds nuts to speak to yourself in that way but it will help with the anxiety and with the rewiring process as it highlights to your brain that this new behaviour is safe and is important.

• Food Helps Anxiety

Did you really think that more food was not on the agenda?

Yep - food helps anxiety, even in eating disorder recovery!

I can't count how many times people in recovery have said to me that when their anxiety gets high, if they eat something scary in that moment, their anxiety comes right down again. And that is despite a brain telling them before they put more food in their mouth that the oppositie will be true and a brain telling them that if they eat more now, they will pay for it later!

This also makes sense from a neuroscience perspective... A brain in high alert does not believe it is safe to sit and eat. If you do sit and eat, it demonstrates to your brain that actually it is safe to sit here and eat and that then allows your brain to understand that the fear response was never necessary and it's safe right here and now, so it can stop sending you signals telling you that something devastating is about to happen!

Therefore, when you get heightened anxiety, as you are making yourself sit and rest, use food to alleviate it and make that food something worthwhile, something that you are really scared of because the more you do, the easier it will be and that anxiety will reduce before you know it.

• Lockdown

During my recovery when trying to overcome the movement compulsions, I put myself into a form of lockdown... and you have to remember this was pre-pandemic and before the term lockdown had the connotations it has now! However, I still advocate that putting yourself into a form of lockdown to help overcome those urges to exercise and move can be a great tool.

Build a nest or a really comfortable space in your home that is cosy and inviting and maybe surround it with notes for yourself too on, 'this is why I am not moving from here!'. If you live with others then tell them that you are in rest mode and not to be disturbed unless it is an emergency or they risk their head being bitten off!

If the weather is good then I would also close the curtains. In my case, I had to hunker down during the summer and so there were days I would pretend the outside world wasn’t there and I kept the curtains closed to also block out the good weather and pretend it was raining and dark out.

Then when in lockdown, surround yourself with food in your nest and just let yourself rest and eat and heal.

• Let the Emotions In

As you go through this recovery process, it is more than likely that your emotions will take you on a rollercoaster ride. All I can advise you to do is to let the emotions in. You might want to scream and cry. You might be really irritable and angry and unfortunately you do have to go through this to come out the other side. It is awful and it feels like it will never end when you are in it but it will end and you will get through it!

Have the tissues ready, warn people you might not always be at your best and that you might be snappy for no reason for a while and then ride with it. It is ok to ask for hugs, it is not ok to exercise or restrict to numb it!

• Music