Eating disorders and emotional regualtion

The speaker, Isabel, discusses the connection between eating disorders and emotional regulation, particularly in young adults. She explains that adolescence offers more support and structure to combat eating disorders, whereas young adulthood can be more challenging due to increased independence and uncertainty. Isabel shares her personal experience with orthorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder, explaining how these behaviors helped her cope with a lack of control and suppressed negative emotions. She emphasizes the importance of seeking professional help and offers strategies for improving emotional regulation, such as writing about and sitting with emotions, recognizing that feelings don't always make sense, and finding healthy replacements for eating disorder behaviors. Hi everyone, my name is Isabel. I'm a freshman at Florida State University and today I'm going to be talking to you about eating disorders and emotional regulation. I especially want to use this podcast to be a little bit more vulnerable. I want to use this podcast to not only discuss my own issues with eating disorders and the way my own eating disorder development related to emotional regulation, but I want to discuss recovery and get into ways young adults can face eating disorders by learning how to understand their emotions a bit better. I want to start by discussing how young adults fit into this picture and why eating disorders have a more detrimental effect on young adults than adolescents. Usually healthy behaviors are learned early on in life and are much easier to maintain during adolescence. Usually adolescents are in an environment that involves being around their families, friends, and with stable routines. If eating disorders were to develop in adolescence, it's easier for someone to notice it and once someone notices it, you have more people making sure that you don't return to those habits and you receive guidance. But when you transition from adolescence to adulthood, family, psychological, and social support, it's gone. You're much more vulnerable and now it's kind of all up to you. You decide what you want to do and unless you want to fix your problems, no one is going to do it for you or even notice that there are any in the first place. And on top of that, this transition to adulthood is very rocky for most individuals. Many people go to college or move out and live alone and when things feel uncertain or unstable, it's easy to go to something to cope and to help you feel some sort of consistency, which is why a lot of people, a lot of young adults, lean on eating disorders. I developed orthorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder my freshman year of high school. So I experienced this all in my early stages of adolescence, which is why I was able to get help and focus on recovery. When I opened up about my eating disorder to my parents, they were very supportive about me receiving therapy. And so in a way, I was going to therapy not just for me and to resolve my own issues, but also for my parents. But if I were to have developed an eating disorder more recently while I was in college, it would be solely up to me to receive aid or not. So how was my eating disorder related to emotional regulation? Well, I developed orthorexia to cope with feeling like I had no control over my life. I lived in a very regulating and strict household, so a lot of the choices I made didn't feel like my own. I felt a lack of autonomy, so to me it felt that the only thing I had control over was what I put into my body and how my body looked. I also grew up in an environment where feeling anything negative was not allowed. Being upset, for example, crying, getting angry, they were all feelings that were shunned. So as a result, I became a very avoidant teenager. I refused to acknowledge any uncomfortable feelings like sadness and anger. And because of this, I began to use binge eating disorder behaviors when I felt an overwhelming feeling of sadness or anger. The time that I spent in my binging episodes were time to escape from all feelings. It was numbing and overwhelming all at the same time, and it was the only way I knew how to bring those feelings to the surface. Before I get into some of the ways one can become more in tune with their emotions, I want to emphasize the fact that I am not a professional, and if you are struggling, please look for real support. So with that being said, one of the most important things you can do when learning how to self-regulate your emotions is writing about them and sitting with them. It's going to feel very uncomfortable, but acknowledging those thoughts and feelings sitting with the uncomfortable and following up by writing or talking about them is going to make them feel real. And once they feel real, they're able to come out of your head. It's so much easier to move on from them. They're not stuck in you anymore. They're out in the open. Another thing that I feel is really important is recognizing that you are not your feelings, and they don't always make sense. There's five parts to strong feelings, that being thoughts, feelings, body signals, urges, and behaviors. One thing that's important to understand is that most of the time, the thoughts you have can lead to very conflicting feelings, and that can lead you to have inappropriate behaviors. Your brain is not always right, surprisingly, which is why it's important to think about the basis of your feelings, and if it actually makes sense to use those feelings to act in a way or to use those feelings to act a certain way. It's also important to notice that feelings give you certain urges, and acknowledging that urges don't always have to lead to behaviors is also so crucial. Just because you want to do something does not always mean it's going to be the right thing. It's really all about being very intuitive about what you are feeling before you act. If it makes sense, and if there isn't a better way to do it. Lastly, one really helpful thing for me has been supplementing eating disorder behaviors, like binging and restricting with other more healthy actions. So instead of just trying not to binge or restrict when you're feeling a strong emotion, use something to distract you in a way. For example, walking or running has been a really great replacement for me when I get really angry or sad, I go for a walk and listen to music. Another thing I do is draw. I use art to express my emotions when I don't know how to express them in writing. Even if it's just like scribbles on a piece of paper, letting out those feelings somewhere is better than nowhere and internalizing them. And then going to eating disorder behaviors. Find whatever replacement works for you and roll with that, because that has been so helpful for me. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed and found this podcast helpful.