Episode 323: One of the most important concepts to understand is "story follows state." As part of this episode, I talk about what this means and how it relates to eating disorder recovery.
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Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the transcript, the show notes, and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/323.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover.
Before we get on with the show, I just want to announce that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are living with an eating disorder and you want to fully recover, even if that seems like this pipe dream, this thing that seems so out of reach, then please get in contact. I work with people whether they’ve just had an eating disorder for a relatively short amount of time or whether this has been going on for decades, and I’m able to help people to meet full recovery and to embrace and get to experience all the freedom that comes with full recovery.
So if this is what you would like, then please send an email to info@seven-health.com and put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can then send over the details about how I work with clients, and we can schedule a call so that we can find out if the approach that I use would work with you and if we’re a good match, and we can then go from there. So info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.
00:01:28
With today’s episode, just a little bit of backstory here of how I decided to do this. This is a topic I’ve covered on the podcast before, but I think it’s a really important one. I had an experience – I can’t remember when this was; it was probably a couple of weeks ago. I was at the horses. Ali, my wife, has three horses, or a horse and two ponies, so I was out doing the horses, and it was freezing cold. In Scotland, it’s wintertime, and I was there all rugged up, and I had my hood up. I was just walking down a track.
I hadn’t had my hood up and I’d then put it on, and I noticed as I did that and over the next minute or two just how that action of putting the hood up started to change my thinking, my physiology. Different things started to happen. What happened when I put the hood up was it then blocked out some of my peripheral vision, so it meant that I had more of this tunnel vision in terms of what I could actually see. So physically, there was something blocking my vision.
But what I noticed started to happen was it really started to focus my vision forward, but also focus it in a way that felt a lot more heightened. It felt a lot more like I was looking out for cues of danger. I had a couple of times where I would turn around and look behind me because obviously my vision was more blocked, so there was this instinct of “I wonder if someone is following me or there’s someone behind me.”
I noticed that if I’m thinking about these changes, I went from being in a ‘safe and social’ state to having more of this ‘fight or flight’ energy, if we use the descriptions from polyvagal theory. I came down the ladder and there was a little bit more of this ‘fight or flight’ energy. I wasn’t completely overwhelmed by this; I was still predominantly in the ‘safe and social’ state, but there was just a little bit more of that ‘fight or flight’ energy that was there. I could notice that my greeting changed a little bit. I could notice these subtle signs that I was in this different state, and all that I had done was to put on the hood.
And it was very interesting; once I then took that off again, I could notice how my vision started to change as part of that, and again, part of that’s because the physical barrier was removed, but just my vision in terms of the focus started to shift.
It made me think about how much our state is impacted upon by lots of different things, whether that is in our environment or whether that’s in our internal environment, and how that then impacts on our nervous system, on our thought processes, on our perceptions – all of these things.
It made me think of the quote from Deb Dana. Deb Dana is someone who’s done a lot of writing around polyvagal theory. I’ve had her on the podcast; I’ll link to her episode in the show notes. She’s taken a lot of the work of Dr Stephen Porges, which can be quite dry, and brought it right to clinicians and made it accessible so they’re able to use this in a therapeutic setting. She has a phrase, which is “Story follows state.”
00:04:55
What this means is that the kinds of thoughts and beliefs and perceptions and memories and all of these things that naturally arise within us are dependent upon the state that we’re in. I think this often is the opposite of what we’re typically taught in self-help type material where it’s “Where your thought goes then has this impact on where your energy goes.” And it’s not that that isn’t true, but typically the thing that is first driving all of this is, what state are you in? And how is that state impacting you?
The thing I will always talk about with clients – and this is an area I focus on a lot in the group programme and when I’m working with one-on-one clients – is really the idea that you are perpetually in a state. We are all constantly in a state at all points of the day, and those different states are impacted upon by lots of different things. It could be the amount of sunlight that you’re getting, the last time that you had a meal, how much sleep you got the night before, how well-hydrated you are, did you have an argument with a spouse in the morning, what’s going on with your child and their schooling.
There are so many different things that can then have an impact on our state, and that in turn has an impact on the kinds of thoughts that naturally arise, the kinds of emotions that naturally arise, the kinds of sensations that we’re now noticing. All of these things are impacted upon by our state.
I want to give a couple of examples of how this plays out in the real world, and these are some good, interesting studies, and then I want to talk about why I think this is such an important concept and how it relates to eating disorders and then eating disorder recovery.
00:07:02
There’s a really great study – and I’ve referenced this numerous times on the podcast before, but I keep coming back to it because I think it really eloquently demonstrates this point. It was done with Israeli judges, and it was done back in 2011. What they did as part of this study is they looked at the judges’ decisions over parole hearings. It was these decisions around parole hearings; I think there were eight judges and they looked at over 1,000 rulings, and these were rulings they’d made back in 2009.
What should be happening as part of these rulings is we should be making decisions based on the merit of the case and the facts of the case, but what they found was something different to this. When they looked at the decisions – and I should just say that when the judges are doing their rulings, the day’s broken up into different sessions. They’ll have a session, then they’ll have a break, then they’ll have another session, then they’ll have a break, and then they’ll have another session. So there are these different sessions throughout the day, and then between those sessions they’re having a snack, having lunch, whatever it may be.
What they then found is when they looked at these decisions and they mapped them across the sessions, the probability of a favourable decision at the start of a session was roughly around 65%, and then towards the end of the session, it was almost 0%. Then they would have a break and then they would come back, and rulings would go up to roughly 65%, and then as time went on, we’d get back to it basically being 0%.
This really shouldn’t be happening if we’re looking at just the merits of the case, but what was basically happening is as the judges were full or they had good energy coming in, a favourable decision was much more likely, and as time went on and they became more hungry and in a lower energy state and more mentally depleted by this case and then the next case and the next case without having a break they then started to see the defendants in a different light, and they were less favourable in their rulings.
The thing is, I bet if you then pulled the judges to the side and said, “Hey, I noticed that this person got granted parole and then this other person didn’t get granted parole; can you explain why?”, they would have a story about why this one really deserved it and this person didn’t. But as this demonstrates, a lot of this was down to where their ruling was based on how long it’d been since they had a break.
There was another piece of research, a study done in 2014, and this was looking at how smell can affect someone’s thoughts and then their beliefs. They asked people to fill out a survey about their views, and the survey was asking things around gay marriage, premarital sex, pornography, the death penalty, taxes, military spending, foreign aid. So there was a real wide mix of things that the survey was asking. So they got them to come and sit in this little room and fill out the survey.
They then got another set of people and they asked them to come in, and this set of people were in the same demographics, they gave them the exact same survey, but this time they filled the room with stinky garbage. It wasn’t actually stinky garbage; it was a chemical that smelt like stinky garbage. It was butyric acid. It’s kind of like cheesy pinto beans and too much beer, was how it was described.
When we look at the regions in the brain that are connected to disgust, whether we’re talking about disgust from a smell perspective or we’re talking about disgust from an idea perspective or social mores perspective, they are found in the exact same region. They are the same region. So when we prime one region for disgust by filling it with the smell of stinky garbage, we notice that people become a lot more socially conservative. And this is what happened in terms of the survey. The second group, when they looked at the survey respondents, their answers were a lot more socially conservative than the people who hadn’t had the room smelling the way that it did.
There are other much shorter examples; I’m not going to go through the full studies on these, but if you put a poster up with a pair of eyes on it near a bus stop, people will litter less. If you play classical music at a train station or near a bus station, it reduces antisocial behaviour. If you put a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people are playing a game around economics, so different games in terms of how much you’ll give money or spend money or how much you’ll do someone out of money or any of those games that they’ll often play to look at human behaviour, if you put some eyes on the screen, people become a lot more generous in economic games. The rationale is that they are being watched.
All of these are just examples of how when we do something to affect someone’s state, the kinds of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and stories all start to shift.
I’ve done a very long podcast, or a number of podcasts, on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and again, I will link to that in the show notes, so I don’t need to go through it in any length here. But that is a very good example of what happens when people aren’t given the amount of energy that they need to survive in a healthy way. Not only did they get lots of physical symptoms that started to occur, but in terms of their mental capacity and their beliefs and their views, all of these things started to change simply by getting them into a different physical state because they weren’t having enough energy coming in.
00:13:07
So why am I talking about this? How does this all relate to eating disorders? As I said at the top, we are always in a state. And the state that you’re in will impact the kinds of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and memories and sensations and all of these things that naturally arise in you.
You don’t think your thoughts; thoughts arise themselves, they come into your consciousness, and then you become aware of them. The same thing with your emotions. You’re not turning on those emotions. Something is happening that then triggers your nervous system or triggers your body so that these chemicals are being released. There is this trigger that is having an impact on your state, which is then creating all of these other things downstream in terms of the kinds of thoughts and beliefs, etc.
When you reduce the amount of food that someone’s receiving, when you impair someone’s sleep, when you increase the energy expenditure that someone’s going through, this changes their state.
I think one of the biggest hurdles that people face with eating disorder recovery is they want all of these things to change first, “and then I’m going to take action.” So “I want certain thoughts to reduce. I don’t want so much of the eating disorder noise to be here. I don’t want so much of the fear and the panic to be here. I want certain beliefs to go away. And when they go away, then I’m going to start to do the changes, and then I’m going to start to really focus on my recovery.”
But the problem with that is that that’s just not going to happen because those thoughts and fears and beliefs are state-dependent. They are arising in you because you’re in the state that you’re in. And without changing that state, this way of thinking or these thoughts are not going to stop arising.
The quote that I regularly say is we don’t think our way into acting differently; we act our way into thinking differently. It is through the action-taking and changing the state that then thoughts start to shift.
So when someone says, “My thoughts started to get a lot louder when I tried to make a change” or “My anxiety increased when I tried to do something different”, my response to that is, this is what is meant to happen.
And I say this is what is meant to happen because if you are in that state and the eating disorder is very alive and well in that state, it means that when you’re trying to do something to go against that, that’s going to trigger stuff within your brain, within your nervous system, so thoughts are going to get louder. Certain things that may happen in the future, all this ‘what if’ thinking, will naturally occur. There are going to be different emotions that come up. There are going to be different sensations that come up. None of this shows that you’re doing something wrong; it just shows this is the state you’re in, and this is how the body reacts in those states when you try and do something different, or when you try and eat this food. It’s not showing you shouldn’t do this; it’s just that’s what occurs when you’re in that state.
It’s by then doing that thing again and again that you are able to retrain your body so that it is now not afraid of that thing, as well as you’re able to do the nutritional rehabilitation so that you’re fundamentally changing the state of the body so it’s not in the energy-depleted state and so the certain thoughts and feelings are now no longer arising because you changed the state.
Again, if someone’s saying, “I’m so scared of weight gain” – this makes sense. That’s what happens when you’re in that state. The big trap is the “I need that fear to go away first and then I will start to make changes.” That’s not going to happen. And I know I keep saying this, but I really want people to understand that without changing the state, these are the kinds of thoughts and feelings and sensations that are part of this state, so they will continue to be there.
00:17:27
It’s why, when I’m thinking about recovery, especially the really early stages of recovery, everything comes back to action-taking. I do do journalling exercises with people. I do have people learn different skills around, “How can I do this breathing exercise?” or “How can I do this thing to deal with unhelpful thoughts that arise?” or “How can I do this when I’m having certain emotions that are coming up?” It’s not that those things aren’t helpful; they can be.
But if you just do those things but you’re then not actually making the changes to the energy state of the body, so you’re not actually increasing the amount of energy coming in and/or reducing the energy going out, it is just going to be Groundhog Day every single day. It doesn’t matter how good you get at doing those different skills; you haven’t changed the state, so your brain is just going to keep sending those thoughts and keep sending those thoughts and keep sending those thoughts.
This is why really, recovery is all about action-taking. If you’re not doing action-taking, if you’re just listening to podcasts like this, if you’re just following Instagram accounts or watching “What I eat in a day” videos on YouTube, you’re not going to get very far. It’s not going to change anything for you.
And the idea of “If I listen to this and watch this and follow this, that’s going to reduce the anxiety in and of itself” – I don’t believe that to be true. Yes, you can become more knowledgeable, but I work with a ton of people who know a ton about eating disorders and it doesn’t change the fact that “When I now have to make this change, there are certain thoughts and feelings that arise.” As I keep saying, that should be happening. It’s not proving you’re doing something wrong; it’s what happens in that state, and the goal is that you make the changes so that you then start to change the state.
This is just a small piece of polyvagal theory. I’ve done a number of podcasts on this. I referenced the one with Deb Dana earlier on. I’ve done another one with Justin Sunseri. So if you want to get into this in more detail, I will link to those in the show notes.
00:19:42
When I think about what can be most useful for this, the first piece is just awareness. Being able to recognise that “I am in a state.” And as part of polyvagal theory, we look at different types of states that you can be in, and being able to notice there are these different states, and “Can I tell when I’m in each of these states? Am I able to tell when I’m in fight or flight? Am I able to tell when I’m in freeze? Am I able to tell when I’m in safe and social?” Because that’s a really important thing, to be able to recognise which state you’re in and be able to accurately notice that.
But two, it’s also being able to remember that when you’re in that state, because so often, “Yeah, I can recognise that I was in fight or flight in that moment, or that I’m still in it now”, but forgetting that “Because I’m here, it’s then going to be having an impact on the kinds of thoughts and feelings and sensations that arise.”
So being able to recognise what state you are in and notice how that’s going to be having an impact on your thinking, because too often, when you’re in a state, it feels like “This is true, this is permanent, this is how it’s always been”, and that’s just not actually the case. So being able to recognise, “I’m in that state, and what do I truly need to be able to move myself out of it?”
And it’s not normally “I need to think myself out of it.” Thinking will only get you so far. Thinking can help you to take action, but often what happens, especially in the early stages, the more time there is thinking, the more time the eating disorder has to get in and share all its opinions, and it typically leads to no action-taking – or worse, in terms of doing eating disorder behaviours. So really being able to recognise, “I’m in a particular state, and what is going to help me get out of that state?” is an important tool.
So that is it for this episode. As I said, if there’s more that you want to learn about this, go to the show notes and there’ll be lots of other things that you can go through as part of it.
As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients, so if you are living with an eating disorder, irrespective of how long it’s been going on, and you want to reach a place of full recovery, then I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line, and I can send over the details.
That is it for this week’s episode. I will be back with a new episode next week. Until then, take care of yourself and I will see you soon!
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