Episode 342: Our mind constantly plays tricks on us; sometimes this support us, but often, it's to our detriment. In this episode I look at 10 things that are essential to know about how your mind works.
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Chris Sandel: Hey! If you want access to the transcripts, the show notes, and the links talked about as part of this episode, you can head to www.seven-health.com/342.
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 today’s show, I just want to say that I’m currently taking on new clients. If you are living with an eating disorder, irrespective of this being something that’s been going on a year, two years, or multiple decades, I believe you can fully recover. And if that is a place that you would like to get to, I would love to be able to help you to get there. And I know for many people that can feel like a very pipe dream type idea and it can feel so far off in the future and maybe not even possible, but I truly believe that everyone can fully recover, and it’s just about doing the things that deliver that.
If that’s what you would like help with, I would love to be the guy that assists you in that. So if you’re interested, 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 to you.
So, on with today’s show. This one has come about because of a post that’s in the group that I run for my clients. Someone posted this thing into the group, and it was an Instagram post. The Instagram post initially, when I checked it, I was like, “This feels very clickbaity.” The post was about psychological truths, and they put a post into ChatGPT and said, “You’ve read every psychology study and every psychological thinker and philosopher; what are 5 things everyone must understand about their own psychology or they risk failing in life?” Then it had the 5 things.
Again, I thought it was going to be fairly clickbaity, but when I read through the 5 things, one, I was like, “This is very good information,” but two, this matches up so much with how I think about recovery and the kinds of things that I work on with clients.
So what I want to do is go through this. I went into ChatGPT myself and asked a similar kind of question. I didn’t limit it to 5 and it gave me 10 different options, and I want to go through them. What I’m going to do with each of these is I’m going to share what ChatGPT has said and then I will add my spin on top or what I’ve noticed from working with people or just going into a little more detail.
00:02:48
Number 1 is “Your brain lies to you all the time. Memories aren’t recordings; they’re reconstructions. You routinely misremember and distort or fabricate details and yet feel certain you’re right.”
This is something that I see happening all the time with clients, but I also see it happening in my own life. We are constantly in a state, and the state that we are in has an impact on the kinds of thoughts and feelings and memories and beliefs and all those things that naturally arise within you. You can have one day where you see things in a particular light, and then the next day you see it very, very differently. And that could be because I didn’t get very good sleep or I got really good sleep. It could be because of this thing that was happening with my kid or this thing that’s happening in terms of finances. These things then have an impact on you and how you see things. So what your brain is constantly telling you in that moment feels like “this is reality, this is true” and yet a few moments later, it feels very different.
There’s a quote – I think it’s from the Talmud, if I’m remembering correctly, but it says “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.” I think this is so true with eating disorders and how things change when you get into a different state.
If I’m thinking about myself, I didn’t have a great weekend last weekend. I didn’t sleep particularly well. I wasn’t my best self on Sunday, wasn’t a great parent, wasn’t a great partner. And on that Sunday, I very much felt like I was in the right with all of those things. Then slept very well Sunday night, woke up on Monday, and I was like, “Yeah, you weren’t your best self yesterday.”
It was really interesting to see these contrasts between those two days. What is useful for me is that I was able to see that contrast pretty instantly. Within a day, I was able to notice that. The problem with living with an eating disorder is it becomes your everyday. You don’t notice that point of contrast because nothing’s really different, so it can be very hard to see how much your brain is lying to you because it just becomes the norm.
What I would suggest – and again, this is coming from ChatGPT – the flip of this is “You don’t have to believe every thought. By questioning your brain’s stories, you gain freedom from distorted memories and self-criticism. This opens the door to kinder, more accurate interpretations of reality.”
From my perspective, the question is often “Is this a helpful thought?”, and ‘helpful’ meaning “Is this adding to the quality of my life? Is this allowing me to be the kind of person that I want to be in this moment and showing up? Is it adding to the kinds of relationships that I want to have?” Asking those kinds of questions to be able to see, is this actually something that I want to be spending my time thinking about and paying attention to?
00:05:50
The next one is: “2. Most of your behaviours are unconscious. The majority of decisions you make are influenced by biases, conditioning, and instinct long before you became aware of them. Free will is far less free than it feels.”
I’ve done a whole podcast many years ago on free will and how I’m very much of the opinion that free will is an illusion. Even though our day-to-day experience feels like we are very much within the driver’s seat and we’re making decisions, and even as I’m doing this podcast it feels like I’m the one that is coming up with all these ideas, the reality is things are coming into my conscious awareness and then they come out of my mouth. We don’t have the kind of free will that we think we have.
And this isn’t to say that different things don’t have impacts on our behaviour or our actions or that people can’t make changes; all of this is true, but I think it’s really important to recognise how much of our behaviour is just unconscious and is just on autopilot, because if I’m thinking about this from a recovery standpoint, so much of what happens when living with an eating disorder is just automatic. It’s not that I’m making these decisions; it’s I’m just doing what I do every single day.
The difficulty, then, is that we need to change that, and it can be hard to change something when it feels like I’m not even making that decision, I’m just doing it automatically. This is why, often, when I’m looking at changes, the earlier we can do it in the day, the better, because it means that you haven’t got into your usual rut of just doing the same thing and the same thing and the same thing. If you’re on to the 10th same thing in a row that you do every day, it’s a lot more difficult to course correct at that point versus “Hey, the first thing I did was a pro-recovery choice that I never do.” You’re then instantly in a completely different realm – which I know sounds scary, but actually then makes it easier, because we’re now not in the usual point of comparison because “I’m now doing a day completely differently to how I do it.”
This is why it’s so important to recognise, “What are my usual patterns of behaviour that I’m doing without even thinking about them, and then how do I start to be intentional about disrupting that?” Because you can’t do recovery on autopilot, at least not in the beginning. It needs to be very intentional.
And this means that when you do something that goes against it, it’s going to feel odd. For anyone to make a change, it feels strange because “I’m now doing something that is different.” With a n eating disorder, you have the added wrinkle on top of that that your nervous system and your brain then see this thing as a threat, so of course when you try and do something different, your brain is saying “This is wrong, this is not the right thing to do, we’re going to be in trouble if we do this, what about this thing, what about that thing” – comes up with all the different worst-case scenarios. That’s normal. That’s to be expected.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t do the things you need to do in recovery. If we go back to #1, your brain lies to you all the time. So being able to recognise, “This is an unhelpful thought. It’s coming up, but I’m still going to do the thing that I’m going to do as part of my goals, and this is why I’ve made the decision in advance and this goal is a non-negotiable, and this is why I’m making this change first thing in the morning.”
The helpful flip with this one is “Awareness is powerful. By noticing patterns and triggers, you can shift them. Small conscious choices repeated consistently rewire your brain and create new defaults.” In terms of the ‘small conscious choices’, I would say you need to be making changes that are actually meaningful enough to make a difference, because if it’s too small, “I get a lot of anxiety from making this change and I don’t actually get much of a change in terms of my physiology, in terms of the food that’s been coming in or the change to my exercise, so I don’t actually notice an upside to this.” So I would say for this, you need to be making meaningful choices that are repeated consistently.
00:09:59
The next one is: “3. You can’t think your way into better feelings. Action often has to come first. Waiting until you feel ready to change usually means staying stuck.”
This is something I repeat over and over to clients, because the sad reality is, the worse the eating disorder gets, the more the awareness of how bad it is disappears. The more you’re able to rationalise things away and “It’s fine, it’s not as bad as it used to be” or “I couldn’t handle this if I didn’t have this level of control” – we come up with all of these different reasons, and I think what often people are wanting is “I wake up one day, it is just so abundantly clear that I need to do recovery, I decide to make a recovery change. At that moment, it feels clear to me. When I go to make the change, there’s no resistance to making that change, and I just change.”
I would love if that was the case, but that’s just not how recovery works. What often happens is in the beginning, we need to be making changes when it feels uncomfortable. We need to be making changes when we feel like we’re not ready. It’s by doing that thing three times, five times, 10 times that you then realise, “Oh, I am able to do that thing.”
The quote I often use is you don’t think your way into acting differently; you act your way into thinking differently. It’s about taking actions that then changes one’s beliefs, and in this instance it changes one’s feelings.
The helpful flip with this is “Feelings follow actions. Taking even small steps builds momentum, shows your brain safety, and allows emotions to catch up with your behaviour.” Again, I agree with this. The only thing I would change is the word ‘small’ to ‘meaningful’. Meaningful steps build momentum.
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Number 4 is “Your sense of self is fragile and constantly shifting. What you think of as you is really a patchwork of habits, stories, and roles that can be rewritten or collapse under stress.”
I think this is a really important one to understand because so often, the barrier, or one of the barriers, for recovery is about one’s identity. “I’m known as the fit one” or “I’m known as the healthy one” or “People know that I do lots of running or marathons” or whatever it may be. So there’s this identity, and some of that is “But what are people going to think?”, but a lot of that is “But who am I without this thing?” And I understand that if I’ve spent the last 5 years, 10 years, 20 years in this thing ,that can then become a big part of your identity.
The thing when I think about identity is whatever you do a lot of becomes your identity. If someone says “I’m really into this thing” or “My identity is made up of this thing”, my guess is that that’s because they spend a lot of time doing that thing. I often use the example that one of my identities is golf because I’m really into golf. I play golf, I watch a ton of golf, I watch golf videos. It’s something I spend a lot of time on. I’m very into music. Music is a big part of my identity. I probably listen to music 8-10 hours a day. I’ve gone to a ton of festivals. All of my friends, I’ve pretty much met in nightclubs or at festivals or through music.
So those things are part of my identity because I spent so much time doing those things, and I’m still doing those things. There was a time where certain exercises were part of my identity because I was doing them, and now I don’t. So this is part of it. It feels like “I’m not going to know what my identity is”, and yes, there can be this period where it can feel a little bit untethered and it can feel like “I’m just not sure who I am anymore” and I understand that that can be uncomfortable to deal with – and there is no remedy for that apart from “Hey, we need to start doing new things, and by doing these new things, then I start to rebuild this new identity based on the things that I do a lot of.”
The thing with this as well is understanding that one’s identity can shift. This isn’t a permanent thing. Even if this has been the way for the last 20 years, 30 years, however long it is, by behaving differently, by spending your time in different ways, your identity shifts.
The helpful flip with this is “This fluidity is freedom. You’re not locked into old identities. At any point, you can reinvent yourself, grow, and choose new roles or narratives.”
00:14:50
Number 5 is “People don’t think about you nearly as much as you fear. Social anxiety exaggerates the spotlight effect. Most people are absorbed in their own lives.”
This, again, is one that comes up a lot as part of recovery in terms of “But what are people going to think? What if someone says this? What if people notice?” It’s not that these things never occur. I’ve actually got a client that I’m working with right now and she’s had a succession of people reach out to her and mention something to her, which they shouldn’t be mentioning, and it’s been challenging for her to deal with – and she’s still continued on with her recovery, and she’s noticed that “Hey, someone can make this comment; I can feel upset about it, it can affect me emotionally, and I can still continue on.”
By continuing on and using the tools that I’ve shown her, she’s able to cope with that. So then there’s the realisation of, “Oh, something challenging can happen and I’m actually able to cope with that, and I’m able to cope with that without using the eating disorder.” So it’s not that no-one will ever say a stupid thing that they shouldn’t say to you.
These things will happen, and people will talk about dieting at work or people will make these comments. But the reality is, this does not happen anywhere near as much as people fear. There can be this feeling of “I’m walking around and everyone is looking at me and everyone is noticing and every one of my friends is commenting about this stuff behind my back”, and the reality is, most people are just so absorbed in their own stuff, because they’re going through their own things, whether that’s struggling at work, stuff with their partner, things with aged parents, this thing that’s happening with their sister.
People are stuck in their own stuff the vast majority of time, and even if they notice something, within five minutes they’re back focusing on all the stuff that they’re dealing with. So it’s really useful to notice, yes, this feels like a really big deal, and obviously as you’re making changes and identity shifting and all of these things, it’s going to feel more intense and more like “I’m in the spotlight.” But the reality is, people are busy with their own stuff. They’re just not noticing things to the degree that you imagine they are.
The flip with this is “This gives you more freedom than you realise. If people are mostly focused on themselves, you’re freer to experiment, take risks, and be authentic.”
00:17:24
The next one is: “6. Happiness is not a permanent state. The human mind habituates quickly. What feels like bliss now soon becomes normal. Chasing lasting happiness is a trap.”
I don’t think most people who are living with an eating disorder are feeling like the eating disorder is leading to happiness, but I think there’s a lot of “If I do this thing, then it will give me a sense of relief.” But the reality is, whatever relief it provides is very temporary. That relief now lasted an hour, and now I have to do this next thing, or that relief lasted till this afternoon, but now I’m having to deal with this other thing. Or okay, we got through today and I’m already feeling like “Holy hell, how am I going to make it through tomorrow?”
The thing with this is, as it says, we habituate very quickly to a lot of things. I can’t remember the exact details of a study, but they looked at something like going to a really nice resort. I think it’s from about Day 3 is when you hit peak enjoyment, and then after that it just comes down the other side. However nice a hotel or whatever it is, at some point you start to get used to that thing.
I’ve had many experiences of going to resorts, and yes, the buffet sounds amazing on Day 1. Day 2 is pretty good, Day 3 is pretty good, and then after a while, by the end, you’re like, “Yeah, I’m kind of happy to get home and get back to my regular food.” The novelty of that thing wears off, even though only a handful of days before, it felt amazing.
I think this kind of habituation also happens with the eating disorder, but with a lot of asymmetry, where it works in one direction much quicker than the other. For example, “I upped my exercise and that gave me this sense of relief today, to be able to do that, and now tomorrow, this isn’t giving me a relief; it’s just like now I’ve created this new normal, and now this has to be my new normal.”
It’s not that I don’t think people can want to chase – ‘chase’ might not be the right word, but might not want to create enjoyment or contentment or have quality lives, but the reality is that we’re going to have ups and downs. There’s going to be challenges, and if we’re only able to feel good if we have those moments of happiness and we’re expecting those moments of happiness to be there forever and constantly, that’s just not true.
The helpful flip with this one is “Instead of chasing constant happiness, you can cultivate meaning, purpose, and small joys. These bring steadier satisfaction and make life more resilient.”
00:20:17
The next one is: “7. You will always have pain. Suffering from loss, rejection, failure, mortality isn’t avoidable. What you can change is your relationship to it.”
This is something I’ve talked about a lot in terms of eating disorders. One of the benefits of the eating disorder, if I can phrase it in that way, is it reduces all of life down to “the things that I’ve got to do for my eating disorder.” This is one of the things that becomes very appealing of having an eating disorder: “I just have to focus on, did I keep my weight below a certain thing, did I eat below a certain thing, did I have enough hours between certain meals, did I do enough miles or time exercising? If I’m doing these things, that’s all I need to focus on. If I start to deviate from that, then it becomes really hard, but if I just keep doing this, then that’s all I focus on.”
In a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with my job, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with my kids, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with my parents or any of those things. And yes, I can have moments where that becomes overwhelming, or I think about that and I realise I don’t want to be like this or I don’t want my life to be like this, and yet if I just keep going back to the eating disorder, I can blank that thing out.
The thing that is important to understand this is that no matter what you do, there will always be pain and suffering. You will possibly go through a divorce; 50% of people do. But if you’re not divorced, there’ll be breakups, there’ll be financial strain, there’ll be job losses, there’ll be people getting sick, there’ll be people dying. Even the smaller stuff: there’ll be relationships with friends that fall by the wayside, or “We had this really difficult patch where we weren’t talking and that was really hard to deal with.”
These are things that will always crop up in life, and what is then important, and what I work on with people, is if we know that pain and suffering and all of these things are a given, how do we then deal with that? What are the tools that we can use to deal with that? Because yes, someone can use an eating disorder, but there’s a pretty high price that gets paid for that. There’s a lot of collateral damage that occurs as part of that. So can we then find other ways to meet those needs, to be able to deal with those things? I truly believe we can, and this is what I work on with people so that you’re able to have those experiences.
As I mentioned before with a client, to have someone make a comment that was hurtful and to notice difficult emotions come up, and then to be able to have the tools to get through that instead of using the eating disorder.
The helpful flip with this is “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. By learning to approach pain with compassion and openness, you often lessen it and you gain a deeper appreciation of joy.” Here, when I think about the difference between pain and suffering, someone could have some bloating from eating a meal or eating a bigger meal or eating some food that they didn’t digest particularly well as part of recovery, so there can be physical pain in terms of “I can notice there is this pain here, I can notice there is this tension here in my belly.”
The suffering is then all of the stuff that gets added on top – the “When is this going to end? Why was I so stupid? Why did I eat that food? Is this going to mean that my weight’s going to balloon?” All of this stuff that then gets added on top, all of this psychological torture, in a sense, that gets added on top, then makes what in some sense is just an uncomfortable sensation so much worse.
When I’ve had conversations with people about the discomfort of this thing, they’re like “10% is the physical, 90% is the suffering that is layered on top.” Like I talked about before, so much of this is automatic; these things just naturally arise within someone. But being able to notice this, being able to notice the difference between what is pain and what is suffering. And I gave pain in terms of a physical piece, but there can be pain in other ways where there’s pain and then we can notice there’s this whole chunk of suffering that is then getting added on top.
00:24:46
Then number 8 is “Your emotions aren’t reliable signals of truth. They’re data, not destiny. Fear can signal danger or simply reflect old conditioning. Sadness might mean something is wrong, or you’re just tired.” I think with emotions, so often with eating disorders, it’s an attempt to avoid emotions. Eating disorders are anxiety disorders; they’re about avoidance. It’s avoiding certain foods and certain activities, it’s avoiding certain thoughts, it’s avoiding certain emotions, it’s avoiding certain sensations. It’s about avoidance.
Often, then, when emotions come up, it’s “I instantly want to reject this thing. I instantly have resistance to this thing. I’m instantly going to do something to shut this down or distract myself.”
So a part of recovery is being able to recognise emotions, create space for emotions, to be able to accurately name and label emotions – and being able to recognise that “Just because I’m having an emotion and just because I’m having a reaction here” – in the same way as you can have unhelpful thoughts, and just because I have a thought doesn’t mean it’s true, doesn’t mean that it’s a value of mine” – the same can be with emotions. You can recognise this is connected to old conditioning.
Or in terms of the eating disorder, I can recognise I’m having this really big physical and emotional reaction to having to make this change. I can notice that there is a ton of fear, I can notice there is anger, I can notice there is resentment, I can notice all these things coming up, and I’m also able to recognise that this is connected to the eating disorder. This is my brain, my nervous system miscataloguing this thing that I’m trying to do as a threat. I can rationally notice that eating a sandwich in and of itself is not a big deal, and the reason I’m feeling this is that my nervous system is wired in a particular way right now.
And when I say eating a sandwich is not a big deal, I’m not minimising that for anyone; I know that for many people, it’s a huge deal, and the experience of having to do that or even just thinking about doing that is a full-body, visceral, emotional experience. And you can recognise, “Hey, this is a reaction that is disproportionate to what I’m actually trying to do here.”
So as part of this, the flip is “Emotions are clues, not commands. You can listen with curiosity, learn from them, and respond wisely instead of obeying them blindly.” It’s being able to recognise, “There is this emotion. I’m feeling this thing. What’s going on? What would be helpful in this moment?” And helpful in this moment in terms of, again, adding to the quality of my life, not just what is going to take this away instantly and this is why I’m doing an eating disorder behaviour.
00:27:53
Then the next one, number 9, the second last one, is: “Most people aren’t rational – including you. Even with facts in hand, humans default to biases, tribalism, and self-serving beliefs. Intelligence doesn’t immunize you from irrationality.” I think there can often be this dichotomy of “Were you being rational or were you being emotional?” The reality is, we are always both of those things. Because even when someone is feeling like they’re being 100% rational, there are emotions that are still occurring. There are emotions that are allowing them to feel “I feel really centred or really grounded, and this is why I’m able to make this decision.”
But there’s this lawyer in our head that is always creating arguments on our behalf that make it look like the decision we’re doing is the right decision, is the smart decision, is the good thing for us to do, and that then has an impact. I recognise so often with clients, what gets them tripped up isn’t the crazy ideas; it’s the “This thing just seems so logical. It makes sense to me why I would avoid doing this thing or would keep doing this thing.”
And so much of that, what feels like rational thinking, is my emotions and my biases and my fears and all of these things are pushing me towards a certain thing. I talked earlier about the free will piece. This is why I don’t think people have as much free will as they think and I think that free will is an illusion, because all of this stuff is going on within our physiology, and then we get to this end point in terms of our thoughts and our prefrontal cortex. And so much of that is then impacted by hormones, our generations of lineage, how you grew up in your household, all of these different things that impact on how we are and how we actually behave.
In terms of this ‘most people aren’t rational, including you’, the helpful flip is “Knowing this helps you pause before reacting. Check your assumptions and be more compassionate with others. Everyone struggles with biases; you’re not alone.”
The thing I would say with this is we are never going to get away from this. We are all going to have our biases. We’re always going to be impacted upon by our emotions. And we can recognise there are points where it feels like “I’m being impacted upon in a much larger degree” and there are times where “Actually, I feel like I’m being impacted upon by a smaller degree.”
Or if I’m thinking about this in polyvagal terms, in different states, different thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions, beliefs all naturally arise. So being able to recognise, “What state am I in?”, because that state is going to have an impact on the kinds of things that feel like “that’s reality to me.”
00:31:04
The final one, number 10, is: “What you avoid controls you. Avoidance gives short-term relief but long-term imprisonment. Each time you avoid, your world shrinks and fear grows stronger.”
This is one of the number one things that I talk about with clients. Eating disorders are about avoidance, and avoidance begets more avoidance, especially in terms of someone getting into an eating disorder. I definitely think that someone can sleepwalk their way into an eating disorder; someone does not sleepwalk their way out of an eating disorder.
In the beginning, if I haven’t had breakfast yesterday, having breakfast today is not really a big deal. If it’s now been a week since I’ve had breakfast, it might be a little more challenging. If it’s now been a month, even more challenging. If it’s now been years, it’s even more challenging. Because there’s been all of this avoidance that has then built up, and the way the brain then starts to change with an eating disorder, that thing that I haven’t done for a really long time now gets seen as a threat.
What often happens is “I want to make this change. I’m going to do this. We’ll do it tomorrow.” Then tomorrow comes, and then we get closer to that change, and then we just bail because “I was going to do it, I thought I was going to do it, and then I didn’t.” It’s very easy to think that future version of you – “Future Chris, he’s got this. Today Chris, not so much, but future Chris will handle that.” So you kick the can down the road and then think “When I get to that future place, then it’s going to be fine.” And then when you get to the future place, it’s just as difficult as it was yesterday and the day before.
So with recovery, the goal is, “If this thing is something I’ve been avoiding, I need to start doing it.” And in the beginning it’s going to feel wrong, it’s going to feel like “my world’s going to end if I do this thing”, and then you do it and you realise the world didn’t end, and then you do it a handful more times and you realise it’s not nearly as difficult as it was the first time round, and then at some point you’ve done it 10 times, 12 times, 14 times, whatever it is, and this thing now feels pretty normal. I don’t have that same physical reaction that I was having before. And recovery is just a succession of “this thing I can’t do and now I’m doing it, and now it’s become normal.” Just creating this new normal of “things I couldn’t do that I can now do.”
The thing with the avoidance piece, in the beginning it can feel like a massive deal, but once you’ve gone through 10, 12, 15 different things that “I didn’t use to be able to do and now I can do it”, it can start to have this impact where “I haven’t even done this thing before and it’s also already less scary than it was before, because I’ve already had pizza, I’ve already had ice cream, I’ve already had pancakes. Okay, having waffles now is not that big a deal because I’ve done those other things that are in a similar category and I realise that I’ve been able to survive that.”
I just really want people to understand that the more I put off, the more I avoid, it doesn’t make it easier. There’s this idea or this hope that “If I put it off, tomorrow I’m going to be more resilient and then I’ll do it”, and then just typically does not happen, so we say then tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow.
So really understanding that the avoidance piece, the way that I get over it is by taking action, and by taking action and doing it repeatedly, it then no longer is a struggle.
The helpful flip with this is “Facing fears, gently, gradually, with support if needed, is how you reclaim freedom. Discomfort isn’t the enemy – it’s the path to growth and expansion.”
Again, I’m in agreement with all of that; the word ‘gradually’ will just depend on what’s going on. For recovery, yes, I’m not against things going gradual, but they need to be changing enough, and they need to be meaningful enough so that we’re noticing a difference. Because often, what feels like “I want to do this slowly and I want to acclimatize at every single step along the way” – often, the changes that are being made aren’t making enough of a dent in someone’s physiology, and this means that someone never gets acclimatized at each point. And in a lot of senses, you’re not going to get acclimatized until after the fact, until I’ve done this thing repeatedly enough, in a meaningful dose, so that I then get okay with it.
So yes, recovery in lots of ways is gradual, and we don’t need to make this any longer than it needs to be.
So those are the 10 things you need to understand about your own psychology, if I’m using a clickbaity type title to this thing. As I said, when somebody posted this to my group, I saw the post and I thought it was really interesting, and so much of this relates to how I think about recovery – but so much of this is just what life is actually like. If someone is not living with an eating disorder but is recognising, “Hey, I want to improve the quality of my life or my relationships or I want to bring this new thing into my life that I haven’t been doing before”, all of these things are going to be applicable. When I go through this and I think of parenting, all of it is applicable. When I go through this and I think about running my own business, all of this stuff is applicable.
What I like about this – and this is something I talk a lot to with clients – is so much of what I work on, you will then use for the rest of your life. So much of what you’re working on, I use on a regular basis, and I’m not in recovery from an eating disorder. But these are then the tools that we have to be able to cope and navigate in this world.
So, that is it for this week’s episode. As I mentioned at the top, I’m currently taking on new clients. If this resonated with you, if you want to be able to build these kinds of tools in, if you’re wanting to reach a place of full recovery, I would love to help. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and just put ‘coaching’ in the subject line.
And that’s it. I’ll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon!
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