I learned how to count calories in my sophomore year health class.
Perhaps it was inevitable that this was my drug of choice - the “good girl’s” addiction. Maybe I would have latched onto the idea even without that misguided assignment. I’ll never know. What I do know is that my world was on fire and someone handed me something that looked like it could put out flames. So I stopped eating. Then, when my body’s good desire to stay alive became too hard to resist, I turned to exercise to squelch the ever running mathematical tally that haunted my waking hours.
As a young teen living through things I didn’t have tools to cope with, this allowed me to survive. But the heartbreaking truth is that sometimes the very thing helping you survive leaves you barely alive. I could have chosen something “worse” - drugs, alcohol, sex. Perhaps these would have been more destructive, taken longer to come back from or been harder to quit, but I don’t believe they would have been any worse for my soul. Taking something that I needed to live, twisting it into the enemy, squeezing the joy out of every social event and turning my life into a sort of self loathing calculus was pretty destructive too.
I’m nearly a decade into recovery from disordered eating. The history of it is long, twisty, complicated but probably not unique. I suspect many people share my story - violation, control, their body both the scene of the crime and a battleground, the end result a tenuous relationship with any sort of appetite or desire and a long, arduous road towards wholeness.
Peeling back the layers of a disordered relationship with food is tricky. There’s not a simple definition of sobriety when the substance you’re using as a drug is also necessary for your survival. An alcoholic can choose to not imbibe again for the rest of his or her life. Not so with food or exercise - the addiction is far sneakier and masquerades as anything but what it is - a desire to escape from something too overwhelming to be metabolized.
During all the years I struggled with disordered eating and exercise addiction I knew perfectly well it wasn’t good for me. I could rationalize that it wasn’t “that bad”, minimizing as an addict does. Still, all the shame and self flagellation in the world weren’t enough to change my behavior. Our bodies and brains are so smart. They may not know how to get us what we need, but they will try. The problem is that these “solutions” then become their own problems, and these secondary problems are often the sole focus of our self improvement efforts. We fail to be curious about the purpose our addictions are serving and when we try to destroy them, we not only fail, but incur more damage along the way.
As I’ve been processing the discourse I’ve witnessed around technology - social media in particular - something in the back of my head has kept nagging at me. I think it’s wonderful that people are stepping off of Instagram and Facebook. I myself feel better after several months without Instagram and the near abolishment of my Facebook feed. But in some ways, I also feel much worse. And that feeling is familiar.
When I had to stop running I thought I might die. Running deadened all my feelings. There was an actual chemical component to this - endorphins make you happy - or they drown out your feelings and dull the edge just enough to go back to ignoring them. When that coping mechanism was removed, I felt like I would crawl out of my skin. It was the first of many small steps towards learning to tolerate distress.
When I quit Instagram I felt twitchy for almost a week, the impulse to just “check” so strong it was difficult to resist. When I take time off of Substack, I have to log out of everything to make sure I don’t come back early. When I leave my phone at home, I have a moment of extreme discomfort.
The uncomfortable familiarity of feeling worse before I feel better is clueing me in to the reality that the dynamics of “using” food and technology are very similar. But what are we using them for?
Imagine if you will, a home with faulty wiring. Perhaps it hasn’t been updated to handle the new fixtures, perhaps the voltage is mismatched, or maybe the wire has been frayed by overuse. Almost every time you use an outlet, sparks from the electrical short catch something on fire. These fires blaze, so you grab a hose to put them out. The water makes a mess, but at least the fire is out. You can breathe for a moment. Until it happens again and again. Because as long as the faulty wiring persists and the sparks keep catching, you will have a fire to put out. The mess of extinguishing these flames goes on and on, and you begin to feel overwhelmed by it. “I’ve got to stop using this damn hose,” you say to yourself. “The floor boards are rotting out!” Perhaps you set up fans, determined to dry it out, or replace the flooring, convinced that will cure the problem. There will not be another fire, there can’t be. You’ve done all this work to repair the water damage. But if the wiring is still bad, will your promise hold up? What’s your alternate plan for not being on fire? Do you have one?
Until you can acknowledge that the water isn’t really the source of the problem, all your promises to yourself aren’t going to get you very far. And so it is with our addictions and coping strategies.
In the Internal Family Systems framework, maladaptive coping mechanisms are called “firefighters”. When overwhelming emotions sound the alarm, the firefighter hacks through windows, hoses things down and puts that thing out.
For years one of my firefighters was naming every overwhelming feeling as “fat” and trying to fix it with food and exercise. Though that particular firefighter has retired, another I’ve been more reluctant to acknowledge is the dissociative effect of my technology use.
I got a Facebook account in 2008 - my junior year of high school. My old statuses that pop up in my memories make me cringe - not because they are your typical high schooler immaturity (they are that too), but because it’s so obvious that I was trying to fool myself into believing in a reality that didn’t exist. I click on that “memories” section periodically, looking for clues as to what happened, and what I see is a girl in a lot of pain, trying to convince herself the world wasn’t falling down around her ears.
I wanted to be truthful, but I couldn’t begin to know how to tell the truth. So this complicated interplay of technology, exercise and food became a way of managing my chaos. I could present a reality I wished were true, squash feelings, douse the flames, mop up the wreckage, all the while convincing myself that I was the problem. I needed to quiet time harder, be more disciplined, eat less sugar…
Even as my disordered eating took a back seat, the social media habits kept up. The endless comparisons and scrolling, the getting sucked into a dissociative time warp just to survive. I can’t really fault myself for some of that. There was a time that scrolling Instagram was a needed and helpful coping mechanism. I needed something to take things down a notch, and perhaps it was somewhat benign at first, until it clearly wasn’t.
So here I am, after a decade of using my phone as my security blanket, wondering what a healthy appetite even looks like in this area.
Like food, it seems impractical to just go without. I think email is great, all of my homeschool work is in Sheets, I voice message friends, online banking is convenient, I use a grocery app… the list could go on. But, like food, it’s so much less about what we actually eat than it is how we eat it.
Perhaps there are things we can agree are objectively bad for you: gaming for 12 hours a day or eating a whole box of donuts, for example. But what about chocolate cake? Are you sneak eating a piece at 2 AM because you’re ashamed to be seen? Or are you eating it with friends and laughing? The content could be the same, but the motive and impact are so much more slippery. What about a funny Instagram post? Are you happily sharing pictures because you want to, or are you crafting a self-deceptive reality to hide misery? Do you even know which one you’re doing?
The thing about food and technology is that if we can convince ourselves our appetite is dangerous, then we do not have to reckon with our unsatisfied desire for good things. Our indulgences make us overly sated on poor substitutes, but it’s this same over saturation that gives us an out. We resort to contempt for the good desires that drew us towards overindulgence in the first place. If this is what my desire leads to, then I must not need it at all.
At some point, I’m not exactly sure when, I stopped binging. It wasn’t willpower that allowed me to stop, it was giving my body enough food. I wasn’t binging because I was bad. I was binging because I was starving.
I wonder if the dynamic is the same with social media. Sure, there’s the well documented brain effects of dopamine etc… but is it also possible that when we binge on this content it’s because we are starving for what it purports to offer?
Just as we need food to survive, we need connection to survive. When we get burnt by the counterfeit versions - eating or scrolling our pain away - the temptation is to assume that we are the problem for needing anything at all.
I don’t have some tidy answer for you. I’m untangling these dynamics in my own life. I didn’t want to write this post, because when I put these words to paper I acknowledge an ugly reality - that I am more likely to seek comfort in a device than a real person.
But the details of how to live in light of this reality are more fuzzy. What about when a real person’s voice comes through your device? What about the real loneliness of being geographically isolated? What about the useful information and encouragement found online? What about the resources I’d never know about without the internet? How do you find community in person? How am I supposed to go without online interaction when most of my friends live 40 min away and I’m tied to a toddler’s naptime? What do I replace all of this with?
Food is very individual. As much as every diet guru would like to tell you there’s one perfect way to eat, everyone’s body responds differently. For some gluten is poison, for others bread is life. It’s impossible to judge motives by behavior alone. So instead we have to become painfully honest with ourselves.
How do I really feel after I eat like that? How does scrolling through Notes make me feel? Every time I eat eggs, my hands are covered in rashes. Every time I log onto this app my anxiety spikes.
I wish it was some prescriptive process, but instead I think it’s a lot of tiny movements towards tolerating our distress for just a moment longer and learning to become a little bit more human. It’s honoring the guardrails we put in place and having accountability. It’s learning to feed ourselves with the good nourishment of healthy relationships so that we’re not starving for connection. I think that if my own life is any indication, it’s a bit of a slog. It’s not an overnight fix. A healthy relationship with any appetite will require you to look at the feelings that overwhelm you and learn to tame them. You will need tools, and you might need to ask for help. But what I want to tell you - what I want to tell me - is that we are not wrong for wanting to eat. Though our appetites are disordered, they were made to long for good. If we are to heal and move towards wholeness, I believe we must begin by forgiving ourselves for having an appetite in the first place.
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Listening: This podcast interview with Curt Thompson and Adam Young was phenomenal. I don’t know when the second half will release, but I hope it’s soon? And I mentioned this podcast for homeschool leaders in my last post - but the episodes are live now, so give them a listen! These ladies are doing such a great job of providing practical wisdom and advice for the task of creating homeschool community.
Reading: I took an unplanned “book break” this last weekend. As in, I ignored most of the things and people in my house and buried my head in two novels. I read Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (very well written… still thinking about the conclusions) and The Perfect Couple by Elin Hildebrand (meh). Honestly? I didn’t realize how much I just needed to take a break. It took a bit to shake off the “I should be doing…” guilt, but when Monday rolled around I actually had the desire to be productive again. I’m learning to be okay with my fiction tastes not being highbrow (at least right now). Right now I just want to be entertained in a way that, while not morally damaging, does not require suspense. I have a pretty high tolerance for complexity in real life and a rather low one for complexity in my entertainment.
I also read this article (h/t
) - extremely informative regarding the current events in the Middle East.Life: It’s supposed to freeze this weekend which means two things. 1) I have barely seen my husband all week because his phone has been blowing up with people worried about their backflows freezing 2) I finally got out to the garden and tried to salvage what remained. It was overgrown, weedy, every single calendula plant was covered with tiny red bugs and all the squash had died. Even so, I still brought this in! I’m sad it’s probably the last of the cut flowers - they’ve been so cheerful. I’m also relieved I can stop feeling guilty about neglecting my garden.
Buying: My sister in law is a massage therapist and after giving me a bit of a lecture on how tight my neck was, she recommended this pillow. I’ve been sleeping on it for a month and even with all the kooky positions that nighttime nursing and co-sleeping require, my neck feels so much better.
That’s all for now, folks. Thanks so much for reading. I’ll see you next week!
Wanted to let you know that your thoughts here made it into a conversation between me and my brother. Never underestimate the impact you have on the lives of strangers! God bless.
Annelise, you make a powerful associations here. I am in complete agreement with you about the way that we seek solutions of control as coping mechanisms. We need to be gentle with our past selves in that there are times when the coping mechanisms serve us -- but over time, they usually stop serving us.
I have so much to say, so much that I understand, so much that I see and am coming too see -- too much to say in a comment. But YES, social media and all of that is part of the same thing as disordered eating and so many other such things. They are things that do meet certain needs while simultaneously causing other damage; and when we abandon them *without seeking other ways to meet the needs that they met,* the suffering will be intense. Even when we *are* seeking other ways to meet those needs, the suffering during the transition can be intense! So we have to, have to understand that we have to address the root issue -- we must find ways to add while we subtract.
Until we understand how these counterproductive behaviors are serving us, we can't break free of them.