This article explores the complex relationship between eating disorders and sleep, highlighting how unhealthy eating habits often create temporary solutions for sleep problems while exacerbating the overall situation.
Everyday habits offer partial and temporary workarounds for the sleep problems common in eating disorders. Psychological, physical, and behavioral problems related to eating disorders interfere with good sleep. Bad sleep often makes life with an eating disorder even worse, and/or makes recovery feel even more out of reach. Evolution has made humans comfort-seeking, inventive, and also effort-averse.
So if there’s a three-way choice between settling for doing nothing, undertaking a high-cost, high-gain solution, and finding a quick but dubious fix, the last of these options is often optimal. If you’re in a bad situation, it’s reasonable to work out just how much less bad you can make it with easy interventions before deciding whether to invest the effort in trying to change the situation entirely. Of course, life is so complex and demanding that we don’t tend to experience our quick-fix efforts as clear-eyed experiments in testing out the tenability of the status quo, prior to making an equally lucid decision about whether to enact profound change. Instead, we often muddle along, drifting into habits that serve us poorly for reasons that often remain as opaque to us are as the sources of our hazy ideas for making things feel a bit better. Life was a good example of this kind of practical and existential muddle, this stumbling sort of life design. And the intersection of eating and sleep was an excellent micro-example. As I’ve described in other posts (e.g., on arbitrary rules), my anorexic way of eating defined by deferral: keep yourself going with hot drinks and put off the real eating until everything else in the day is done. The result was middle-of-the-night eating and a comprehensively messed-up sleep schedule. But as my therapist pointed out soon after I embarked on my final, successful recovery attempt, the way I ate not only caused sleep problems, it was also a great solution to them—as great as any solution could be that existed within the anorexic status quo
EATING DISORDERS SLEEP PROBLEMS HABITS RECOVERY PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH
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