March 2014

Who isn’t under stress today? Whether it is school, work, family, friendships, or just life stresses, everyone has stress at some point. It’s not IF we are going to have to handle stress but it should be HOW are we going to handle stress when it happens.

Lately, I’ve been very stressed out with college.  I went to an online high school in Pennsylvania 10th grade through 12th so I could travel with my modeling.  In 9th grade, I went to a liberal arts magnet school in Georgia and before that I was home-schooled through middle school. I haven’t had a lot of years in a class room.  It was very difficult trying to keep up with all of my school work while I was modeling and sometimes working 12 to 13 hour days shooting and going to castings.  I graduated in May from my online school and started college this semester after returning home from modeling.  I have always put a lot of pressure on myself to be “perfect” in everything I do and school is no different.  College is new to me and with it brings a lot of new stress that I’m learning to deal with like everyone has to when they first start school.

Lately I have been reading about the effects of stress on the physical body and it’s crazy what it can do to us.  Stress suppresses our immune system, can cause problems with breathing, heart rate, and can mess up our sleep.  Everyone handles stress differently: some people eat a lot when they are under stress, some handle it better alone and don’t want to be around other people, some might get irritable, and some might not even respond to stress. We all react to it in different ways.

With my eating disorder (ED), the first thing that ED wants me to think is that ED is back in control.  I questioned it a few times when those same self-defeating thoughts came back along with the stress.  I was starting to think that I couldn’t handle school without ED and giving into that way of thinking, but I started to realize that I was giving ED way too much credit.

I’ve come a long way with my eating disorder and I know that I am stronger than ED.  Recovery is not easy; I’m going to slip every now and then and give in to those ED thoughts. There will be times where I feel out of control and I’m going to give in to ED’s lies. But that’s the thing… they are LIES.

For me, giving in to ED and going backwards after all of the hard work I’ve put into my recovery is not going to happen.  I’m not going to let stress allow ED to control my mind.  ED feeds off of stress and loves to make me feel like I need ED’s “help” to deal with it all. That’s not true.

Handling stress all starts with our thoughts.  In therapy, we talked about how eating disorders relate back to how we think. Everyone has conversations with themselves in their head every day.  These conversations are either positive or negative. These past few weeks, ED was starting to feed me negative lies and for a while I was almost beginning to believe them again; but I’m not going to continue to give ED that much credit.  I started taking every thought captive and replacing each of ED’s lies with the truth about me.  It’s up to us to know how to respond to the negative thoughts ED feeds us; we can react and believe them or we can see them for what they are – LIES – and try to replace them with positive thoughts and truths.

This is much easier said than done and it takes a while to get to this point in recovery.  I know this sounds cheesy, but start by saying something positive to yourself in the mirror in the morning. When I first started my recovery, I had a saying on my bathroom mirror that I would repeat over and over in my head: “I accept myself unconditionally right now.” Try repeating this to yourself; write it down and put it in your car or on your mirror…wherever you need to.  Everyone deals with stress and handles it differently. When you feel stressed, weak and out of control, think about the lies ED is telling you and combat that with what you know is the truth. You are strong and you don’t need to listen to ED’s lies.

Stress is going to happen….What are you going to do with it?