Sleep and Eating Disorders: Why Turning In Early Helps Your Recovery
Written by CCTC Staff Writer
It’s just about common knowledge now: The biggest keys to wellness are eating well, moving in healthy ways and for a healthy amount of time, and sleep. It affects everything from your cognitive abilities, to immune responses, to emotion regulation.
For those with eating disorders and other mental health conditions, sleep is especially important to help manage symptoms and regulate the chemicals in the mind that manage those mental and emotional functions. In this article, we will discuss:
What “sleep” really means
Why we, as humans, need sleep
How sleep affects eating disorder thinking, behaviors, and recovery
How to tell if you are getting quality sleep
The best practices for getting a healthy amount of quality sleep every night
Sleep is not the only factor that determines your recovery — but it is a big part of it, and a way to improve your wellbeing in general.
What exactly is “sleep”?
Sleep is generally based on physiological characteristics observed in mammals. It is an active state of unconsciousness produced by the body, where the brain is in a state of rest. Your body reacts mostly to internal stimuli (like dreaming) when you’re asleep.
Physical characteristics of sleep include:
Reduced body movement and electrical activity in the brain
Reduced responsiveness to external stimuli, like loud sounds
Closed eyes (usually)
Reduced breathing rates
Altered brain waves than those we have when awake
The Function of Sleep
There are many theories for why we need sleep. Sleep is such a complex process, even though it comes so easily to us. But this is what scientists have found so far:
Sleep is necessary to restore the body’s ability to rejuvenate itself, and take care of the mind. There are many processes that happen mostly as you sleep, including muscle and cell repairs, tissue growth, and the release of hormones for growth and emotion regulation.
It’s also important to be able to think and to form memories. If you’ve ever had to take a test with only a few hours of sleep beforehand, you understand.
Every being on earth sleeps in some form, which speaks to the importance of it.
Lack of Sleep and Eating Disorders
Many patients with eating disorders don’t get a good amount of good, quality sleep. Because sleep does so many things, not getting enough of it has many negative effects on your recovery.
On the mental side: No sleep means that you’re going to have a much harder time learning how to regulate your emotions. You also may not be able to think clearly and make recovery-oriented decisions.
When sleeping, you release hormones that help control stress levels. As eating disorder recovery is extremely stressful at times, you can’t really afford to not get good sleep to manage your stress.
Related: Want to know more about regulating your emotions in eating disorder recovery? Click here.
On the physical side: A lack of good sleep has been scientifically proven to contribute to erratic eating patterns, which is the opposite of what will help you get to recovery.
An eating disorder also causes a lot of damage to your body, even if you’ve only been engaging in behaviors for a short amount of time. If you can’t sleep, your body will have a much harder time repairing itself.
Your metabolism is affected by hormones that are only emitted into your body while you sleep. As an eating disorder can cause havoc to your metabolism, it’s important to get good sleep to repair it.
How to Tell if You’re Getting Quality Sleep
Here are some signs that you’re getting good sleep:
Falling asleep in thirty minutes or less
Waking up for less than fives minutes, and only once per night
Being asleep for eighty-five percent or more of the time you spend in bed
Not feeling exhausted when you wake up in the morning
Not feeling drowsy throughout the day
Not needing caffeinated beverages throughout the day to stay awake
While we all have days where we’re not jumping out of bed in the morning, or have that “two-thirty feeling,” you shouldn’t feel completely exhausted throughout the day, every day.
If you do feel like this, there are steps you can take to improve your sleep. And improving your sleep is a big contributor to your recovery (and overall well-being).
How to Improve Your Sleep Experience
Stick to a regular sleep schedule. This is probably one of the most important (and one of the most difficult) things you can do.
Avoid excessive napping throughout the day. While treatment fatigue is most certainly a valid experience, sleeping for too long throughout the day leads to being wide awake at night. If you have to nap, try to stick to twenty minutes of sleep. If you sleep any longer than that, your brain will go into a deep state of sleep, and it’s hard to pull yourself out of it without feeling incredibly tired afterwards.
Reserve your bed for sleep and intimacy, but nothing else. Don’t bring work, electronics, or books into your bed, as your brain stops relating your bed to sleep.
If you absolutely have to bring electronics into your room, put a filter on them so that they don’t emit blue light. Blue light mimics daylight, and can trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime.
If you’re wide awake while lying in bed, get up and do something soothing in another room. If you stay in bed when you’re wide awake, your brain will stop associating your bed with sleep. Do something gentle, like a puzzle, or reading a (kind of boring) book. Don’t do anything that will stimulate your brain.
Avoid caffeine and nicotine for several hours before you go to bed. These are stimulants that can keep you wide awake if you take them too close to bedtime.
Also avoid alcohol four to six hours before bed. You might feel sleepy at first. But your sleep patterns will be disrupted as the effect of the alcohol wears off.
If you have tried everything above, and have trouble falling/staying asleep, or difficulty waking up in the morning, it may be time to talk to your doctor about your sleep problems. It’s a worthy conversation to have, because good sleep is a huge step in the right direction to healing your body, head, and heart in recovery.
Related: A regular sleep schedule is an important factor of remaining in eating disorder recovery during COVID-19, a time with little structure. For other tips on maintaining your recovery during COVID-19, click here.
If you or someone you love is suffering from an eating disorder, take the first step today and talk to talk to someone about recovery or simply learn more about the eating disorder recovery programs we offer.