When You Know What Helps, But Still End Up in the Behavior

Understanding the Eating Disorder Cycle

One of the most common and frustrating things that comes up in eating disorder recovery is when someone is still engaging in behaviors they already know aren’t helpful for them.

They’ve talked through coping skills, they understand the alternatives, they understand the long term consequences, and they still find themselves going back to the eating disorder behavior in the moment.

And in that gap between knowing and doing, that’s usually where frustration starts to build. It can sound like, “I know this isn’t helpful for me, so why am I still doing it?” And pretty quickly, that turns into negative self-talk that can lead into shame, and at times hopelessness in the recovery journey.

Immediate Gratification and Avoidance

In these moments, I like to slow things down and talk about avoidance and immediate gratification.

First off, our brains are conditioned to move toward things that make us feel better in the short term, and unfortunately eating disorder behaviors often provide that sense of immediate relief or gratification. In those moments, the focus is on feeling better right now, not on long-term impact. Or if there is awareness of the long-term impact, it often feels less important in the moment compared to the relief the behavior brings.

The other side of this is avoidance.

Often, eating disorder behaviors function as a form of maladaptive coping. We feel some sort of discomfort, and engaging in the behavior helps reduce that distress or distracts us from having to fully sit with it.

That discomfort can look different for different people. Sometimes it's anxiety, overwhelm, uncertainty, loneliness, boredom, hurt, guilt, or simply having a difficult day. Sometimes the behavior is helping someone feel more in control. Sometimes it's creating a distraction from a painful emotion, or helping them avoid something they don't know how to cope with yet.

As I have talked about the avoidance cycle in previous blogs, we are also reinforcing this pattern every time we engage in the eating disorder behavior and it reduces discomfort, which makes it more likely to show up again in the future.

Making Sense of the Pattern (and Reducing Shame)

The biggest thing we can do here is start understanding why we still fall back into eating disorder behaviors even when we have coping skills, and give ourselves grace in these moments.

Often, the eating disorder behavior is providing relief, distraction, or a sense of control quickly enough to outweigh other coping strategies in the moment.

Something I often bring into sessions is that instead of asking, "Why did I do that?" from a place of criticism, it can be more helpful to ask, "What was going on for me that made that behavior make sense in the moment?"

When we approach the behavior from a place of shame, it often becomes a dead end. We get stuck focusing on judging ourselves rather than understanding what was happening. When that happens, we often stop digging any deeper into the behavior and miss the opportunity to understand what was actually going on and what we might need moving forward.

The more we understand what was happening leading up to the behavior and what the behavior was doing for us, the more opportunity we have to respond differently next time.

Knowing what to do and being able to do it are often two very different parts of recovery.

The Well-Worn Path

One way I like to think about this is as a well-worn path. For many people, the eating disorder has been around for a while, which means those thoughts, behaviors, and coping patterns have been traveled over and over again. The path is familiar.

Recovery is the process of creating a new path. However building a new path takes time, energy, and repetition. Along the way, there will be moments where we find ourselves back on the old path because it is the one our brain knows best.

Often, this is where shame shows up. We tell ourselves we are back where we started, that all of our progress is gone, or that we should be further along by now. But finding yourself back on the old path doesn't erase the work you've done creating a new one. That new path still exists. It doesn't mean you've failed, and it doesn't mean recovery isn't working.

What Happens Next Matters

What matters most is what happens next.

Whether we move into self-criticism and shame, or whether we can pause long enough to understand what was happening in that moment and recognizing what the behavior was doing for us. From there, we can gently begin to think about what support might look like moving forward, without turning it into something we have to punish ourselves for.

Because that gap between knowing what to do and being able to put it into action doesn’t mean recovery isn’t possible. It’s a space where distress, learning, and change are all happening at the same time.

Recovery is often the process of continuing to choose the new path, even when the old one feels easier to find.

And when we do find ourselves back on that old path, the goal isn't to immediately judge the behavior or ourselves for having it. The goal is to choose recovery understanding what we might need to put in place moving forward.

Understanding the behavior doesn't make it okay. It simply gives us somewhere to go next.