The relationship between my Anorexia and Anxiety

At the moment it is only 2:12 am but I am unable to sleep because it is so terribly windy. When its windy, the little unit I live in rattles and shakes and it really is quite hard to sleep so I thought I may as well make good use of my time and write a post.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with one of my work colleagues about how different mental illnesses can go hand in hand with one another. In this conversation I found myself explaining the relationship between my two mental illnesses, anorexia and anxiety better then I have ever been able to explain it before so I thought I would share it with you too.

I see my anxiety as my primary mental illness and my anorexia as a secondary mental illness. This is because while I havent always had anorexia, I have always had anxiety. I  honestly think that my anorexia is just a a coping mechanism I developed for dealing with my underlying anxiety. To me, controlling my weight, food intake and exercise were all ways of making myself feel as though I was in control and 'safe'. Of course I can see now that my anorexia has only made my anxiety worse but at the time my anorexia was developing, it made me feel better.

I was incredibely self conscious and hated what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I started blaming the way I looked for everything bad in my life. I started to believe that if I could become beautiful, my life would be better. While I believe I will be recovered from anorexia one day, I know that my anxiety will always be with me. There will be hard times in my life when I feel anxious or panicked about what is happening around me but I need to find new ways to deal with my anxiety rather than by falling back into my anorexia.

I need to always remember that controlling my food, weight and exercise has not solved any of my problems in the past and that it wont fix anything in the future either. While turning to these types of behaviours will only ever make me feel more awful then I already do, there are other coping mechanisms I can use when my anxiety gets bad that aren't destructive to me. I find that simply talking myself through stressful situations and distracting myself helps me a lot.

At the moment my main coping mechanism is to just tell myself to breathe and that what I am feeling will soon pass. One thing that seems to help me a little is to get outside in the fresh air and take Tess for a walk. other times I put on a television series to try and distract me from my thoughts or I call my litle sister for a chat.
While distracting myself with these things can help me while I am at home, I cant do this at work. There is obviously a lot of responsibility involved in working in a bank as you are always dealing with large amounts of peoples money and this makes me incredibely anxious.

I second guess myself with nearly every transaction I make and am always terrified that I have miscouted money or made some kind of mistake. I try to tell myself that I am just being paranoid but I honestly cant help feeling this way. It isn't until I 'balance' at the end of the night (when all of the money I should have at my terminal in accounted for) that I am able to relax. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to deal with this anxiety I experience at work?

Anorexia and Anxiety

Like lots of others who suffer from an eating disorder, I also suffer from anxiety. I do not believe that my eating disorder caused my anxiety as I was very anxious and insecure as a child, long before I developed anorexia. If anything I would say that my anxiety contributed to me developing anorexia. While I never considered myself to have anxiety when I was younger, looking back I know that I definetely did.

I hated going to bed of a night when I was a kid as I would lay there for what felt like hours, terrified that something bad would happen in the night. I was frightened the house could burn down, a murderer would come or someone would try and break in. I was a frequent sleep walker and my mum would often find me sobbing and very distressed in the hallway in the middle of the night. When she asked me what was wrong I would reply through tears 'I don't know.' Mum would try to calm me down and put me back to bed but I never remembered it in the morning.


Numerous times throughout my life I remember going into a strange state that until now I was unable to explain. Sometimes it would happen while I was laying in bed trying to get to sleep, other times it would happen while I was at school in stressful situations. All of a sudden the world around me would go really quiet and all I would be able to hear is my heart beat pulsing loudly and ringing in my ears. I would feel really confused, disorientated and scared while it was happening and had no idea of the amount of time that was passing. Now I know that these little episodes were in fact panic attacks but at the time I had no idea what they were. I never told anyone about it when it would happen as I couldn't explain what was happening I thought that something was wrong with me.

It wasn't until I got to college and was placed in various stressful situations that would bring on these attacks that I realised it was some type of panic attack. I knew that something was wrong when I could barely read a page out of a novel in front of year my 11 english class without feeling as though I couldn't breathe and that my heart was going to beat out of my chest. My voice would quiver and shake which was really embarrasing and made me even more anxious about public speaking.

As well as being party responsible for the development of my anorexia, I also think that my anxiety has prolonged the amount of time I have been sick. I feel as though I would have been able to recover much sooner if it wasn't for my anxiety. The reason I listened to my anorexia for so long is because I felt as though the anxiety I would feel if I went against my anorexic thoughts was unbearable.

I wish I could say that I was able to overcome this anxiety on my own but this is not the case. The truth is, I have only felt as though it was possible to fight my anorexia since going on anti-anxiety medication. My doctor has wanted me to take medication for my anxiety for years but until a few months ago, I had refused. I felt like taking medication would be a sign of weakness but now I know that I was wrong to feel this way. There is nothing weak about accepting help when you need it. Accepting that I was not going to recover on my own and doing what I needed to do in order to recover is one of the bravest things I have ever done.

Please, if you suffer from anxiety and are trying to recover from an eating disorder, don't completely eliminate the idea of taking anti-anxiety medication. I know that it feels like a big deal but it is honestly one of the best desicions I have ever made in regards to my recovery. No, taking medication doesn't make the anxiety go away completely, but it does make the anxiety more bearable. I don't think I would have been able to progress as far as I have without it and haven't regretted my decision to take the medication for a moment.