Eating Disorder Recovery and Microdosing - What To Expect
As more people are becoming curious about psychedelics and their ability to support people move through depression, anxiety, addiction, and eating disorders, the practice of microdosing is also receiving increased interest.
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Microdosing is the practice of consuming a small amount of plant medicine, like psilocybin (magic mushrooms), on a regular or weekly basis.
The hallucinogenic effects are small, meaning that the soup on the stove won’t change to a purple colour, but it may seem more nourishing, alive, and vibrant (and possibly easier to eat).
When you microdose, the world feels more intimate.
Your place in the world feels more connected as you experience a dropping away of the false illusions, and a deepening into the interconnectedness of things (including how each ingredient in your soup is part of a complex and beautiful web that you are also part of).
Microdosing can sensitize you towards your own body and your inner emotions. The veil starts to feel thinner allowing whatever has been suppressed or numbed out to come to the surface to be acknowledged.
With this increased intimacy and sensitivity, things can feel confronting for the psyche. One of an eating disorder’s main strategies is to put up walls and defensive armour to keep the tender, fragile, painful emotions at bay.
Through restriction, excessive exercise, or obsessive planning, one stays focused on the external, in the future, or on outside expectations, in order to stay away from what is brewing inside. Avoiding emotions is one of the eating disorder’s main tasks.
Microdosing may take you to an edge whereby you start to feel and connect to those previously hidden emotions.
As such, microdosing can be challenging!
This is because sacred plant medicine or psychedelics shine light on repressed sensations, feelings and memories - the things we don’t want to look at - so that we can acknowledge them, and move through them, and ultimately heal.
If you are microdosing or are thinking about starting to microdose for your eating disorder recovery, and to free up your relationship with food and your body, there many be moments of discomfort as you start to venture into the places you have been working so hard to turn away from.
Whilst each person will have their own microdosing journey, you may notice four shifts come up: feeling hungry, feeling tired, feeling feels, and feeling lost. These are beautiful to work with, especially if you are in recovery. Here’s why…
Feeling Hungry
If you are microdosing for your eating disorder recovery, one of the things that you may encounter is a feeling of being hungry.
This is because plant medicines illuminate the places that we have ignored, hid from, or suppressed. When there has been a history of eating disorders, there has been history of restriction in some way or another (for more on restriction, read this).
Ignoring hunger and the subtle cues of hunger are a large part of an eating disorder - and if we have practiced not responding to our hunger (and only responding when there’s obvious tummy growling or when we feel faint), the more subtle cues of hunger are missed, and we simply get used to feeling hungry. all. the. time. without realizing it.
As such, if you start microdosing there may be feelings of increased appetite. This is the medicine illuminating the restriction, the malnourishment, the undereating, and the lack of fuel in the body (as well as heart and mind).
It's important to listen to these cues, to trust these feelings of hunger, and to respond to your body's needs. This is an opportunity. The feeling of hunger is being amplified for you to listen and is a chance for you to do things differently, and to see how it feels and what happens.
It is a chance to choose differently for your recovery; for you to take care of your body and transform your relationship with food.
With the cognitive flexibility that plant medicine offers, you can use these windows of opportunity when microdosing to respond from an aligned and courageous place in relationship to food and your body. This is how you create new pathways that support your recovery.
Feeling Tired
Another thing you may notice when you start microdosing is just how tired you feel. A large part of what recovery is about is learning how to slow down, to yield, and to pause.
So much of the eating disorder wants to just keep pushing, going, doing, and excessively exercising - with often not enough nutritional support. The energy of the eating disorder is to steamroll through and to not stop.
The body is running fast, running on empty, and running from the painful past. When things slow down, all the emotions and memories that have avoided come up. The eating disorder is like protective strategy is to ensure you just keeps going.
When you start working with plant medicine, they may ask you to slow down so that you can feel what has been hidden away allowing for healing to occur. We have to feel to heal, and feeling comes by slowing down.
When you're microdosing and there's a sense of feeling really tired, it's another opportunity for you to do things differently: to slow down and to allow the body to rest, as a way to support whatever wants to come up to be felt.
It doesn’t mean coming to a complete halt but to make small shifts towards taking a few conscious breaths, pausing between tasks, taking a moment to look around your environment, or feel the energy in your body. Pausing.
When you slow down in a sustained and supported way (ie. not collapsing but rather resting), there is a chance for the nervous system to recalibrate so that you start to come back into balance, build up capacity to feel, acknowledge, accept, and ultimately move through the pain that has been suppressed through the eating disorder.
Feeling Feels
For people choosing to navigate eating disorder recovery, there is also a deep refamiliarization and re-navigation of one’s emotional landscape. In the beginning of recovery, it can be challenging to feel the feels or name the emotion that is bubbling to the surface. Sometimes it can just feel like numbness - like a vast plain of nothingness.
Not being able to sense or articulate an emotion could be a protective strategy. In the past, you may have learnt that if you expressed your emotions, they wouldn’t be received in the ways you needed. And so, you learnt to hold them in and block them off - because it’s easier to do that than to feel the rejection of not being received.
Sacred plant medicine, including microdosing, amplify our emotional state, intensifying our current inner world. The emotions that were repressed or avoided come up to the surface through the support of psychedelics and give us a chance to feel, acknowledge, and accept the emotions.
For people with eating disorders, this can be a challenging but deeply transformative experience. When we turn to the emotions rather than hiding from them, we rely less on the disordered food and body strategies. This is because these strategies played the role of managing the emotions through restriction, excessive exercising, purging or eating past discomfort.
When we build capacity to be with our feelings, we don’t need the eating disorder. This why psychedelics can support people in eating disorder recovery, specifically through consciously connecting with and moving in and through the emotional landscape.
Feeling Lost
It is possible that when you start microdosing, you may notice at times a feeling of being a little lost, or a bit aimless. This is a really interesting insight to work with.
The eating disorder likes to control things, has a rigid way of navigating through life, and feels protected when it knows each step. When the microdosing comes in, you can be opened up to a more flexible way of being - and that can feel scary. It can bring up anxiety when there isn’t a roadmap or a plan.
This is an opportunity to experiment with the spontaneity, the ever-changing moments of life, to trust the unknown, and to ground into anchors that feel resonate and valuable for you and you only - not based on what someone or some program told you is important.
Sometimes we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves.
The medicine is shining light on the illusion of control that the eating disorder attempts to give us, and instead asks us to open up to reality of impermanence, to trust the unknown next step, to develop capacity in the face of change, and move from rigidity to flexibility not only with food but in our lives.
“When we truly surrender and truly trust the unknown, we run into something big… We come to understand it’s coming from within.” - Joe Dispenza
Psychedelics and microdosing increase cognitive flexibility, meaning they support people in eating disorder recovery to more easily change their thoughts around food, allow for emotions to come through, and for the body itself to release tension.
With the support of psychedelics, there is an ability to go to the root of why the eating disorder developed, process painful memories and challenging feelings, reduce pervasive food and body thoughts, and improve self-love and self-acceptance.
There is an increased sense of self-trust that develops through this process. This self-trust leads to an inner grounding or anchoring - a feeling of, “I deserve to be here, I belong, and I am worthy to live my life.”
This self-trust leads to a greater ability to face and move through challenging feelings from a more grounded, centered place without needing to numb, relieve or suppress through food or body manipulation.
There is more flexible, grounded, and compassionate approach to life and towards oneself, even in life’s ups and downs.
Through this process, the nervous system is able to move beyond the old imprints of the stress survival responses, and into a blueprint that is aligned with the present moment. This is the process of embodiment - and recovery is all about deepening into one’s own embodiment.
Learning to hear and respond to hunger, listening to when rest is needed, allowing emotions to be acknowledged, and anchoring into deep trust are the gifts that the medicine can give us as support in realizing our full self, beyond the eating disorder.
For more articles on microdosing:
Can Microdosing Support Eating Disorder Recovery? — Francesca Eats Roses
Microdosing for Eating Disorders
Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash