In this ‘brain post’ I want to explain a little more about two important brain regions that play big parts in how we think and act and how these two different parts of the brain often work against one another, trying to take the driver’s seat in guiding our behaviours. The two parts of the […]
Category: Neuroscience & Eating Disorders
When in eating disorder recovery, there are a number of factors that can make a real difference to how much progress you make in terms of recovery changes and neural rewiring. I have written about some of these in a separate post but in this post, I wanted to highlight the importance of ensuring that […]
Every human brain (however old) has the ability to learn new skills, behaviours, thoughts and emotions. This is the concept of ‘neuroplasticity‘ or ‘brain rewiring’. Eating disorder recovery necessitates changing a lot of behaviours and thought patterns that in the years or decades of illness have become deeply wired into the brain, such that you […]
In earlier posts, I have written about what neuroplasticity is (the ability of the brain to rewire and change) and why it is important for eating disorder recovery. Therefore, if you want to know more about neuroplasticity generally, have a read of my last post on the topic (here). In this post, I want to […]
As some of you loyal, wonderful and regular readers on here might know, I am now working as an eating disorder recovery coach and for that I have a separate website, which is hellybarnes.com. This post is not a marketing ploy though. I am just popping this post up to let you know that I […]
When something stops being an option in your mind for long enough, you just stop seeing it. During my years of heavy restrictive eating, compulsive exercise and movement and painful isolation, my brain learnt and adapted to this being my new normal and stopped paying attention to the fact that anything else was a real […]
If you have a restrictive eating disorder and you are a young woman, then there is a chance you don’t have a normal menstrual cycle and quite possibly experience what is known as hypothalamic amenorrhoea. Perhaps you have a hit and miss irregular cycle or maybe you have not had a period for some time […]
When you have an eating disorder, your brain is hard-wired in such a way as to instantly pay attention to information and ‘advice’ regarding dieting, weight loss, exercise and all the damaging diet industry and diet culture bullshit that dominates our modern day culture. These messages are precisely what we need to avoid when we […]
A human brain can only concentrate and pay attention to one thing at a time. This fact is a reality for us all… that even with the most accomplished or expert brain, focusing on more than one thing at a time is just not possible. Multi tasking is a myth…. I know all you female […]
The fear is real in eating disorder recovery, but what if we can turn that fear into excitement? With an eating disorder, we develop very intense and real fear responses whenever we try to eat and rest more or change other hard wired disordered behaviours that have developed over the course of the illness. Although […]
In eating disorder recovery, we frequently refer to the concept of brain rewiring as a fundamental part of the process. Unless we use the plasticity our brains have to change our habits and make recovery focused behaviours, thoughts and ultimately beliefs our norm, we won’t attain a lasting recovery. Frequently though when people talk about […]
In the past, whenever people have suggested I might like to practice daily ‘gratitude’ – perhaps in a nice journal or using some other method, externally I might have smiled and nodded, while inside I was thinking, ‘f**k off’. ‘Practicing gratitude’ to me sounded hippy, woo woo and quite frankly, when you are miserable living […]
This post is called, ‘Words Matter In Eating Disorder Recovery’ but actually the words we use in day to day life matter in everything, all the time! So, although in this post, I will be relating how we use words and language to talk or think about ourselves or our lives in respect to eating […]
When it comes to eating disorder recovery today, we frequently refer to the concept of ‘rewiring our brains‘ into healthy recovery focused pathways in terms of our automatic behaviours relating to food, weight manipulation and other such things. I am currently doing a course in neuroscience and I have been learning about what we actually […]
This is a slightly different post today. I don’t usually share things like this but I am currently studying neuroscience and part of the course is about brain plasticity which of course is very relevant to eating disorder recovery. With an eating disorder, we have a brain that is hard wired to perform disordered behaviours, […]
RECOVERING NOMAD 