recovered-ish with chloe cox

"I'm done with recovery" — what that feeling is really telling you | the recovered-ish podcast ep. 27

• Chloe Cox • Season 1 • Episode 27

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0:00 | 43:30

Episode Description

If you've ever thought "I can't do this anymore" or "I just want my life to stop being about recovery" — this episode is for you.

In this episode I'm breaking down the difference between recovery burnout and actually outgrowing your eating disorder, because they can feel almost identical from the inside — and they require completely different responses.

One is a sign that recovery is working. The other is a sign you need something different. Knowing which one you're in changes everything.

In This Episode:

  • Recovery burnout vs outgrowing your ED — and why they feel so similar
  • Signs you're in recovery burnout — hopelessness, resentment, progress feeling too slow
  • Signs you're actually ready to outgrow the eating disorder
  • The one question that tells you which phase you're in
  • Why burnout doesn't mean recovery isn't working
  • How to push through without quitting or doubling down harder
  • Why diversifying your life is one of the best recovery tools
  • When to talk to your team before making any decisions

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
 3:00 Today's topic — recovery burnout
 6:00 Recovery burnout vs outgrowing your ED
 13:00 Signs you're in recovery burnout
 18:00 What burnout is really asking for
 19:00 Signs you're ready to outgrow the eating disorder
 23:00 The donut story
 26:00 The one question to ask yourself
 28:00 What to do when you're in burnout
 34:00 Recovery doesn't have to be your whole identity
 36:00 Talk to your team before you quit
 39:00 Closing thoughts

Resources + Connect with Me:

Keywords/Tags: recovery burnout, treatment fatigue eating disorder, done with eating disorder recovery, ED recovery burnout, outgrowing eating disorder, recovered-ish podcast, chloe cox, ED recovery podcast

Resources + Connect with Me:

SPEAKER_00

Why is this still hard? I've been doing this literally day in and day out for six months, and I still am having a hard time. The thing you're seeking is relief from pain and exhaustion. Not necessarily a bigger life. You just want the struggle to be over. I don't want you to crash. That's not my goal for you. I want you to cross the finish line with triumph and go have a plate of pasta. That's metaphorically what I really want for you. You're listening to the Recovered-Isch podcast. I'm your host, Chloe Cox. And yeah, I know a thing or two about eating disorder recovery. Between my own very complicated history with disordered eating and the work I do now, I've seen this thing from pretty much every angle. This podcast is where we talk about the messier parts of recovery that don't really make it online. No platitudes, no inspirational quotes, just the real, raw, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprisingly liberating process of building a life beyond your eating disorder. Let's get into it. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Recovered Ish Podcast. I'm Chloe. I am your host. Thank you for joining me today. I am coming to you on this beautiful Wednesday in a bit of a strange headspace. It's so funny the way life works. Last week on the podcast, I was talking about the scale and whether it's a useful tool in recovery or not. And I made this statement of I rarely ever encounter my weight, which is true. And especially as someone that's going to many OB appointments lately, being pregnant, I am getting on the scale a lot. Monitoring your weight through pregnancy is something that's recommended. It doesn't really bother me at this point in my recovery. But I know I spoke last week about how I rarely have to encounter my weight, if ever. And I do my best to communicate to my doctors that I don't want to know that information. It's not useful to me, especially because last pregnancy I did know my weight pretty much the whole time. And it ended up not being good for my mental health postpartum. But I went to an OB appointment yesterday and got on the scale like I do, turned around, let the person know, you know, please don't tell me my weight, I'm not gonna look. And I don't know if she was just having a weird brain moment, but she was like, oh, and then she was like, oh, never mind, and then announced my weight to me, said the number out loud. And I think it's because she wasn't sure if I was fully standing on it correctly or not. And then it adjusted and the beep beep went off. And then she was like, Oh no, that's fine. It's blah, blah, blah, blah. And said my weight loud and clear for the whole office to hear, even though I did just ask her to not tell me. And I'm okay. It's fine. I'm okay. That's what I'm walking away with is wow, that's frustrating. I'm okay. But I am realizing we can do so much to try to protect ourselves from that information. And sometimes it still gets through. So I might do another episode in the coming weeks on like when you are exposed to your weight, how do you bounce back? How do you handle it? And I know this has come up for a lot of people in recovery, but I thought that it wasn't impacting me. And I don't think it's really it's not changing anything about my food, but I am finding that since yesterday, I have felt just really a sense of like, ugh, I'm cool with not being pregnant ever again. And I don't know if that's because it's just exhausting kind of going through all of these changes and is at times really taxing mentally, emotionally. Obviously, physically, it's quite taxing, but I just would love for this pregnancy to speed right along. I can't wait to meet my child. That's the goal at the end of all of this, but it would be really nice to not be pregnant anymore. And that's the feeling I'm sitting with, which interestingly enough parallels what we are talking about today on the pod. Yesterday I put up a poll on my Instagram stories. If you don't follow me on Instagram, I do this pretty regularly to get your input on what you would like to hear about in the podcast. So if you don't already follow me and you want to weigh in, no pun intended, your opinions, you can follow at Recover with Chloe on Instagram. But it was a pretty split consensus between covering dating and intimacy in recovery and covering recovery burnout. Recovery burnout was slightly higher. So that's what we're talking about today. But just know if you want to hear about dating and intimacy, that's on my schedule for next week's pod. This idea to cover recovery burnout came from a reel that I posted last week talking about how you might know that you're getting pretty close to being at a turning point in your recovery where you're ready to take those final steps into full recovery. One of those big signs is feeling exhausted by your entire life being consumed by recovery. And this is really similar to the way that it feels when you might initially enter recovery, feeling so exhausted by your entire life being about an eating disorder. You start to have that same feeling when you are almost ready to really let it go. But many people, and I wrote this in the reel as well, like this is a really distinct and particular experience that can sometimes be confused with treatment fatigue or burnout. They are not the same thing. And so I kind of want to talk about both today. So you can so you can figure out if you resonated with that real or if you resonate with the idea of treatment treatment fatigue, which camp you're actually falling into and how to navigate through it. Because on the one hand, this could be a great sign that you are ready to surrender fully and let your eating disorder go and move on with your life, which sounds kind of nice, right? But it could also be a sign that you are just exhausted by how much work you've put into your recovery over such a long period of time, and you would like to be done, even though the work isn't done yet. One brings you a lot closer to those final recovery stages, and the other one requires something different of you. It doesn't require giving recovery up or letting it go or dropping out of therapy, and it's especially hard to move through those spaces. So today we're gonna break down. But this topic feels particularly relevant to me right now because, first of all, as I mentioned, I'm feeling pregnancy burnout. I'd like to be done. Thanks. I'm not done. Obviously, I'm 24 weeks today, I've got about 16 weeks ahead of me. Oof. And I have no choice around that. I gotta wait this thing out and ride it out fully, which I feel grateful to be doing, but also sometimes I wish that I could just fast forward. So that sounds remarkably like the way that recovery burnout can feel. And then the other thing I've been feeling lately is, and don't get me wrong, I really love my job. I love what I do, I love my clients. I can't emphasize that enough. I adore my clients. Every single one of you that I work with, I have so much love in my heart for you, truly. But sometimes I'm like, I don't want to talk about eating disorders anymore. Sometimes I'm like, I don't know if I have much else to say. And obviously I do. Here I am, about to talk to this camera for an hour again about eating disorders. This is episode 27. That's 27 hours of me talking to myself about eating disorders. So clearly I still have a lot to say on it, and I am passionate about it. I wouldn't have chosen this career if I wasn't, but sometimes I'm like, man, I'm really ready to think about other things, to do other things, which is fine and okay. But usually for me, when I start to feel that way, and I have felt this way at several points over the course of the many years I've been in this field, I'm like, man, do I just need a break from the eating disorder world? One, because I think I'm at a really solid point in my recovery where outside of my work, it's really not a part of my world. Outside of posting on Instagram, doing these podcasts, working with my clients, I'm not thinking about eating disorders. I'm not having to actively all the time work on my own recovery. And so sometimes it gets maybe a little bit exhausting, like going back in and reactivating my old wounds. But sometimes I'm just like, wow, wouldn't it be cool if I could just talk about Love Island? Wouldn't it be cool if I could just talk about this crazy book that I'm reading? I am reading the most interesting book. If you haven't read The Make Believe by Hannah Murray, highly recommend. Highly recommend. Very interesting from a psychological perspective. And also if you're into culty stuff, very interesting. Sometimes I think my brain just needs a vacation from eating disorders as a topic. And this again feels similar to the way that it felt when I was in my late stages of recovery, probably about six years ago, and just felt, okay, time to move on, time to talk about other things, time to think about what life I want to be building, time to start dating, time to invest in me outside of this. And it was not a sign of me, at this point, anyways, feeling weighted down by the amount of effort I was putting in towards recovery and how exhausting and hard it was. It was more a feeling of I'm ready to grow out of this. And when I've reached this same point in my career, and I have a few times, something tends to shift a bit. Usually I always find my way back to eating disorder work because it is really what I am passionate about. But it tends to, my work tends to pivot. So one example is I went from working in a treatment setting to private practice, and that gave me the ability to be a little bit more creative in my work and self-directed, and that was exactly what I needed. And I grew from it. Another example would be starting this podcast. I was feeling like I wanted to reach more people, I was feeling like a bit tied down to a rhythm and a ceiling. And then that shifted things a little bit. I when I opened up the coaching branch of my business, that was another point where I was shifting and growing, not so much from a place of I don't want to talk about eating disorders. It usually begins as that's the thought, but it's never really about that. It's usually I'm just, I need a change and I need some growth. And I'm feeling it again here. And I think where I'm starting to shift back into is like wanting to grow my clinical skills even more. I just completed a training in EMDR, which, if you don't know what that is, it's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And I believe really deeply that it can be highly effective with eating disorders and body image issues and traumas in particular. And I'm so excited already about the changes I'm seeing in my therapy clients that I've implemented this with. So that's invigorating me in a new way. It's still about eating disorders, but it's not me, but it's me practicing in a new way that grows and expands my identity. And that lights me up again. The reason I'm giving you so much of the background of what I'm going through personally with my career is because this feeling of ug, I'm ready for my life to be about something different, is not ugly I'm throwing it all away. I'm not saying I'm deleting my Instagram or I'm not going to be talking about eating disorders ever again, or the podcast is over, or I'm closing my private practice and I'm becoming a lawyer. That's different. That's shut down cutoff. This is I'm feeling stifled and I'm ready to grow more. And so that's what it feels like when you are at that point in recovery where you've done so much therapy, you've made so many changes with food, your life looks very different. You're going through the motions of maintenance of I attend my sessions and therapy, I go to see my dietitian, I follow my meal plan, I challenge myself frequently. Challenges aren't feeling as challenging as they once were. And I'm sick and tired of my life revolving around these appointments, in the sense that instead of this appointment, maybe I would rather go out to lunch with my friend. Or maybe in therapy, I'm still going because I know that it's good for me and my maintenance. And sometimes we talk about the eating disorder, but actually we're talking more about identity work and family dynamics and the day-to-day versus the underpinnings of the disorder. You'll start to notice those smaller shifts. And it's not so much a feeling of I'm so sick of therapy. I'm so sick of having to push so hard in my disorder. It's more a sense of asking the question of what else is out there? I want to be more than this. And you might still be thinking, it's really hard to differentiate I want to be more than this from I'm so freaking burnt out from this. And you're right, they sound remarkably similar. They might both sound like I'm tired of thinking about recovery, I'm dreading my therapy appointment, I'm very sick and tired of talking about food all the time. And I think the especially sticky one is I just want to be normal. The difference is that the motivation underneath those thoughts is not the same. So I use the terms recovery burnout and treatment fatigue interchangeably. Treatment fatigue is a term we come across, especially working in the treatment world. And usually it comes up for someone that has been through multiple rounds of treatment, either outpatient or inpatient, PHP IOP. And it's again, they're really freaking exhausted of having to go back through the process again. And it sucks, and it is that way for so many of us. The relapse rate in eating disorders is remarkably high. So treatment fatigue tends to be ascribed to that experience. But I believe that recovery burnout is the umbrella that treatment fatigue falls into. So if I say treatment fatigue or recovery burnout, I am using them interchangeably. They mean the same thing in the context of this conversation, anyways. I want to define it clearly. Recovery burnout or treatment fatigue is often the result of doing hard things for a long time. It is the emotional exhaustion you might be experiencing from working towards recovery in an intensive way for a long period of time. Long period of time is a relative term, but I think it needs to be said that eating disorder recovery usually takes a lot longer than we think it's going to. I remember thinking I would be in residential for a month and then I'd be recovered, which is cuckoo bananas to think about now, knowing I've I've been in recovery for 11 years and it's been a lot of active years of working to get to this point. So recovery burnout is common because we do have to work really hard for a really long time without letting up. That is going to be emotionally exhausting. Some signs that you might be in this burnout space would be looking for hopelessness, feeling discouraged. I've been doing this so long and it's not working. Is this ever going to get better? Is this ever going to change? I've been seeing progress little by little here and there, but I feel hopeless that it's ever actually going to be full recovery or freedom. A sense of really heavy discouragement. You might also be feeling like progress is too slow. I definitely felt this way. As I mentioned, after six months through residential and PHP, I was like, why is this still hard? I've been doing this literally day in and day out for six months, and I still am having a hard time. Something's wrong with the system that this isn't working. Progress is too slow. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. You feel like, and this is for many of us that have eating disorders, we're very goal-oriented people that kind of do the check, and this is the result. A plus B equals C. You expect things to go in a linear way, and you expect the harder that you work, the more progress to be made. And that's not always how it works in recovery. Sometimes you can be working really hard, and the progress is a step forward versus a leap. You might be really resenting your appointments or meal plans, feeling like you know what you're doing, quote unquote, wrong, and you know going into this appointment, you almost can predict what your dietitian is going to say to you. And so you're just like, I don't even want to freaking hear it. I'm just so annoyed. Even though you probably do still need to hear it, or resenting your meal plan of like, I would like to be the one choosing. Thank you. The reality is when you get to a point in recovery that you start to work more towards intuitive eating, you're very much encouraged to make those choices on your own. But you might feel resentful of the fact that I'm still following this meal plan when everybody else gets to just do whatever the heck they want. Very valid to feel that way. I'm not saying it's invalid. It's totally valid to have that frustration. It just might be a sign that you're in that sort of treatment fatigue burnout phase. Other thoughts might be like, I can't do this anymore. I literally can't do this anymore. Every single day is a struggle, every single day is a battle. Every single day I'm fighting my brain. I cannot do this anymore. Fair. Fair to feel that. Recovery is so freaking hard, especially in this phase when it feels like nothing is really changing. The distinction that I want to draw is that treatment fatigue or recovery burnout, the thing you're seeking is relief from pain and exhaustion. Not necessarily a bigger life. You just want the struggle to be over. It implies that it is still actively a struggle and you're ready to just be done. You might even have the illusion that if you were doing it all on your own, you would be fine because you could just kind of call the shots. That's a dangerous game to play, but it implies that there is still a struggle that is there that you would like to end. You would like the struggle to be over. Now, on the other hand, outgrowing the eating disorder, quote unquote, this identity shift or close to that full recovery space, it feels very different than just banging your head against the wall and wanting the struggle to stop. This is where you might be noticing that you're thinking about other goals. I know for me, a key point was working so hard and long in therapy to feel like I was deserving and worthy of more. I started to actually have goals that were oriented towards creating that bigger life. And we'll talk about this next week in the dating episode. But one of the key signs for me was I wanted to get out there and meet people. I wanted to go on dates and I wanted to get married. And those were things I did not even let myself say out loud when I was in my eating disorder because I really didn't think it would happen for me that I would find somebody that would love me, which is so sad to hear myself even say that. Another goal was getting my master's degree, applying for grad school. I really wanted to become a therapist. And at that point, I didn't know if I wanted to work with eating disorders or not, but obviously here I am. The goal wasn't just eat your food or accept your body. Sure, those were still ongoing goals for me, but other things were more prevalent in my mind. You might find yourself wanting hobbies or spending more time pouring into friendships, travel, creativity, family, purpose. Those start to be the themes of your sessions versus how to disentangle a disordered thought. A really big one is the eating disorder feeling boring. Boring. You again, uh, like that kind of vibe of when the thought comes up, for instance. I remember when I first started dating my husband. We went on this weekend trip to San Diego, and it was like midnight, and we were at our hotel, and there was a donut shop around the corner. And if you've listened to this podcast, you might know that donuts were a big thing for me. And he was all like, Let's go get donuts. And I was like, Yeah, let's go get donuts. And so we walked down the street and got donuts. And of course, the biggest part of me was like, this is so fun and cool. I love that I'm able to do this now. And then the eating disorder was like, What are you doing getting a donut at midnight? This doesn't work on your meal plan. This is too much food. What are you gonna do tomorrow? And I'm like, dude, just be quiet. You're so freaking annoying. I'm so bored of this. The life that I'm living right now is fun and cool. And I'm getting a donut with a cute boy. And that's way better than worrying about this stupid voice in my head. It's boring. The life that my eating disorder would have had me have in that moment was going to sleep and waking up in the morning before him and working out. And that's just not fun compared to what we actually did, which was go on a little donut adventure at midnight. So wholesome and so fun and sweet to look back on. But that was a sign of I'm ready to move on, get this out of my life. I am bored. The voice comes up, yeah, I'm bored of you. You also might find yourself being really tired of centering your entire identity around this idea of healing. I think for such a long time, and this came up as I was really on my journey with yoga, and which I absolutely love and credit a lot of my recovery to. And I got super into crystals. And hello, I still am. I have my crystals right next to me. But it was like my whole thing was journaling and doing yoga and following my meal plan and processing trauma and like all of that. That was my whole identity. My whole world was like heal. And I was ready for it to be about something else. Sure, some of those things have stuck around because they're beautiful self-care practices for me, but it was all everything I did every day was centered on. You might have thoughts like, I want my life back. I want to be at the helm of the ship, or I want to build a life, because that's really where I was. I wasn't wanting the life that I had before. I was wanting to build a new one. And that felt exciting, and that's where the focus was. You can feel the difference in your body when you're ready to move on versus when you're ready to abandon. That's the difference between recovery burnout, abandonment, and growing beyond the disorder, moving on. Key distinction: this isn't you giving up on recovery. This is you actually noticing that it's working. Recovery is finally working. So, one question I would have you ask yourself if you're trying to figure out and you're still not sure which phase am I in, this question can snap it into focus. Ask yourself if I could snap my fingers and be fully recovered tomorrow, what would I want my life to be about? If you're drawing a blank, or if you're picturing a version of you that can still live a disordered way without distress, that's probably treatment, fatigue, recovery, burnout. If you're like, I don't know, I would work out and eat X, Y, and Z, and you're picturing your body being a certain size, and maybe you picture that being very peaceful, but if you were to get real with yourself, it's just the disorder minus all the bad stuff. That's probably treatment fatigue. That's probably burnout. If on the other hand, your answer is something more like I want friends, I want love, I want to feel good about my work, I want to be creative, I want to enjoy life, I want to travel, explore, I want to feel peace day to day, I want to not be thinking about my body, that might be you ready to outgrow the eating disorder. When our life becomes big enough that there's no longer room for the disorder, that's a sign that you're ready to surrender. Even if there's just the desire there for the disorder to take up a small fraction of your life and be able to focus on all those other things that matter more to you. If you can even come up with things that matter more to you, massive sign that you're outgrowing the ed. So you're either sitting here thinking, okay, amazing. I'm there. I'm so close, wonderful, great. Or you could also be sitting here thinking, yeah, I don't identify with either. Perhaps you're sitting here, oh shoot, I'm fully in burnout mode. You're probably wondering, what the heck do you do about it? Because this is going to come up for most of us, just given the length of time that recovery really requires and the amount of sustained effort that it requires. And I know we've talked in the past about the key to recovery being learning to tolerate distress long term. So true here. And it's not always easy to do that. And people say all the time recovery is a marathon, not a sprint, and it's cliche, but it's very true. If you think about endurance sport like that, it's high energetic output, and then the person completes the race and they freaking crash for days. I don't want you to crash. That's not my goal for you. I want you to cross the finish line with triumph and go have a plate of pasta. That's metaphorically what I really want for you. So we have to figure out how to get through these phases without giving up or without abandoning recovery or taking little breaks from it. I certainly was somebody that was guilty of taking little breaks from recovery, where I'd be like, dude, this is not working. I'm not going to have that snack. And that will feel really great and like a relief. And I got the relief that I wanted, but it didn't actually solve the burnout because the next time you get back up on the horse, you're still burnt out, you just had a moment of dipping back into the disorder. And maybe it's even harder to get out of because of that, because you let the disorder back in a little bit. I think the biggest thing is to first acknowledge that if you're experiencing treatment fatigue or recovery burnout, this is not evidence that recovery isn't working. It can really feel that way. That's where the hopelessness and the discouragement really comes from is like this isn't working. I'm done. It is not that. If you're emotionally exhausted from recovery, it's a sign that you've been doing something hard for a long time. It does not mean that hard thing isn't worthwhile or isn't working. It's exhausting. It doesn't mean that it's wrong. The truth is, it's really hard for us to see our own progress when we're living with us every single day. I can look back at myself a year ago and see that goals that I've been working towards, things that I've been building a year ago, I was in a very different place than I was, than I am today. If I look back even a month ago versus today, not a whole lot's different. And the change day to day is imperceptible. But over time, I can really see the progress that I've made. And I'm not just talking about eating disorder recovery, I'm talking about work and identity and parenting, all that stuff. So if you're feeling like I'm not making any progress, first of all, I want to challenge you there. Even when we take steps back, that gives us an opportunity to examine and make further strides forward. Every step back, and I talk about this in my relapse episode, is an opportunity to understand ourselves better. And every time I've slipped up, it's pushed me forward. Eventually, maybe not right away, but eventually. So when you are exhausted and burnt out, this doesn't mean you're doing something that isn't working. It means it's hard to actually objectively see your own progress and you're doing something that's hard and exhausting, pure and simple. Don't let that become a story about you not doing it right or recovery failing you and leading to that sense of hopelessness. The other thing I'd have you do, which maybe seems a little odd coming from somebody that produces this type of content, I would turn off some of the informational faucets that you have going. And what I mean by that is when you're opening your Instagram, are you bombarded by recovery content all the time? Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's triggering, sometimes it's just plain too much. You know what you need to be doing day to day. You know that you need to be going to your therapy appointments, you know that you need to be going to see your dietitian, you know you need to take committed action, but you maybe don't always need to open up your app and see, love your body, love yourself. You maybe don't always need to be looking at people living their most recovered life and feeling like, oh my God, I'm so far away from that. Maybe it's time to step off. Maybe it's time to unplug from some podcasts. I will not be offended if you'll unplug from mine. Maybe instead you can start to actually think about diversifying your life a little bit. What else are you interested in? What else could you be focused on? Recovery burnout is when your entire life is about recovery. Actually, exploring some things outside of recovery can be very helpful for your recovery. When I reconnected to the part of myself that really loved reading, and I wasn't reading books about recovery, I was reading literature and fiction. That helped me realize, oh, okay, there's life beyond this. I can escape a little bit, and I can also remember who I am. And that helped me so much more than reading another recovery book at a certain point. Spend time doing more quote unquote normal life activities that maybe don't have anything to do with the disorder. How long has it been since you just did something for the fun of it for no other reason than it was something that brought you joy? Can you even think about what that is? Maybe just start by thinking about what that is. Add a little bit more of that to your life. We want to thicken the narrative of who you are and what your days look like. When everything is about recovery, sometimes it triggers that all or nothing. I'm either all in or all out. And I think that can be really problematic. So let's just make recovery a piece of the story and not the full story. Maybe you can ask people in your life that are support people to start asking you other questions. I know sometimes when I was in my recovery, I either wanted people to never ask me, or I would get offended if people didn't ask me how I was doing. I know sometimes for people that are going through it, it can get really exhausting when support people are always checking in on how are you doing? Did you eat your meals? How's your progress? And you just want to feel like you're normal. So asking support people to be like, maybe check in with me a couple times a week, but actually right now, more of what I need is talking about reality television or tell me something, tell me a crazy story from your workday. Those things can be more supportive sometimes than actually talking about the disorder. The whole thing about treatment fatigue and recovery burnout is recovery can become an identity. Eating disorder can become an identity. The whole goal eventually is for you to not have those as a part of your identity. So start that work now. It doesn't just have to be about food all the time. It can also be about who are you becoming. Those questions, when everything else feels exhausting, can feel really energizing. Sometimes overwhelming for sure, but it can really get the wheels turning mentally to have a bit more psychological flexibility. And once you are able to ground into what is this life? What is this recovered life that I actually want to live? You might have more energy to do the hard things and to actually do the stuff related to food and to push yourself a little bit more. Perfectionists have a tendency when feeling burnt out to make it a personal problem. I'm doing it wrong. I need to work harder. We don't tend to creatively think of other paths. We tend to just double down on what we've already been doing, but harder and more. And if we do that in our recovery, recovery doesn't feel like it's working. So I'm either gonna throw the, throw in the towel, stop altogether, or work even harder. That sometimes can set us up for failure. So instead, I would challenge you to look at recovery creatively, look at it differently rather than doing more of the same with a higher degree of intensity to push through burnout. You do not have to think about recovery all day to stay in recovery. Consider what are the pillars that you need to hit, and then ask yourself, what else is there room for? I want you to hear me loud and clear on this point, though. If you are in a space of recovery burnout, and you're like, I just need a break from therapy, I just need a break from my dietitian appointments, or I can't stay in treatment. I'm so burnt out. Bring it up to your team before you quit. Bring it up to your team before you opt out. It could be as simple as a conversation about it and why and what's working and what's not. It could be a need to shift providers, which we all understand when you've hit a ceiling. I, as a therapist, understand when a client has done as much work with me as they possibly can and they would be served better by someone else with a different approach, obviously always want you to do what's best for you. It could be down to that. There are other ways to consider this that aren't just being done. Recovery burnout, again, is not a sign it's not working. It's not a sign that you're not working hard enough. It's just a sign you've been doing something really hard for a long time. A common fear that comes up, I think, when I suggest in the space of recovery burnout to minimize the recovery focus is if I'm not focused on recovery, then I could relapse. And I'm not saying to stop focusing on recovery entirely. I'm saying to focus on recovery in proportion to the recovered life you want to live. Full recovery is actually boring and ordinary. It's a rhythm of eating. It's noticing thoughts, allowing them to pass, it's repetition. It's exhausting mentally, it really can be. I think the repetition and the monotony of it can get really exhausting. But the goal is a quote unquote normal life lived without a disorder where you have the space to think about other things. What if you started acting as if that were true now without compromising the pillars of your recovery, the mainstays, the things you need to be doing every day, but shifting focus to how can I live my recovered life today? Versus how can I think harder, process more, do more, push harder? What if you just did what you needed to do and challenge yourself to zoom out a bit and look at what's the real goal? What do you really want at the end of this? How can you bring some of that in now? Okay, so again, if you're exhausted, it means you're exhausted. If you're burnt out, it means you're burnt out. It doesn't always mean that the path isn't working or the path isn't right. And again, I want to return to my example of I'm feeling at this point in my career a little bit like I wish I wasn't so focused on eating disorders. But here I am having a passionate conversation about eating disorders that actually feels really good for me. It's not me talking about eating disorders that's actually the problem. It's the systems outside of it that are making me feel a bit burnt out. It's wanting to grow more in what I'm doing. It's envisioning a life where I feel the effort that I'm putting in is expanding me. So if I were to say, I'm done talking about eating disorders, I'm done in the eating disorder field, that actually wouldn't be what I really want or need. What I really want and need is to keep growing, is to diversify my life, pour into what feels exciting for me right now. And that actually doesn't mean that what I'm doing right now isn't working. It's just a focus that might be changing. Adapting a lens of creativity when it comes to pushing through burnout of any kind is a vibe. And I guess as I'm sitting here talking about this and reflecting on my pregnancy burnout in parallel, maybe there's a way that I can creatively apply that too. Maybe even challenging myself to find some enjoyment in the changes that are going on. I have to think more about this parallel. But I really do believe that it's valid to be exhausted, especially when you've been working so long and hard at something. It's not an indication it's the process isn't right or the process is done or that you should quit. It's just calling for a change of some sort. And maybe a detachment from the way that we've been approaching recovery, integrating it in a different way and finding new sources of energy to push through. So I do hope that was helpful. And I'll tell you, it was helpful for me to even sit down and do this podcast. It's a really weird, gloomy day in California, and I was feeling like going back to sleep. Um both done with being pregnant and a little bit mentally burnt on content creation. But this just gave me a new energy because I do feel passionate about this, and it's a reminder that it's okay to have moments where things don't feel right. It's okay to have moments where you feel a little down or discouraged. Actually, sitting with those feelings and being curious about those feelings is so much more helpful than trying to fix them. Usually, when we sit with an emotion, whatever we need from it is gonna come up as we sit with it. You don't need to be effortful with it, you don't need to tighten your grip. Allowing what's true to just wash over you is sometimes the most helpful thing. Okay. Enough of my pontificating on this. I hope that you enjoyed the episode today. Like I said, next week we are going to be talking about dating and intimacy. Definitely a juicy topic. I will tell you that much. And I will be fully spilling the tea on my early 20s chaotic recovery dating life. And also like how I found my husband and how we navigate recovery as a couple. We're both in recovery in ways. I'm in eating disorder recovery, he's in recovery from drug addiction, how I've navigated intimacy and what it feels like to be in a romantic relationship in a body that maybe you're not comfortable with. It's hard, people, and it's really nuanced. So I'm excited to talk about it. So please come back next week. That will be a juicy one. If you enjoyed today's episode, would love it if you could give the show a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you're on YouTube, would love to have you on as a subscriber. Give this video a thumbs up. And if you're not watching on YouTube, I would love for you to join me here. I'm a visual podcast person, which is why I even put them up on YouTube. I like to watch the people talking. I'll throw it up on my TV and fold the laundry while watching my favorite podcast. So I invite you to have a restful moment of just engaging face to face. I wish I could see your face. I guess you can only see mine. Anyways, can't wait to talk more next week. Eat your food. Try to think about who you are beyond this as you do it. I will be eating right there with you, and we will talk soon. Bye.