Why Does Sadness Funnel Us Towards Smallness?

Reflections on depression and disordered eating through a reader's vulnerable question.

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Alright, it’s Friday. Hello and hugs. We’re back to another reader-submitted question this week. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can submit questions via the chat.

Here’s the question:

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Hey Abbie,

Have you written before about depression and disordered eating? I know you’ve talked a little bit about anxiety. For background, I’ve been in recovery for years and no longer restrict, but sometimes when I’m in a low mood — like during a depressive episode — I feel this strange pull toward wanting to eat less. It’s really been tripping me up lately, especially with how overwhelming the world is right now.

I don’t act on the restrictive thing, but the feeling is still there. Basically just trying not to beat myself up or feel like I’m failing at this whole healing thing…I’m frustrated. And I’d love your thoughts as someone who has been open about recovery while also having had other mental health conditions. Is this normal? What’s underneath it? How do I make it STOP?! Thank you so much if you’re able to get to this.

— Allison

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The truth-y truth is that this question has been sitting in my inbox for a while. Not because I didn’t want to answer it, but because I was kind of waiting for the answer to come to me.

There was of course the possibility of simply responding with some general insights on the co-occurrence of depression and eating disorders (a truth) and the way that restrictive eating can become a coping tool for sadness and despair (also a truth). But something about Allison’s question was tugging deeper than that.

And recently, the pull to reply became very real — because the past few weeks have been a lot. Life has thrown some curveballs, and on top of it all, I’ve been dealing with a flare-up of two autoimmune conditions since November (more on that soon, probably next week).

All of that to say: I’ve had some low mood days. You know, those days. The ones where answering a text feels like climbing a mountain. Some of it is medical. Some of it is the life stuff. Some of it is just being a person in this world, trying to stay awake to it all.

This is why, on Tuesday of this week, I went digging into my folder of newsletter questions, knowing that it was time to talk about the depressy-to-restricty (my personal term) experience.

Let’s start with what could have been the more generic response to this question, because it’s still important context.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

The Link Between Depression and Disordered Eating

There’s a strong and well-documented link between mood and disordered eating. In fact, research shows that between 50% to 75% of people with eating disorders also experience symptoms of depression. Low mood can bring with it a whole cascade of emotional and physical challenges — isolation, self-criticism, feelings of inadequacy, anger, loneliness, difficulty concentrating, hopelessness, fatigue, and changes in sleep or appetite.

For many, disordered eating begins as a way to cope with those symptoms, offering a sense of control, safety, or escape. But over time, those same behaviors can deepen the depressive spiral. A body and brain that are malnourished are also a body and brain that struggle to experience joy, regulate emotions, or think clearly.

Shame and guilt — which are common to both depression and eating disorders — can intensify this cycle. Low self-worth, shaped by both internal pain and external messages about thinness and value, keeps people stuck in a loop of body dissatisfaction and self-punishment. And because malnutrition itself alters brain chemistry, it becomes even harder to climb out of that hole. Healing, then, has to involve not just food — but compassion, connection, and support for both body and mind.

With that context, let’s get back to the more personal reflections that gave rise to the pull to respond to this question in the first place.

When Low Mood Hits After Years of Recovery

For me, the depressy days were not depression, they were more of a deep ache over meaning and purpose — an ache borne out of what feels like mental health burnout. Because while I’ve never been diagnosed with depression, I’ve lived with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) since I was a kid, as well as OCD, which I was diagnosed with in my thirties.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind that, in my case, anxiety was the precursor to developing an eating disorder. The constant fear that GAD instilled in my daily life eventually gave way to a darkness that felt and operated a lot like hopelessness, exhaustion, and loneliness (similar to symptoms of depression). As a result (and this is highly simplified, because many other factors existed), the perfectionism and rigidity of disordered eating was an attempt to find safety amidst that darkness.

If depression was part of why you developed disordered eating, it makes so much sense that feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness could activate those dormant thought patterns — the ones that once saw controlling your weight as the way out. This is especially true if trauma or a deeply difficult season of life was either happening concurrently with, or was the catalyst for, body dissatisfaction.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern in myself. When I feel low, disconnected, anxious, aimless…my brain and body have this strange fuzzy restrictive feeling. The feeling itself is so hard to explain that I even questioned trying to put it into words here.

It’s more like a sensation. A pulling inward. A quiet desire to shrink my presence. To take up less space. To opt out of the noise and intensity of life for a while. It doesn’t come with calorie math or body checking. It’s just this whisper: maybe if I get smaller, things will feel less heavy. Maybe if I disappear a little, the ache will too.

We’ve been conditioned to want to shrink our body when what we really want is to shrink our pain.

The reality is, the feeling I get on low days now is the same feeling I used to manage with restriction. It sounds like — for you, Allison — that may be true for depression too. In other words, what might feel like the urge to restrict is actually just a thing that was once attached to the depressive episodes. It’s important to make space for how the low mood might just be reminding you of what it once felt like to want to restrict food, rather than the actual desire to return to your eating disorder.

Almost fifteen years into healing from an eating disorder (or being recovered, as some might say), it’s very apparent to me that the “restricty” feeling is not actually a thought about food or my body — not anymore. It isn’t an “I’m relapsing” feeling, and that’s what I’ve found so interesting about it. I don’t actually want to stop eating. I don’t want to lose weight. I don’t believe in the fantasy of control-through-restriction anymore.

But because the emotions are eerily familiar, it can absolutely create confusion, much like what Allison describes in their question.

I now wonder: was what I once interpreted as a desire to restrict food really more of a desire to get as small as possible in an effort to just escape the world for a little bit?

I’m offering this up because maybe for you, like me, it’s about the feeling, not about the old coping tool.

And I think for a lot of people who’ve had eating disorders, especially restrictive ones, this shows up during periods of low mood. Depression stirs the water. It shakes loose those older neural pathways — the ones that used to tell us that less was safer, better, quieter. The ones that sold us the lie, over and over again, that control could lead to peace.

Photo by Tamas Pap on Unsplash

When that old flicker returns, I understand exactly what Allison means about frustration, or feeling like you’re somehow failing recovery.

But here’s the thing: you’re not. The fact that you’re noticing the feeling and not acting on it is evidence of healing. The feeling might show up, and that’s okay. What matters is what you do with it. And I think having conversations like this one is so important — to make room for the nuance of mental health, rather than the black-or-white thinking that tends to permeate recovery spaces.

Because the pause is where the truth exists. For example, I don’t want to restrict. It is not even on my radar anymore. And it sounds like you (Allison) don’t want to restrict either.

What we probably want is to feel okay. What we probably want is relief. What we probably want is for the gray fog to lift without having to crawl our way out of it.

So if that feeling shows up, notice it. Get curious about it:

• What is this really about?

• What’s the texture of it?

• What do I actually need right now?

Because if it’s not about food or your body anymore, then what is the “restrict-y” feeling pointing to?

Sometimes it’s about wanting to be held. Sometimes it’s about overstimulation and not knowing how to soothe it. Sometimes it’s about loneliness. Or burnout. Or the ache of being alive in a body that hasn’t forgotten.

When you slow down enough to notice the feeling instead of reacting to it, you can remember: this is old armor. It used to be protection. It makes sense that it still lives somewhere in me, and…I have other options now.

If you're reading this and thinking, me too, I want you to know that you're not failing recovery.

You're noticing a pattern — and noticing is a powerful, compassionate thing to do.

Yes, depression can activate the desire to restrict food. But the act of restricting food can also contribute to higher levels of depression. It’s a vicious cycle, and one that you’ve fought hard to overcome.

So when the sadness hits, and when the low days happen, remember that it’s just an echo of a time when you once coped in the only way you knew how. It’s not the answer, because responding to our pain with self-abandonment will never lead to real peace or liberation.

Rather than seeing the restrictive thoughts as a wound that’s being torn back open, maybe see it as an old scar being illuminated — a memory making itself known.

Please don’t shrink yourself just because the world feels too big.
Please know that nourishment is an act of radical self-compassion. Especially in a culture that would rather us be depleted, deprived, and unable to fight for our rights.

You get to stay. You get to take up space. You get to eat, even on the hard days.
Especially on the hard days.

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It’s also okay if you don’t know what to make of all this. There’s still a lot of fuzziness around it for me — how could there not be? None of us have the answers to life’s hardest questions.

So maybe nothing I’ve written here will make sense to anyone else. Or maybe someone out there knows exactly what I mean. Maybe you’ve felt it, too — that strange urge to disappear, not because you want to vanish, but because existing feels like too much.

If that’s you, I’d love to know: When you’re having a hard day, what does that “restricty” feeling feel like in your body, in your life, in your story?

Thank you so much to Allison for writing this. I hope my ramblings were at least interesting, if not helpful. xoxo

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If you were interested in this newsletter today, you might enjoy this week’s podcast episode. We get into anxiety, how diet culture demonizes medications for mental health, plus how environmentalism can mask disordered eating.

And if you’re looking for a breakdown of anti-diet culture, this episode received tons of wonderful feedback!