Rolling in the Deep

You may be familiar with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, but do you know how it’s caused? It’s a psychological disorder.

The reasoning behind it differs from person to person, but most develop it because they are afraid of becoming overweight.

Anorexia is 95% found in white females and 0.5 to 3.7% of women will have it sometime in their life. You see, this is something that should never be taken lightly, and is definitely something that should never be ignored.

Many people who have anorexia also may suffer from a nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NS-RED). In this case, they’d starve during the day and binge eat night after night. This makes it hard to fall asleep at night, and usually results in staying up all night.

Of course each problem causes another problem, so then they’d be sleep deprived. If you have school the next day, that means you have to wake up early despite the lack of sleep.

Sleep deprivation can cause irritability, moodiness, and difficulty learning and concentrating, thus affecting teenagers’ school performance. A student’s performance is affected very easily.

Not only does sleep deprivation affect it tremendously; but also, bullying, grades, relationships, friends, family, etc. Being overly preoccupied with being perceived negatively by others may make you more vulnerable to anxiety, anorexia, and insomnia.

People who have anxiety and an eating disorder; the anxiety came first. The balance in your brain is subsequently followed by the balance in your body. People with social anxiety disorder (SAD) aren’t concerned with eating behavior directly.

They are afraid of being judged. Also, they are intensely worried that others will notice the symptoms of their anxiety while eating; trembling hands and spilled food.

They are constantly thinking about what everyone else is thinking, and have no time to make sure to take care of themselves. They want to make sure they please everyone else; that’s when the anxiety and eating disorders come in.

Hi, my name is Autumn Noel Lannen. I am sixteen years old, and I live in Newnan, Georgia. I have social anxiety disorder which has led me to anorexia and insomnia.

I wrote this not only because Russ Massa insisted; but also, to inform people of terrible, destructive things that you’d never notice people have unless they told you.

I’ve had anxiety all my life, and now that I am older it has caused problems for me. I have difficulties going through a drive-thru and talking on the phone. Those are the main problems I face, but there are also problems such as; presenting projects in class, reading out loud, and eating in front of people.

I grew a habit of covering my mouth with my hand while I chew. I do this because I don’t want people to watch me eat. It seems silly, but I can’t help it, “Mind over Matter.”

Being afraid to eat in front of people has started my anorexia. Instead of constantly putting my hand over my mouth, I stopped eating while around people, which was a majority of the time.

As you’ve read above, I pretty much starved during the day and binge ate at night after everyone was asleep. After I ate, it was very hard for me to fall asleep.

I usually stayed up till around 4 a.m. I would watch movies and listen to my iPod. I tried turning everything off and not drinking sodas, nothing worked. I even tried Tylenol PM and Melatonin; they didn’t work either. I went through a stage of depression.

I gave up on everything. I felt like a failure. I couldn’t sleep; of all things I thought that would be the easiest to accomplish. To sum everything up, my social anxiety caused my anorexia, and my anorexia caused my insomnia, and my insomnia caused my depression.

As Adele would say I was, “Rolling in the Deep.” I dug myself into a hole, and I found a way out.

When school started, that’s when I knew I had to change; school changed me. I started making sure I went to bed and woke up at a certain time. I started eating in front of people because I was afraid someone would notice.

I’m still recovering. I’m still healing. It will be a long process trying to fully recover, but I’m better, healthier. Before the summer began I weighed almost 150 pounds, and I dropped to about 125 pounds by the end of the summer! I now weigh 133 pounds.

I am proud of myself. I never knew that something like this could happen to me, and then when it did I never thought I’d get out of it, but I did.

Some would say God saved me; that the reason I got better was because of God. Well if that were so then I guess God made that happen to me. To me that’s bullsh*t.

The reason this happened to me was because I did it to myself, and the reason I recovered is because I realized I was hurting myself unintentionally. I’m My Own Savior.

(Written by: Autumn Noel Lannen)