As a teenager, disordered eating was Olivia’s maladaptive coping strategy. She would binge eat and then exercise, binge and exercise. As she recovered from her eating disorder, she came to realize that her behavior wasn’t really about the shape of her body—“I needed something to blame for my anxiety, and cultural brainwashing made my body seem like a good target,” she said. Instead, her compulsive behavior was an attempt to deal with feelings that felt too big for her to handle.
She’s been symptom-free for several years. Still, she told me, “I sometimes walk through doors sideways because I think I’m too big to fit. When I catch myself doing it, I make myself go through straight, because what I learned is that it’s not my body that I’m worried is too big. It’s my anxiety.”
Now she runs, both to manage her stress and as a productive outlet for her intensity and energy—and she limits herself to one marathon a year because, she says, “I tend to go overboard, and it helps if I set limits.”
“I think you’re doing something more profound than just setting limits,” I said. “I think you’re allowing exercise to help you complete the cycle instead of hitting the brakes. And you can do the same thing
with sex.”
“I can?”
“Yes.”
She chewed on her lip and nodded her head. Then she said, “I
don’t see it.”
She’ll see it in chapter 5. broken culture broken stress response cycles The key to managing stress effectively is to make efforts to complete the cycle—unlock from freeze, escape the predator, kill the enemy, rejoice.
But stress is more complex in modern humans than in gazelles and gorillas, for a lot of reasons. First, in modern life, we are, as I mentioned, almost never chased by lions. Our stressors are lower intensity and longer duration—“chronic stressors,” they’re called, in contrast to “acute stressors,” like straightforward predation. Acute stressors have a clear beginning, middle, and end; completing the cycle—running, surviving, celebrating—is inherently built in. Not so with chronic stressors. If our stress is chronic and we don’t take deliberate steps to complete the cycle, all