Thinking it All Out

I get really stuck in my head sometimes.
I can spend entire years in my head.
That pretty much is what happened to me when i was in my eating disorder.
I would wake up with numbers. My first thoughts of the morning were how many calories did i yesterday (already stuck in my mental calculator from the night before, just a lovely reminder) and did i binge/purge? Then I would jump out of bed, weigh myself. Based on what the weight was, i would have an ongoing dialogue in my head about what kind of person I was (good/bad/dumb/idiot/okay/successful/whale etc) and what I was going to do with my food based on my weight that day. Then I would go about my day, going through the motions of going to school, greeting friends mindlessly (I was basically chronically depressed but tended to wear a smile), running to classes, trying to be engaged (but really I'm not thinking about physics - how the HELL is everyone else here really thinking about Physics? I'm too busy figuring out how i'm going to get away with not eating lunch and trying to figure out what to buy at the supermarket when i leave school). I'd finally escape the walls of school and then run home to binge and purge, the time of day when  i could finally escape from the hell that was my life (and basically, the hell that was my head, my thoughts).
Recently though, I'm still in my head a little bit. I am beginning to think that this tendency to be overly cerebral might just be a personality trait, or the way i'm wired. I used to always blame it on the eating disorder, but I'm beginning to wonder if part (or most, even) of the eating disorder was a way to make my tendency to "be in my head" more bearable. The eating disorder behaviors, at least, (the high of starvation & restriction, the high from bingeing and purging) gave my mind a temporary break from itself. *
These days, I've been in my head a lot. It has not necessarily been a bad thing, I have just had a lot to think about in terms of my summer, my goals, my intentions, my relationships and so on.
Writing this out, however, I am realizing that maybe all of this time spent in my head isn't a good thing. Maybe I need to stop worrying so much about the future and be more in the present moment. As if that were easy. I do definitely need to pick up my yoga again, because I love and miss it and just kind of forgot about it this month. It definitely keeps me grounded and in the moment. I also have just felt very preoccupied recently with some kind of dissatisfaction in my life that i have been trying to "figure out" in my head. Maybe I need to just give life a chance and see what comes. I wish i were more "go with the flow". Ha!


Okay well, it's getting late and I'm going to go grab a snack.
Time to be grateful ;)
1. My new paint markers and canvases! I can't wait to finish my new painting and start more!
2. My running shorts - in the past week or so, its basically all ive been wearing, it (along with my favorite grey t-shirt) is my go to outfit for these awful body image days and I don't know what I'd do without it.
3. Iced Coffee - looking forward to my Starbucks tomorrow morning when I am at work.


*I know a couple friends of mine from treatment who also are just very cerebral people. One in particular comes to mind who always used to say "I need to figure this out in my head, first", and then proceed to spend hours just thinking.  I wonder what this is about and I'd be interested if there were any research on the topic of the correlation of people with eating disorders and a tendency to be overly cerebral.