Neuroplasticity. Sounds like a disease, or some form of toxic waste, or something else you’d seriously want to steer clear of. Well, not only is neuroplasticity something you want; it’s something you’ve got!

“ Neuro” anything refers to the brain. Neuroplasticity means the brain remains malleable, changeable — “plastic”. On the micro level, this means that your brain can keep creating new pathways of learning.  It can continue to grow and change itself right into old age. This is not what brain scientists once thought. The old belief was that most brain growth occurs when you’re young. However your brain grew is pretty much locked in place by the time you reach adulthood. Not so!

The brain’s ability to keep changing itself has so much significance it, well, boggles the mind! But today I want to narrow the focus to a topic related to eating disorder recovery that I took up in my last post: self-regulation. Self-regulation means the capacity to calm and soothe yourself and to tolerate even very intense emotions or impulses.

Last time, I reported that self-regulation gets bundled in when you take in the comforting of attuned caregivers in infancy. The bad news is that the special openness of an infant brain to receiving the self-regulatory download recedes by toddlerhood. The goods news is that, thanks to the wonders of neuroplasticity, your brain can still install the skills of self-regulation as a grown-up. It won’t happen through passive reception the way it does for an infant. It takes a lot of conscious effort. But in time, with enough practice, your brain will get the hang of it. It will become your familiar way of handling what life brings you and the feelings that get stirred up. This means you will no longer need your eating disorder, which has been trying hard to fill in for this missing skill.

If you’d like to read more about ways that grown-ups can consciously acquire the skills of self-regulation, check out my posts “Coping Beyond Distraction: Expanding Skills for Living in Eating Disorder Recovery,” “Recovery from the Top Down or the Bottom Up?” and “Resourcing Your Way Through Recovery.” Discover what your brain is ready, willing and able to do for you!

“ Why can’t I just control myself??” If you have an eating disorder you have probably asked yourself this question over and over, either in anger or despair. So today I want to tell you the answer by going way back to your roots.

It turns out there’s a basic skill called “self-regulation” that has everything to do with handling impulses and emotions. If you’re lucky, you had parents or caregivers who had this golden skill so they could just pass it on to you unconsciously, free for the ride. If you weren’t so lucky, your caregivers weren’t blessed with the skills of self-regulation. They couldn’t pass them on to you because nobody passed self-regulation on to them.

Although children are learning self-regulation skills (or not) throughout childhood, there’s a very important, very early time where transmission really occurs in earnest. It’s what developmental researchers call a “critical window,” a time when the brain sprouts a staggering amount of extra equipment dedicated to a particular task. The critical window for transmission of self-regulation is during approximately the first 18 months of life. A brain researcher named Alan Schore put it together that all that cooing and gazing that goes on between a parent and infant involves a process in which infants are gradually enabled to manage more and more stimulation, including positive and negative emotion. In this process the lucky infant is growing actual brain structure for future self-regulation.

How many of you got a say about how things were done back then? I didn’t think so. For the majority of you, your eating disorder represents, among other things, a valiant  unconscious attempt to compensate for the brain-building that didn’t happen for you during that time. This would be too-tragic and mean-spirited a story to tell if it weren’t for another amazing thing scientists have learned about the brain, which is that it gives us a second chance. It may never be as simple as the unconscious download from a well-regulated parent in infancy, but you can still acquire self-regulation skills in conscious ways as a teen or grown-up. Check in next time when I go over the brain’s amazing ability to keep growing itself and the ways you can harness this ability to develop the skills of self-regulation.

This year I resolve to:

• Look in the mirror and pick out one thing I like about what I see each day.

• Consider my own needs and wishes in every situation, even those in which I end up deciding to put the other person first.

• Say “no” when I need to say “no”, even if that’s disappointing to someone else.

• Remember that my imperfections don’t reduce my worth.

• Treat an urge to binge or to restrict as a signal that something’s bothering me and I need to figure out what it is and attend to it in some way.

• Give some energy each day to something I care about that has nothing to do with weight.

• Ban the use of verbal abuse when speaking of myself.

• Give myself credit for one thing I do well and/or feel proud of (unrelated to food or weight) each day.

• Do my best to remember that recovery isn’t a straight–line process; slips and even relapse are a respectable part of a learning curve.

• Find a new way each day to remind myself that my weight has nothing to do with my worth.

My very best wishes for a happy, healthy New Year!

Susan