Sensitivity and Eating Disorders: You Were Never Too Much

I was always told I was “too sensitive.”

Too emotional. Always crying. Always taking everything to heart, feeling it all so deeply when everyone around me seemed to just be able to let things go.

And somewhere along the way, I started to believe them. I decided my sensitivity was a weakness, a fault in me, something that needed to be managed, toughened up, or changed somehow. I spent a long time trying to be less. Less emotional, less affected. Just less.

So when my eating disorder came along, it made sense.

It gave me somewhere to put all the feelings. A way to cope when I didn’t know what else to do with everything going on inside me. And for a while it seemed to work, until it started causing far more pain than it was ever helping me escape.

It took me a long time to understand that the problem was never how deeply I felt things. It was that I’d never learnt what to do with those feelings, especially the hard ones.

What People Really Mean When They Say “Too Sensitive”

If you’ve ever thought you were “too sensitive”, I want to offer you a different way of seeing it.

Because feeling things deeply isn’t a flaw.

Some people experience things more intensely than others. You might pick up on other people’s moods, the energy in a room, a slight change in someone’s tone, the words they chose or the look on their face. Things that someone else might barely notice can stay with you for hours, sometimes days.

And when something painful happens, you feel that deeply too. Heartbreak is hard for anyone, but when you’re particularly sensitive, the depth of what you feel can almost make you feel physically unwell. It can sit heavily in your chest, affect your sleep, take over your thoughts and make everything else feel harder.

But that same sensitivity isn’t only there for the painful things. It’s often the very part of you that notices when someone isn’t quite themselves, that cares enormously about the people around you, feels deeply connected to others, and experiences the wonderful parts of life just as fully.

So the difficulty was never that you felt too much. This is part of your make-up. It’s part of what makes you you.

The difficulty is that feeling things this deeply is genuinely hard when nobody has ever shown you what to do with it.

Because we spend years learning how to read, write, do maths and pass exams. Yet one of the things every single one of us will come up against throughout our lives is how we feel. Grief, heartbreak, rejection, anxiety, anger, disappointment, uncertainty. And most of us were never really taught what to do when those feelings become overwhelming.

So it makes sense if you found your own way of coping with them.

How Sensitivity and Eating Disorders Become Linked

This is where sensitivity can become part of how an eating disorder takes hold.

Because for some people, an eating disorder becomes one of those ways of coping. A way to turn the volume down on feelings that have become too much, when you don’t have another way to do it yet.

That can look different for everyone. Maybe it’s distraction, numbness, a sense of regaining control. What it offers isn’t really the point. What matters is that it’s doing something for you, which is part of why it can be so hard to let go of.

And it’s completely normal not to have realised that’s what it’s doing. Hardly anyone thinks, I’m overwhelmed, so I’ll turn to my eating disorder. It’s more that, when you start to look, you might notice it gets louder when things feel hard. And that connection is so hard to see when you’re in the middle of it.

And none of this means you caused your eating disorder by feeling too much. Your sensitivity didn’t do this to you, and it’s just one part of a much bigger picture.

What Recovery Actually Involves

Noticing that connection, between how you feel and what the eating disorder has come to do for you, is often where recovery really begins.

It’s also why recovery has to go further than the food. We do need to work on the food side and on eating disorder behaviours. But if the eating disorder has also been one of the ways you cope with difficult feelings, then only ever working on the food can leave those feelings with nowhere to go.

And here’s the part I really want you to know, because I think it’s what a lot of people worry about underneath.

So much of the fear is that who you are is the problem. That your sensitivity is the thing that needs fixing, and if you can’t change it, you can’t get better. But it was never you that was the problem. Recovery isn’t about becoming less sensitive, or feeling less, or turning into someone different.

The work is learning what to do with everything you feel.

And that doesn’t mean making the hard feelings disappear. I know that might be what part of you is hoping for, and I understand why. But it isn’t where the freedom is.

When something hurts, you might want to push it down or do whatever you can to make it stop. That makes complete sense. But pushing a feeling away doesn’t always make it go anywhere. Often it just sits there, like a knot in your chest you keep trying not to notice.

So part of recovery is slowly learning you can turn towards a feeling instead of away from it. That you can recognise I’m really hurt right now, or I’m overwhelmed, understand where it’s come from, and work out what you actually need while you’re in it.

You can’t always change the thing that caused the feeling. You can’t make heartbreak not hurt, stop grief being grief, or make anxiety never show up. But you can change how you support yourself while you’re feeling it.

This is hard to do on your own, especially if your instinct for a long time has been to escape a feeling the moment it arrives. It’s a lot of what the work together involves. Learning, with someone alongside you, how to stay with what you feel, so it stops being something to escape and becomes something you can move through.

Because feelings do move. They can seem enormous when you’re in them, but they don’t stay that way forever. They rise, they change, and eventually they pass. And the freedom is in learning you can let them.

You Were Never Too Much

So if you’ve spent your life believing your sensitivity was the problem, I hope this gives you a different way of seeing it.

Maybe you were never too sensitive. Maybe you were someone who felt deeply, and was never shown what to do when all of that feeling became too much.

And when you learn what to do with it, your sensitivity stops working against you.

The same depth that once left you overwhelmed becomes the thing that lets you understand yourself, feel close to the people you love, and take in the good parts of life as fully as you’ve always taken in the hard ones. The care you’ve poured into everyone else can start to include you too.

And you don’t have to become less you in order to get better. You just have to learn how to be on the same side as the part of you that feels so much.

If you’d like to understand more about why you may have been vulnerable to an eating disorder in the first place, I’ve written about that here.

If you’re ready for support with your relationship with food, your feelings and yourself, you can read about the recovery programme here.

Sasha Paul

Eating Disorder Recovery Coach · Registered Nutritional Therapist · Master Practitioner of Eating Disorders

Sasha Paul is the founder of Natural Food Therapy, where she works one to one with people recovering from eating disorders. Having recovered herself, she combines nutritional therapy, counselling skills, life coaching, NLP and CBT-E to support the whole person. She works online worldwide, from a base in London.