Why Depression and Eating Disorders Often Show Up Together (Plus Strategies to Help You Heal)
Depression and eating disorders often go hand in hand. While research shows that about 40 percent of folks with eating disorders will also receive a clinical diagnosis for at least one other mental illness at some point in their lives, one sticks out as especially common: clinical depression.
In fact, a recent study from the Journal of Eating Disorders shows that, out of 18,641 women surveyed about their mental health, a significant number reported a close association between depression and eating disorder behaviors.
Both conditions share numerous psychological and environmental links such as rumination, intrusive thoughts, mood instability, social isolation, unresolved trauma, or emotional dysregulation.
If you’ve been shouldering this heavy burden of both depression and an eating disorder at the same time, it’s important to know that healing is within reach. Let’s explore where these two conditions intersect, along with some practical tools for recovery.
The Connection Between Depression and Eating Disorders
Depression and eating disorders share an inverse relationship, meaning that either one can feed into the other. Many of the risk factors and life stressors that make a person vulnerable to depression can also contribute to an increase in eating disorder symptoms. That’s because both mental illnesses often develop from similar genetic and personality traits.
For example, someone who is neurotic, self-critical, perfectionistic, or emotionally avoidant might numb those uncomfortable feelings with maladaptive eating habits. This could result in nutrient deficiencies that impair brain function and cause signs of depression (e.g. chronic despair, negative affect, loss of interest, withdrawal).
Likewise, someone with a neurotransmitter imbalance due to their genetics or environment might lack healthy dopamine or serotonin levels. These hormones produce intrinsic motivation, pleasure, satisfaction, well-being, and emotional stability. But an imbalance can throw off the brain’s reward system, leading to poor decision-making, mood fluctuations, and compensatory habit formation (e.g., restrictive or compulsive eating).
Depression, Eating Disorders, and Trauma
Adverse or traumatic experiences can increase the risk of these mental illnesses. For example, children who suffer abuse before the age of 18 are over three times more likely to exhibit eating disorder behaviors than their peers who were not abused.
Similarly, PTSD can make someone more vulnerable to depression and other pathologies such as self-harm and substance use.
Research also points to a direct correlation between childhood mistreatment and poor self-esteem, chronic guilt or shame, and subsequent body image disturbances, which often last well into adulthood. These attributes also fuel both depression and eating disorder symptoms.
3 Gentle Healing Steps You Can Take Right Now
Healing from an eating disorder while also navigating depression can feel overwhelming, isolating, and deeply exhausting, but you don’t have to overhaul your entire life to move toward steadiness.
Small, compassionate steps count. In fact, they’re often the ones that help your nervous system feel safest. Here are three gentle, doable actions you can take right now to support your healing, without pressure, perfection, or urgency.
Anchor Each Day with a Nourishing Routine
Create a basic routine that feels structured but manageable and make it your non-negotiable anchor to help move through the day. The Alpha Psychiatry Journal suggests that eating disorder behaviors throw off the body’s natural circadian rhythm, which can affect sleep habits, mood states, work flows, social activities, and other areas that inhibit your functioning.
So it’s important to restore a sense of nourishment and balance with an easy-to-follow routine
Keep in mind, the goal here is not perfection. It’s to re-stabilize yourself through a series of healthy, consistent actions that will regulate emotions, nurture the body, soothe overwhelm, and lessen that urge to listen to the voice of your depression or eating disorder.
Here’s one example of a daily anchoring routine that you could implement:
Drink eight ounces of water after you wake up each morning.
Eat a nutritious breakfast within one hour of being awake.
Start the day with gentle movement (e.g., a 10-minute walk or sun salutation).
Pause every few hours to take some deep, conscious breaths.
Schedule meals and snacks at regular intervals and put away devices while eating.
Close out each day with an intentional journaling or meditation practice.
Practice Checking In and Redirecting Yourself
When you feel depressive symptoms coming on or the urge to relapse into an eating disorder behavior becomes strong, pause for a few breaths and ask yourself three questions:
What am I feeling emotionally at this moment?
What are these emotions trying to communicate?
What is the next gentle action I can take for myself?
This simple but mindful and compassionate inquiry makes it easier to disrupt intrusive thoughts and automatic impulses, so you can choose a constructive response over a harmful reaction. The more often you practice checking in with your own needs, the more natural it will become to redirect your brain from maladaptive forms of coping.
You might even start to notice that when an urge to act out surfaces, the best course of action isn’t to indulge the temptation, but to invest in your own self-care. For instance, you could step outside for fresh air, do a breathing exercise, drink some water, stretch your muscles, eat a snack, or text a friend. So learn to tune into and honor your needs.
Prioritize One Ritual that Brings You Pleasure
Depression quells enjoyment, while an eating disorder punishes or restricts it. To combat this pattern and restore some color to your world, choose something you can do at least once a day for no other reason than sheer, genuine pleasure.
Choose a sensory ritual if possible. Research shows that activating multiple sensations (e.g., touch, taste, and sight) at the same time can have a calming effect on the nervous system.
Small but consistent micro-pleasures can retrain your mind to embrace the hopeful, joyful emotions that depression steals and an eating disorder numbs.
Not sure how to introduce this type of ritual into your life? Here are a few ideas to experiment with:
Light a candle with your favorite scent
Sit outside in the sun for five minutes
Turn on a song that makes you dance
Massage body lotion into your skin
Sip herbal tea out of a mug you love
Declare an affirmation over yourself
Most Importantly: Ask for Help
If the burden of your mental health feels too heavy right now, please remember: you were never meant to shoulder it alone. Reaching out for support is a brave and often necessary action. It cuts through the isolation that both depression and eating disorders thrive in, so you can connect with resources and interventions for healing.
At Project HEAL, we’re on a mission to remove financial and systemic barriers to treatment in order to help you access tools to recover from a licensed mental health professional. Learn about our treatment access programs to see if we can support your healing journey.
