Black and White Thinking in Autism and Anorexia

Have you ever been told your black-and-white thinking is something you need to "challenge" or "overcome"? If you're autistic and dealing with an eating disorder, you've probably heard this countless times. But what if this binary thinking pattern isn't actually a problem to fix? What if it's serving a vital purpose – one that's keeping you safe in an overwhelming world?

In this post, we'll explore why black-and-white thinking is actually an adaptive response, particularly for neurodivergent people navigating eating disorder recovery. Instead of fighting against your all-or-nothing view, you'll discover how to work with it, understanding its protective role while inviting curiosity and opportunities for growth.

Understanding Black and White Thinking in Autism and Eating Disorders

Black and white thinking – also known as all-or-nothing thinking, polarized thinking, or dichotomous thinking – is a powerful adaptation that's common in individuals with autism and eating disorders. As you will soon learn, it might actually make more sense to call it “protective thinking.” Because like all autistic traits and eating disorder behaviors, avoiding the shades of grey is a way to feel safe.

In How to Beat Extreme Hunger, I wrote extensively about habits. They are our brain’s way of conserving energy, which optimizes our chances of survival. For neurodivergent people navigating a neurotypical world, the brain’s ability to conserve energy becomes even more crucial. Our minds are already overwhelmed by trying to process an abundance of information, so polarized thinking becomes an instinctive way to reduce the cognitive load. When it’s either this or that – and nothing in between – there’s simply less information to process.

For autistic people who develop anorexia, this need to conserve energy becomes twofold. When you’re malnourished, your brain has even less fuel to work with. What was already your mind's way of managing overwhelm becomes intensified by starvation. This is why autistic traits are often amplified in anorexia, and why even non-autistic people tend to come across as autistic during their eating disorder. The brain can barely handle basic functions, let alone consider shades of gray.

Safety, Survival, and the Neurodivergent Mind

Whether we like it or not, all of this comes down to one thing: survival. The body's primary objective is to keep you alive. And to survive, you must feel safe. So what do you do when this sense of safety is threatened the moment you enter a world that isn’t built for you? You look for a life raft.

Being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world can feel like you’ve been dropped into an ocean without knowing how to swim. Everyone else navigates the waves effortlessly, instinctively knows the social rules, and doesn’t seem to be bothered by the bombardment of sensations. Meanwhile, autistic people are using all of our energy just to keep our heads above water. Note the word knowing in the first sentence of this paragraph. While safety is a precursor to survival, there are two precursors to safety itself: knowledge and trust.

Knowledge and Trust: Building Blocks of Safety

We trust what we know, and we know what we can grasp. If I asked you to "look at your right hand," you’d know exactly what to do. If I asked you to “look at your left hand” you’d know exactly what to do. But what if I asked you to “look at everything”? If you didn’t question my sanity, you’d simply respond with “I can’t.” And that’s because the human mind cannot grasp "everything." It works in distinctions.

The only reason you can grasp “your right hand” is because you’re distinguishing that figure with fingers from everything that is "not your right hand." The same applies to your left hand. Black and white function like right and left – clear opposites we can grasp. Everything in between represents infinite gray. The void. The emptiness our minds cannot comprehend.

Knowledge exists as data points in our brain. Multiple data points make abstract concepts tangible because our mind has something internal to latch onto. Knowledge only forms once the mind has experienced something before. The more times we experience this grasping, the more data points our brain collects, and the more trust we build.

Understanding Knowledge Through Experience

To understand this concept, consider eating a sandwich at a restaurant. The sandwich is made with two slices of bread and is filled with whatever you ordered off the menu. Every time you go to a restaurant, your sandwich is made with two slices of bread. You’ve experienced a sandwich consisting of two slices of bread so many times, that your brain trusts that every time you order a sandwich, it’ll be made with two slices of bread.

Now, imagine you go to a restaurant where the sandwich is made with three slices of bread. What? When every prior experience of eating a sandwich has been associated with two slices, your brain is surprised when another option is presented. While neurotypical people without eating disorders may respond with excitement, the autistic mind – especially one that’s malnourished – will likely become overwhelmed. Why is this sandwich different? Why three slices, and not 5 or 8 or 267? Because there’s no longer a touchstone, we put our trusty all-or-nothing thinking into gear and say: “It’s either a sandwich with two slices or no sandwich at all.” This is to protect ourself from being confronted with the “wrong” choice, the existential angst that arises when there are no boundaries.

Autism and Flexibility: The Truth About Rigid Thinking

A common misconception about autistic people is that we are rigid and lack the ability to be flexible. However, similar to "ED behaviors," this apparent inflexibility is just the tip of the iceberg. It negates everything below the surface. When you dive deep, you’ll come to see that autistic people are some of the most flexible people there are. Before drawing a conclusion, we do extensive research and weigh a multitude of options. In fact, it’s this trait of covering all our bases that makes autistic people the best people to diagnose themselves as autistic! Self-diagnosis is valid. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Of course, there are always two sides to the coin. While our relentless curiosity is what drives us to explore and come up with out-of-the-box solutions, this same openness can be our Achilles’ heel. Waiting to choose until you’ve considered all of the possibilities can put us into a difficult position; it places us at a crossroads with infinite paths stretching out before us. Because the biological constraints of the human mind don’t allow us to tread every path without expending precious energy, we face analysis paralysis, that is to say, we become “paralyzed” by our mental analyses.

So why don’t we just randomly pick one path and hope for the best? Because randomness comes with risk. The existential part of us is consumed by the fear of going down the “wrong” path. It wants to ensure we make the “right” choice, which we believe can only be done when we know what the right choice even is.

The Paradox of Choice

Naturally, we are faced with a profound paradox. We believe that considering more options will help us make the correct decision, while in reality, having more options renders us incapable of making a decision at all. This connects to what philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom." The more options available, the more likely we feel we'll choose the "wrong" one. But because the (autistic) mind is equipped with an incredible ability to adapt, we figure out a way to avoid the infinite options altogether. Because the grey zone paralyzes us, we label the entire grey zone itself as “wrong.” What remains? Black and white. Yet still, two options is more than reality will permit us. We must pick one. But how?

How Anorexia Solves the Existential Crisis

Here’s where the eating disorder conveniently takes over the wheel. If food is “good” or “bad” – and there’s nothing in between – the ED chooses only “good.” If food is “healthy” or “unhealthy – and there’s no in between – the ED chooses only “healthy.” Voilà! Problem solved. The only answer that ever remains is the “right” answer – the eating disorder’s answer. And so, the eating disorder itself becomes the answer to the underlying existential crisis. The way to avoid the inner turmoil that is rooted in the fear of doing life “wrong.”

This fear of being “wrong” is more commonly known as the fear of failure. But because no one wants to be a failure, we strive to be its antithesis: perfect. What most people don’t realize is that striving to be perfect actually follows the same path as striving to be a failure. This is *perfectly* illustrated by Julia Cameron: “Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough."

Because the quest for perfection is nothing more than a quest for failure, we end up running in circles, never getting on any train. We keep confirming our perceived failure, which, over time, becomes a habit in and of itself. It’s our repeated actions that form our beliefs (I believe I am a failure), which ultimately form our identity (I am a failure).

Identity and Change: Moving Beyond Binary Thinking

Once the identity is set in stone, the ego will do everything it can to maintain that identity. If you identify as someone with an eating disorder, you will take actions that align with someone who has an eating disorder. If you identify as a failure, you will take actions that align with someone who is always failing. If you identify as someone who sees everything in black or white, you will continue chipping away at a colorless existence.

This leads us to the ultimate question: how do you form a new identity? First, you must establish your current position. Where on the map are you? Then, you must identify where you want to go. You simply cannot get on a train without a destination. “Okay, but how do I know which train to get on?” Here we see the word “know” once again. The belief that you must first know which path is “best” brings us back to square one, as knowledge comes after experience.

Trusting the Discovery Process

Think about learning to ride a bike. No amount of reading about bike-riding or watching others ride bikes will give you the knowledge of how to balance on two wheels. The only way to gain that knowledge is to get on the bike. You must be willing to wobble, to fall, to get back up. To trust the process of discovering what works for you.

Breaking free from black-and-white thinking follows a similar path. You can't know what exists beyond black and white until you permit yourself to explore it. This doesn't mean diving into the infinite gray zone all at once. In fact, the way I see it is more like yin and yang.

The Yin-Yang Approach to Eating Disorder Recovery

The yin-yang symbol consists of a circle divided into black and white halves by a curved line. Within the black half sits a small white dot, and within the white half sits a small black dot. These dots represent the interconnectedness of opposites. In other words: within each extreme exists a seed of the other extreme. So even in what seems to be utmost rigid black-and-white thinking, there's already an element of flexibility.

These small dots mark the beginning of a new identity. An identity that doesn’t have to exist in the void, but rather, leaps across the boundary. Each leap onto the opposite dot (imagine the dot as a foam platform!) acts as a data point from which knowledge can build. With every experience, the dots expand, creating more space for nuance within each realm. As you gain more surface area to jump onto, there’s less danger of “missing the mark.” The buffer zone becomes increasingly wider, until you reach the point where the existential narrative shifts from "What if I choose wrong?" to "Where might I land this time?"

How to Challenge Black and White Thinking – Don’t!

Many people will tell you to "challenge" black-and-white thinking, as if it's an enemy that needs to be conquered. But this approach fundamentally misunderstands both autism and adaptation. Your autistic way of thinking is part of how your mind works to keep you safe, so to fight it means sacrificing your body’s desperate attempt at survival.

Remember the example of the hands? Forcing someone to stop thinking dichotomously is like tying their hands behind their back while they’re already drowning. Indeed, as we tend to see in neurodivergent people undergoing traditional ED treatment, the inflicted trauma only increases the desire to jump onto the life raft of an eating disorder.

So instead of judging black and white thinking as “bad,” we benefit from inviting curiosity. What purpose is this thinking style serving? How can we use the all-or-nothing mindset to our advantage? When we approach autistic adaptations with curiosity rather than judgment, we discover the doorways between black and white – the yin-yang dots that are waiting to be explored.

Ready to take the next step and discover how to use your autistic traits as strengths in eating disorder recovery? Join us in the Autistically ED-Free Academy here!