Nile Wilson--My Story by Nile Wilson

Author:Nile Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Sports
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Addictive Behaviours

Writing this book has actually been a massive eye-opener for me; I see that my addictive behaviour patterns have been apparent through my entire life. In some ways, it is no wonder I ended up with some of the difficulties I have.

My dad reminds me that when I was a kid, he often read a bedtime story to me. Nothing unusual in this but I used to make him read exactly the same story every single night for months on end. It was as though I was fixated on that one particular story. My love for it moved into an obsession and I just couldn’t get enough of it. As a child, I must have had a sense that this story would make me happy and I would fall asleep.

My obsessive and addictive tendencies have been there all along, although this wasn’t all bad. I immediately got hooked on gymnastics and was addicted to learning and perfecting new skills. I loved to perform and compete; it was another obsession. This all definitely helped me become the gymnast I am today. Even if I look back to the first time I watched YouTube, it immediately became an obsession! I just couldn’t get enough of watching gymnastics videos online, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing either.

The thing I can see now is how these behaviours eventually manifested themselves in a negative way. I guess some of my strengths have actually become my weakness. For example, the 16-year-old who went to Montpellier for the European Junior Championships, completely obsessed with getting the results that everyone, including myself, was pushing for, had also developed a serious eating disorder. I can look back now and understand that it was a way of me believing I was injecting some control into what I was doing. I was obsessed with achieving what I needed to, and that pressure needed some sort of outlet. Control of my weight was a way of controlling the pressure. I would eat less and less, resulting in me losing weight; I told myself that the lighter I was, the better I would be at gymnastics. It was like a simple formula.

But then, like any addictive behaviour, you realise that the feeling of control is actually an illusion. The behaviour is then controlling you and the pressure builds again. There’s no balance in place. No outlet to manage everything. And in this case, the blowout from that pressure came in the form of binge eating. A vicious cycle that was all about trying to control things and actually leading to me lacking control. Just horrible.

Once my eating disorder was in some ways sorted, gambling came into my life. It was just another outlet for the pressure that built up in me through my obsession to achieve great things in the gym. Initially, it gave me that brilliant feeling and released the pressure, but then, just like my eating disorder, it became an obsession and started controlling me. I couldn’t get away from it and the escalation was rapid.

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