mood swings – The Daily Opinion

Multitasking

Today I have, as usual, been trying to do too many things at once. I am regularly told by people that this is a terrible thing, that I shouldn’t do it, that by trying to do so many things at once I end up doing nothing very well.

I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, however I find that, whether or not it’s true, I have very little choice in the matter.

Concentration is often an issue for me. I suffer from a total absence or over-abundance of it at various times, and find that in order to be productive in any way I must adapt accordingly. When my concentration levels are at zero, I ensure I have many things all neatly lined up that need working one, so that I can spend as long as I can manage focused on one thing, then move on to the next without feeling like a failure. I remain on this task as long as I can, then move on again, and so on, until I ultimately end up back where I started. Having spent so much time thinking about so many other things, refreshed enough to once again tackle the original task. This I find is the best way to handle myself at times when working on one thing for a protracted period is impossible.

I am (again) often told that I should rest at times like this. ‘Just relax’. The problem I have is that if my mind becomes quiet, if it is not occupied by whatever it is I am doing, either because what I am doing is ‘relaxing’ or because I’ve been trying to concentrate on one thing for too long, one of two things happen: I zone out completely and am often lost in an abyss for weeks, even months at a time; or my head becomes filled with unwanted thoughts and images, yes even voices, which are not only extremely upsetting, they can drive me to the brink of sanity. I can lose my reason entirely at times like this, if I am not very, very careful.

I have been existing in such a state for just over a month now. It began around the end of September and has been getting steadily worse since. My solution, thus far, seems to be working. I have a great many projects on the go and spend a little time doing one then move on to the next. This is totally at odds with how I can be at other times, when I become utterly fixated on one particular thing and will do absolutely nothing else, including eating, sleeping, bathing and leaving the house.

Both these mindsets are a reaction to the mood-state I am in at the time. I am often frustrated, and in fact quite aggravated by the fact that people think they know what’s best for me. If I’m bouncing, one task to another, I’m told to slow down, focus, stop taking on too much. If I’m fixated on one particular thing I’m told I’m being obsessive, that I’ll burn out, that there’s no need for it all to be done right now, to ‘take a break’. The reason I find all these things so infuriating is that if I am doing one or the other of them, it is because I am trying, desperately, to stave off another doozy of a mood swing. I am teetering on the brink of a bad depression and trying every single thing I can think of to stave it off. I am about to hurtle into the stratosphere and, rather than contend with the usual side effects of mania, I am channelling all that energy, all that insanity, into something constructive, in the hopes of avoiding the catastrophic consequences of such states I have experienced in the past.

Getting people to understand this is extremely difficult. In particular, they emphasise that you will exhaust yourself or become ‘run down’ and that this will, inevitably, make you feel worse. What they don’t understand is that these things we do to keep ourselves sane are coping strategies. They may not be perfect, they may have some unpleasant side effects, but the fact is they work—to one degree or another—if they didn’t we wouldn’t keep doing them. That is psychology. That is something I have learned over the last few weeks in group therapy.

So, if you are doing something because you need to, because it is helping you cope, don’t automatically assume it is wrong just because other people can’t understand it. It may not be perfect. It may have unfortunate side effects. But there is something there that helps you, and anything that helps should not be thrown away. The trick is identifying what is helpful about it and what is unhelpful and separating out the two, so that you are left with a helpful coping strategy which gets you through the tough times, but doesn’t have all of those unwanted side effects.

I’m still working on the last part. In the interim, I’m multi-tasking.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

Beating the Blues

I have mentioned before that I always find myself slipping into a depression in the autumn and winter time. Despite the fact that autumn is my favourite season—I love the colours—by the start of October I am already starting to feel the bite, and I don’t mean the cold.

This year is proving to be no different. The healthy eating, weight loss, and generally positive attitude that I’ve managed to maintain since July suddenly vanished a few weeks ago. I am too afraid to stand on the scales this week, for fear of what they will say. I worry that if I have gained a lot back, it will push me deeper down the hole.

On Tuesday, my psychologist kept me back after group because she was worried about me. I had been having suicidal thoughts, was on the verge of tears most of the time and had, to my horror, been relapsing in my fight with bulimia. All these things disturbed me greatly, perhaps more so because I hadn’t realised I was doing them until she pulled me up on it. She made me promise to hand all medication over to my mother, with the strict instruction that it be kept in a locked box, and she administers it when needed. This was not an easy thing for me to do. I’m terrible at asking for help at the best of times, but admitting I need my mother for something? It is just not within me to do such a thing, or so I thought.

Having been kept back for a considerably long time, and forced to promise I would do as she had suggested, I found myself stumbling through an explanation when I got home and trying to explain what I was feeling. I braced myself for the inevitable tirade of upset: I was selfish, I was useless, I was too much effort… then I remembered I was no longer living with my ex, and started to feel considerably better.

As it turns out, mother is a very good MED monitor, even if she is a little on the forgetful side. You should know that I do not bring up the subject of suicide idly. It is not my intention to glamourise it, to paint it as the blissful escape. In my experience the only thing accomplished by taking your own life is failure, for as it turns out, it’s a hell of a lot harder to do than you might think. Last time, I came so close to succeeding that mother has been left … I want to say traumatised, but I suspect she was traumatised the first time, and the second, and that she would have been equally traumatised for each and every other time. Traumatised is not the right word. It is difficult to find the right word, for how do you explain the fear that is cultivated in a mother who comes so close to losing their child, and is then forced to watch as old patterns repeat themselves. I often wonder, at times when I’m feeling low, if she’s wondering how I’ll do it next time and if I’ll succeed. I believe she was past the point of believing there never would be a ‘next time’, and that she was resigned to the fact that I would keep on trying. Perhaps she was even resigned to the fact that at some point, I would succeed.

This is only one reason why I worry about being on so much medication. Overdose has always been my favoured option in the past, and it just seems a little to much like tempting fate. In asking for help however, when I first started to feel those early warning signs, before I’d gone past the point of asking for help because I had a genuine death wish and would lie my arse of pretending to be happy if only it meant nobody knew what I was planning, I changed something. I changed something in myself and also in my mother’s outlook on my condition.

She no longer seems quite so … hopeless.

I also feel oddly better just for the fact that I do not have access to a (very large) stash of drugs which I might take at any time. The ‘easy out’ (which I’ve found for myself on several occasions is not at all easy) is no longer an option. That one small thing managed to lift me just enough to make me realise that there might, might, just be a way to get ahead of the winter blues this year and, if not enjoy the next four months, at least not find them quite so excruciating as usual.

With that in mind I dug my way through all my own research on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), why so many people with bipolar find their cycles run with the seasons, and my mood maps regarding trigger events around this time of year. The first two of these points may well apply to everyone with bipolar, at least to some extent, the latter is most definitely a personal matter, although it is certainly worth looking at your year and pinpointing the times you are at your worst, to see if there is anything going on there that causes it.

I’ve now come up with a tentative plan, involving four steps:

Step One: Do not allow my diet to slide, no matter how hard it may be. Get back to eating reasonably healthily, if not sticking to the very low calorie, low fat, intake I was on previously. My goal here is not to continue to lose weight during this troublesome period but to prevent myself from regaining the weight I was able to lose over the summer. This pattern of summer weight loss and winter re-gain is perhaps the most ingrained one I have, and I feel that breaking it would be a huge step forwards.

Step Two: Invest in a light box. I will go into more detail on this in a later post, but a light box is essentially a screen-like box (they come in various shapes and sizes, including alarm clocks) which emits blue light. This blue light has been scientifically proven to positively affect the bipolar brain. The reason so many people suffer from SAD is the low levels of natural light during the winter time, which does not only affect those with mood disorders, but many people who are normally perfectly healthy, but suffer depressive episodes during winter. The blue light simulates sunlight and helps boost the chemicals in our brains, lifting our mood. At least, so the theory goes. I’ve never tested one of these before, as they are quite expensive, however I decided it was time I invested in one to see if it actually helped. Supposedly, having it on for around one hour a day, while you work, watch TV, or read, is all it takes to compensate for the winter blues.

Step Three: Turn my triggers into happier memories. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. There are certain dates around this time of year that always spin me for a loop and have for years. The most recently acquired ones are the anniversaries of the fire, and my Nanny’s death, both of which occurred in 2011, within a week of each other. Last week I wrote about the fire and how my perspective has changed. I now see it as an important life event that allowed me to move on. Yes, it was painful, there is no denying that, but it was also necessary and, most importantly, it is over. The trouble with trauma is that it is so easy to let it continue indefinitely. We keep it alive in our memories by going over and over it, reliving it each year as that dreaded date comes around once more. The past does not remain in the past but lives in the present, as real as it was the first time around.

It was in realising this that I hit upon the idea of doing something to celebrate my Nanny’s passing, rather than mourn her as I have done for the past two years. She was a lady who loved afternoon tea, taken at the correct time of around 3pm, with china tea cups and cake stands of at least three tiers. She was the best of me. She saw the best in me and brought out the best in me, and it was she who said, many years ago, that I would be a writer. This was long before I had thought of writing, let alone actually written anything. Consequently, next week I shall be taking tea with my mother, sister, and niece—my dear brother, as usual, is unable to make it due to working too much.

There is another anniversary in November. One that is perhaps the most painful of all and something I still struggle to talk about eight years later. On November 6^th, when I was twenty years old I still an undergraduate, I broke up—for the millionth but absolutely final time—with my boyfriend. I have never been able to figure out what it is about that relationship that traumatised me so much. I suffered a miscarriage while we were together, and I suspect that has a lot to do with it. I was almost always convinced he was cheating on me, although I think (in hindsight) this may only actually have been true at the start, when we were still sixteen or seventeen and nothing serious. I also think it had more to do with my condition that it did the actual relationship. My moods then were insane, still fuelled by teenage hormones and angst, more often manic than depressed, although that’s not to say I didn’t suffer periods of terrible depression. Then, as now, I was rapid cycling. I was also still in the grips of bulimia, which left me a wreck for more reasons than one. Somehow, in my head, all of that became tangled up in that relationship, and it seemed to me, for years, as if he—or at least my relationship with him—was responsible for all those things.

I felt he had broken me.

It wasn’t until years later when I was finally diagnosed that I realised, I was broken long before I met him. He’s now happily married, and has just had a baby, a development which I thought, when I first heard about it, would quite literally kill me. As it happens it turned out to be the most liberating news I’ve ever received in my life. Somehow, in the intervening years, I have developed enough perspective to separate out our relationship and my mental health issues, enough to understand that he did the best he could, given the state I was in. He did, in fact, far more than most twenty year olds would have managed under the circumstances. Somehow in understanding this, the impending anniversary this year does not terrify me quite so much.

Step Four: Keep myself distracted. This may seem like an absurd thing to say, given how ridiculously busy I am, but as many of you will know, having something to do isn’t usually enough to keep you distracted, keep you occupied, keep you sane. You need many things to do, because your attention span is so short, and you flit from one project to another with the speed of a cheetah. Yes, grated, while you’re focused on one thing you’re entirely focused upon it, you might even say you are obsessed, but that focus never lasts, and if you don’t have something lined up to take its place when the mood takes you to move on, you can be in serious trouble.

At times like this I cannot stop. I cannot stop for a moment, or even a second, for if I do, I find it impossible to move again for weeks, even months.

To that end I shall this year be participating in National Novel Writing Month, taking place (as always) throughout November (see my writing blog for details).

So, October is almost over, November is almost upon me. It’s alright though, because this year, I have a plan. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen. I know a lot of you struggle with similar issues at this time of year. I hope my (possible) solutions give you some ideas as to how you might overcome your own troubles.

Running Down

This week I had a cold.

It began with a sore throat on Sunday and degenerated from there.

When I attempted to go out for something to stave off further symptoms, my car stubbornly refused to start.

I didn’t have breakdown cover.

On Monday I had a marathon, three hour therapy session with my psychologist as part of my new group therapy. Unlike the other sessions, this was a one-on-one. We mapped my ‘patterns’ and ‘cycles’, trying to understand what has caused them, and how I can change them. It was an extremely emotional few hours and I cried regularly.

I came out feeling not unlike I had been run over by a large vehicle of some description, possible a Virgin Train. Or Concord.

The fact my car had broken meant mother had kindly rearranged her day to take me all the way into Chester. She’d met up with my sister and niece and gone shopping while I was at the hospital, so I was fortunate when I came out in that I was greeted my the grinning face of my niece, who for reasons unknown always seems to find whatever I do hilariously funny. This helped considerably, as I was shaking by that point and honestly don’t know what I’d have done, had I needed to make the hour+ drive home by myself. Instead, I did a bit of shopping and actually found a nice dress that fitted (minor miracle).

This left me feeling considerably better about myself, however it had been a long day, I was starving hungry, and hadn’t had any lunch. I ended up having hot chocolate and cake in Costa and picking up a ready meal on the way home. To make matters worse, the fact that my sore throat had by this time developed into a full blown cold meant that I only wanted one thing: curry.

Don’t ask me why, but whenever I have a cold I want one of two things, curry or chilli. I can only assume it is because the spiciness goes some way towards clearing your congestion. I’ve had two lots of curry and one lot of chilli this week, and while I do have several fantastic, low calorie, low fat, curry and chilli recipes, I’ve been far too tired to cook.

I have yet to find a good, low-fat, ready meal curry. So, between the hot chocolate and cake, the curry and the (obligatory) naan bread, Monday was a total disaster diet-wise. Tuesday wasn’t much better, as I woke up feeling even worse, couldn’t be bothered keeping track of what I ate. If memory serves, I managed a relatively healthy lunch but then had cake and biscuits for dinner. Once again, a disaster.

By Wednesday morning I felt like Death.

I woke up and simply did not want to get out of bed. The light was far too bright and hurt my head, which was already killing me, I ached all over, was insanely congested, and it seemed as if I were swallowing broken glass.

Worse still, I felt depressed.

I felt the dark clouds looming, the feeling of impending disaster, and the notion that life is just plain shit.

It was at this point (around 8am) that I forced myself out of bed, suddenly terrified that all of this meant I was headed back towards a great depression.

Almost exactly the same thing happened last year, around this time, as the changing weather left me with a bitch of a cold and I felt really miserable. Determined to stave of what I saw as the inevitable period of hell, looming on the horizon, I pushed myself out of bed, forced myself to work, forced myself to walk Dexter despite the pouring rain and do an extra lap of the park, because exercise as we all know is good for the mood. The result of all this was not that I suddenly felt better, but rather that I felt considerably worse. I did not want this to happen again.

So, on Wednesday morning I did not force myself to work, I did the sensible thing, and listened to what my own body was telling me: it was completely exhausted. I went back to bed, something I try desperately not to do, because it is another thing that I equate with true depression. I woke up feeling slightly better. The day passed much like any other. I felt well enough to work, so I sat at my desk and caught up on some writing, but when I started to feel tired mid-afternoon I stopped, rather than forcing myself to continue. I took myself away from the guilt of not working by going downstairs, away from my computer, to watch Sherlock. It is not often I separate myself from my computer, however I have found that at times, completely severing the connection is the only way I can get any rest.

Thursday was far worse. I woke up with a terrible headache. Unlike the day before, a lie in did nothing to make me feel better, and I felt like Death all day. I did no work, but parked myself in front of the TV and watched Bones all day, while knitting a new cardigan for my niece. I ate what I felt like eating, which as it turned out was more curry, garlic bread and half a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. It was a day when everything hurt, everything felt awful, and adding hunger and cravings to it was the last thing I needed. The curry cleared my head, the ice cream soothed my throat; at that particular point in time those two things were of greater concern to me than my diet.

Friday I woke up at a normal time, with no headache, no sore throat, no dizziness, and only a slightly running nose and scratchy voice to show for my troubles. I went about my day as normal, getting my work done, nipping into town to sort out some things with the bank and going to the shops for some (healthy) food. I ate lunch in Costa, as I was in town at the time, but I had a skinny hot chocolate, rather than the full fat with cream and marshmallows that I actually wanted, and declined any form of cakeage (this is almost impossible for me to do, especially when confronted by coffee and walnut cake).

By Saturday I felt perfectly fine once again, all had returned to normal.

When comparing this experience to the experience I had last year—severe bronchitis and several weeks of depression, even after the bronchitis had finally cleared up, I find myself wondering. It is generally upheld that ill-health or being ‘run down’ can easily trigger depressive episodes in people who are prone to such moods; this is one of the reasons a healthy diet and exercise are extolled as being so important in treating mood disorders. If you are already feeling lousy, if your body is already vulnerable to the onslaught of a virus or disease and expending all its energy fighting off the physical, it has fewer reserves to keep the mental in check.

In light of recent events however, I believe it is more than that.

When I began to feel ill, my immediate thought was not ‘I have a cold’, but ‘oh no, I’m getting depressed. AND, I have a cold, just to make everything worse’.

In my mind, the depression comes first. The fact that I was feeling bad made me vulnerable to a cold, rather than the reality, which was the other way around. Any person, regardless of their mental health, feels miserable when they’re ill. The problem for those of us who regularly feel miserable for other reasons, is that we tend to assume that any form of misery is the mental kind; we disregard the fact that any person with a cold would feel miserable, and assume it is a sign our own private form of hell is returning.

Once the idea has been placed in your head, there’s no shaking it. You either do everything you can in an effort to stave off another depressive phase—as I did last year—and by so doing run yourself down so much that your original illness is magnified tenfold, and you do actually become depressed, or the very fact you believe you’re already depressed depresses you, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: I think, therefore I am; I think I am depressed, therefore I become depressed.

Doctors often talk about people being ‘run down’, which causes them to become vulnerable to colds and flus and various other ailments. What they mean is that these people have developed a low immune system, for whatever reason, and so are less capable of fighting off any infections they come into contact with, infections they might otherwise have been perfectly capable of fighting off without becoming ill. It’s very easy to get run down by working too hard, or even playing too hard, sleeping too little, eating unhealthily, and not getting enough of the nutrients needed to keep your immune system strong.

Doctors often talk about being ‘down’, also. People, in general, will often say that dreaded phrase ‘everyone feels down sometimes’, when talking to someone with depression. These people either think they understand, or are trying to make that person feel better. The majority of them have no idea that those words make people who have suffered any kind of depression want to kill them. Slowly. And painfully. It is perhaps one of the most unhelpful, condescending, and irrelevant things a person can say to you when you are trying to explain how you feel during your depression. The reason for this is very simple: feeling ‘down’ is not the same as feeling depressed. Depression is a clinical illness. Feeling down is not. It might not be pleasant, but it doesn’t compare. Thinking it does, generally only serves to display how ignorant you are when it comes to the true nature of depression.

That said, while there is a vast difference between the ‘down’ felt by ‘everybody’ and the ‘downs’ felt by those with mood disorders, there is one saving grace in this unbelievably irritating expression: all people, in general, DO feel down sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the majority of which are transitory. What people with mood disorders have a nasty habit of forgetting is that they are included in that general category of ‘all people’, and while their depressive episodes do not fall under this patronising umbrella term of ‘feeling down’, there is a plethora of other instances in their lives which do. Instances which are mistaken for the first signs of another depression. Instances which then become another instance of depression, for no other reason than the person is so afraid that is what they are already feeling.

It occurs to me that, since I have become more self aware where my bipolar is concerned, I have become hyper-aware of my emotional state, and even the slightest dip in my mood is a cause for me to assume I am once again getting depressed. This, in itself, stresses me, and has at times actually pushed me into a state of depression which I most likely would not have experienced, had I not been so worried it was about to happen again.

This week I was feeling run down. I had a cold. I was, however, able to acknowledge the fact that it was just a cold, and treat it as anybody else would.

This time last year I was also feeling run down. I had a cold. I forgot that anyone with a cold would feel miserable and took it to be the first sign of another depressive cycle. As a result I became, almost instantly, depressed. I wasn’t just run down, I was running down; I felt the slightest echo of what I feel when truly depressed and, convinced I actually was depressed, ran myself headlong into a depression. That was one cycle that could easily have been avoided.

That is one cycle I have, thankfully, avoided repeating this year.

Another cycle I have is using food as a coping mechanism. I overeat when I’m stressed, I starve myself completely when I’m very upset. This week, I was so far off my diet you would think I was unaware the word even existed. I ate what I felt like eating, when I felt like eating it, be it calorific curries and chilli, cake, chocolate, ice cream or biscuits. The reason for this was simply that I didn’t have the energy to keep up the diet, and my body seemed to be screaming for certain things.

I assumed, naturally I think given what I ate in the last week, that this would be reflected on the scales this morning. Imagine my surprise when I stepped on and found—to my delight—that I had not gained a single pound. Moreover, I had not gained so much as 0.1 pounds. I had remained exactly the same weight I was last week. Given that I ate far less last week that this week, and gained 0.2 pounds last week, I can only conclude that the reason for this is that this week, while I was ill, my body actually needed the extra calories to fight off the cold.

Consequently, it is with great delight that I can record my weight has remained the same this week. It is also with renewed enthusiasm that I embark upon my diet again today, now that I feel better (both physically and mentally).