Know Your Cycle
One of the things that has helped me the most in my management of Bipolar is the understanding my cycles. We all deal with them and we learn to hate them and love them at the same time. Over the course of several years i have been trying to understand what my triggers are and what causes me to go into depressive moods and what puts me in manic moods as well. If you know these, you are a lot further along than I am in the management of the disorder. The thing I have done is understand how long I am in each mood or cycle. I like to understand things in a linear fashion. I like to know how long exactly it takes to bake cookies or how long my commute will be. Several years ago I started to track my cycles.
I wanted to understand them so I could see if I could control them in some fashion. As I did this I started to see trends and the way the cycles were presenting themselves. I noticed a weekly cycle. On the weekend I would enter into severe depressive moods and then during the week days I would enter into manic moods. It was not always perfect like this, but overall this was the trend. Once I understood this typical cycle time, I started to find employment that would work around these cycles. My day job thought I was normal. But my night/weekend job saw a completely different picture. They saw the severe cycles of depression.
Most of my employers have liked my manic moods because I'm very productive. I understand that's not the case for everyone and that Bipolar Type 1 is a different beast altogether. I will address severe mania in another post. My weekend/night job mostly leaves me alone so I can listen to books or music to get me through. Then Sunday is my down day when I don't work at all and I just let bipolar take over. I let myself fall and feel bad and let the episodes come. I can sleep during the day. I can sleep through the night. I take whatever rest and recover however I need as much as I need. Then come Monday I am back at work appearing to all the world as though everything is normal.
The point of all this is to learn and understand our cycles whether they be slow or fast or anywhere in between. My answers may not be your answers because I have molded them around MY timing. Once you know your timing, you can find solutions to work with it. If you struggle based on seasons you could look for work that's seasonal. If it's a few weeks to a couple months long, find work that can stockpile to get you through the slumps. Whatever the answer is for you, consider making it match up with your natural cycles. We can take this information and find a good way to manage our lives. If we want to have a somewhat consistent life we have to understand what is coming next. We might be between cycles or in a major episode but if we can know logically what is up next then we can prepare and say, "I know I am in an episode, but in x amount of time I should be on the up-swing". Then allow our selves the time to let the swing come and pass. Many times there is little we can do to change our mood states, but understanding our cycles is very beneficial and can even save your life.
Comments
Post a Comment