Last time I wrote about missing the signs of improving bipolar disorder but today’s question is, if your bipolar is improving, how do you know what you’re doing right that’s driving that improvement? In my case, the answer to that question was easy – it was a bipolar medication change. But things are not always so simple.
What Might You Be Doing to Improve Your Bipolar Disorder?
That’s because many things can improve bipolar disorder. It might be psychosocial changes, supplements, medication, therapy, exercise, less stress or one of a million other things. I would say, though, that we all want to know what we’re doing right to cause bipolar improvement so that we can sustain it.
How to Know What You’re Doing to Improve Your Bipolar
There are several things you need to do to really figure out what is improving your bipolar symptoms.
Track you mood and other variables. I’ve talked about mood tracking before. It’s really important for so many of us to track how we’re feeling so we can see that slight uptick in mood, that downtick in anxiety or the change in other bipolar symptoms. Out-of-the-box mood trackers work but they work even better when you customize the mood tracker to track what you, specifically, experience. (Sorry, I know the mood tracking articles are a little old but the updated software is available and it’s basically the same.)- Track treatment changes. Of course, part of this tracking has to be noting what your treatment is and when you change it.
- Track any lifestyle changes. You need to write down when things happen so you can correlate them with mood changes. So, if you quit your job, joined a yoga class, started meditating or joined a writer’s group, all these things need to be noted.
- Track changes in behavior. This one is tougher but if you do something that’s out of character for you, note it. For me it was going to a big party. For you it might be calling up an old friend and reconnecting or beginning to paint again.
- Make one change at a time. This is painful but the best way to know if something you’re doing is improving your bipolar disorder is to only change one thing at a time. For example, only change one medication. That way you know if that medication change is making the difference. If you make two or more changes at once it’s almost impossible to tell what’s causing the bipolar improvement.
- Look for patterns. You might not see a pattern in a week, or even a month, but you might see it over six months. Check back and look at your mood graph. What has changed? What happened at the beginning of that change? What have you done right that’s causing your bipolar improvement?
[If all that sounds like a lot of work, please consider two things. One, it only takes about two minutes to track your mood and symptoms once you get used to it. Set an alarm on your cell phone to remind yourself to do it and just take the two minutes. Thinking about what else to track may take an extra minute. Two, your mental health is worth the three minutes a day. I mean, seriously.]
Now, the fact of the matter is, sometimes bipolar remits on its own and it has nothing to do with what you’re doing so, in other words, you’ll never track down what led to the bipolar improvement. But if you’re like me with a fairly intractable case of bipolar disorder, you likely have induced the positive change in some way and it’s important to know what you’re doing right so you can keep doing it.
Tip of the hat to John McManamy for the topic suggestion.
I suffer from bipolar anxiety and depression. I mostly feel down and depressed or mostly a gray at the whole world. I find myself hurting my kids and my husband from what I do and say. I can say the most cruel and hateful things and it makes my daughter cry because I tell her I don’t love her and don’t like her and that is not true! I just push everybody away. I am so tired of struggling with this I was getting help until the help stopped helping me!! I can’t even manage to get a true evaluation to determine what meds I should have! What can I do? I have recently started drawing again maybe that will help some. I just need help
I’m doing pretty well right now. It’s true that the hardest thing to do is to make one change at a time. It seems to slow progress, but it is the only way to know which changes are helping.
Perception rules, and rules don’t… A conscious hand on emotion is a hard won tool.
Use it often, use it well, felling good is again just a sensation. I know I’m feeling good when
I’m not feeling bad. Simplistic? Maybe, but memory like emotion is unreliable.
Like a sail boat you learn to tack your feelings to their destination. Never is the route strait, or immediately known. We are all directed by so many prevailing winds.
This also works for anyone trying to help someone else that has BP that refuses to get help and take medication. I did this last year on my own to track BP episodes. It helped me to know when the mood swings were coming. Sort of a therapy for me to deal with my family member. It is an effective tool on the medicated and nonmedicated front. Thank you Natasha for the investigative information. Are you state side and how was your trip overall? We didn’t hear anymore about it. Have a great day!
The question of not being sure what brought about an improvement reminds me of an experience I had when being treated for depression with a tricyclic anti-depressant. This was many years before I developed bipolar disorder. My mood gradually lifted. When I went to see my doctor he said, “You know, the dosage you are on is not enough to pull someone out of depression. You’ve done it yourself.” This instantly filled me with anxiety. I needed to believe in something outside myself which could bring me out of depression.
More recently there has been a lot of controversy amongst psycho-pharmacologists as to how much the effectiveness of antidepressant medication can be attributed to the enhanced placebo effect. The placebo effect occurs when the emotional benefit of believing we have been given an effective treatment provides the improvement necessary in our psychological and thus physical system to actually bring about improvement in a psychological or physical condition. The enhanced placebo effect refers to the likelihood that we are more likely to believe in the effectiveness of a drug which has noticeable side-effects than one which doesn’t.
If belief in something can bring improvement, why shouldn’t that something be ourselves? That was the problem I came up against when my doctor told me it wasn’t the drugs making me better. It may have been my own doing, but a key symptom of depression is a lack of faith in our ability to cope with life.
Cognitive factors, such as faith (whether in a medication – as was the case with me at that time in my teens – or in something like a favourable astrological reading), are sometimes hard to monitor as they are so close to us. And yet the positive attitude that such faith provides can make the difference between taking on new challenges and being more socially engaged or not.
Still, while it may be difficult, I’m sure such factors can be taken into consideration when we assess improvement in our condition.
This is a very helpful blog, thank-you for posting it. One thing I started doing (because I couldn’t remember things) was to keep a log of what’s going on inside me. Some of it is helpful, some looks just plain disjointed (usually depression). One part that was revealing was to write down the times I had built up money, then lost it all. The ups and downs went over a course of months or more, and I finally saw the pattern that way. It doesn’t give an excuse to keep doing it, but helps to identify what sometimes motivates us to do some of the things we do.