Early Mornings

Early Mornings

This post is not meant to diagnose, treat, or save you from mental illness, if you or someone you love is in danger, please get help. You can text HOME to 741741 to be connected with a crisis counselor. I personally have. You can also call or text 988 for suicide and crisis help.
http://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts

All of these are I statements because they are true to me, this is not your story, although you may find some of it similar to your own. Please do not take what I do as a roadmap to metal health perfection, it does not exist, mental health is different for everyone.

I know that when I wake up early in the morning before my alarm that I may be going into a manic state. Mania is a state of abnormally elevated arousal, affect, and energy level, or “a state of heightened overall activation with enhanced affective expression together with lability of affect.” It has a few elements that make it different than simply just “feeling better”. For one thing there is a euphoria that comes with mania: a very intense feeling of happiness or well-being. This can sometimes even be inappropriate to the situation. For me, it looks like feeling really good all of a sudden and having thoughts that anything is possible; I suddenly have a lot of confidence and my brain is working overtime on planning for amazing things. On this early morning for example, I woke up at 5:30 am and could not go back to sleep. My mind began reeling at all the possible things I could do today: wash the carpet, declutter the bathrooms, organize the camping gear, make a scrapbook, rearrange the basement living area, go to the gym, go to the store for smoothie ingredients and shop on amazon for a daily planner. Yes, my brain told me I could do all of those things. Now some people may say that this is just brain storming, but I assure you that at 5:30am as a Stay at Home Mom, I should be resting until 7am. Of course it is okay to get up early, that is not the point. The euphoria came to me at a time I should be resting, therein lies the mania.

Another element of mania is an increased energy levels; my levels are very high. I did not go to bed early last night, in fact I went to be later than usual: 11pm. The Lions were playing the Vikings for the last game of the season and my husband is a huge Lions fan; I guess now I am too. Anyway, going to bed early and sticking to a schedule is important for me because I have to track my sleep schedule to manage my symptoms. Another part of the hyperactivity in mania is excessive involvement in activities. For me, this looks like joining the gym again, exercising more, reading a lot of books, talking to all of my friends, engaging in a lot of social media, blogging a lot, researching ways to be healthy, cleaning my house a lot, and wanting to take on a lot of reorganizing projects around my home. I not only want to do all of these things, I can and do start all of these activities again, after being in depression and having no desire for any of these tasks/hobbies. I even start to dream about all the activities I can accomplish, like actually dream at night; sometimes I dream about going back to school and completing my degree.

Reduced need for sleep is one of the main symptoms of mania. I know that I am getting closer and closer to mania when I feel like I need less and less sleep. It’s almost like have an IV full of Red Bull constantly filling my veins. Energy drinks, coffee, some teas, nicotine, and even your phone, are all stimulants: a substance that raises levels of physiological or nervous activity in the body. When I am manic and already need little sleep to function, I have to make sure I switch to herbal teas, avoid caffeine, try not to engage in super intense exercise, and I can not commit to several different events all in the same month. I know all of these things about myself in mania because I have been in and out of it so many times. Too many prior engagements on my plate can either send me into psychosis, cause me to crash, or have me feeling really left out and sorry for myself later when I do not have as much energy (or when I fall back into a depressive episode). Crashing can be hard to recover from, psychosis is scary and can even be life threatening, and feeling sorry for myself on top of a new loss of energy can be detrimental to my health. In order to stay at a baseline, I have to overly relax myself in mania. This can be hard to do as I am itching to complete and take on tasks, talk to everyone and conquer the world.

When I in in mania I have a lot of racing thoughts, they run through me like rapids in the river: fast and loud. The thoughts come into my brain quickly about all sorts of things and while it is good to think a lot, and it took me years to figure out, this overthinking is actually unhealthy. I have done a few things to learn how to cope with these racing thoughts. For one thing I can write them down, I can talk about them out loud with someone, I can blog about them, I can distract myself from them with a task that involves thinking, I can take my time to read something even though I am distracted by the thoughts, I can plan for them so I feel like the thoughts aren’t for nothing, I can write a letter to someone, I can call a relative I haven’t spoken with in a while, or I can craft something. Of course, I can not do all of this at once, so scheduling my time and sticking to that time schedule helps me maintain a healthy baseline. Otherwise, I will spend hours upon hours on a project and lose myself completely. Everyone and everything will all of a sudden become obsolete; eating and caring for myself will go out the window, there will be no rest for the wicked, and my family’s basic needs will not matter to me at all.

For some people, irritability can look like anger or agitation. Irritability is a very common symptom of mania. That isn’t to say that if you have anger troubles you are automatically in mania and should diagnose yourself. What that means for me and many others who have Bipolar is that all of a sudden, out of no where, we lose or cool and beyond our control feel angry. How we control that anger is different per person. For me, when I am irritable it feels like nothing fits right. Items in my home feel out of place, my clothes feel weird, I don’t have any makeup that looks good on me, everything appears dirty and out of place, my life seems to be in disarray, the list goes on. For many people with Bipolar this is associated with mania, for me, this is more of my hypomanic stage and I can feel myself going into either depression or mania because of it. Honestly, that doesn’t make a lot of sense I know. But irritability in mania and irritably in depression and irritability in hypomania all look different for me. The mania irritability looks like less patience and more “hurry, hurry, hurry” I feel like I am late for something. Again, maintaining a schedule and/or distracting myself helps me remember that it is not an emergency all the time. I do not have to feel like I am late, like everything is super important, or that if I can’t finish a project in one sitting it is the end of the world. It is totally okay to take breaks, I like to call the breaks side quests because it makes them sound more exciting.

Ah the feeling of grandiosity; this is probably the best part of mania. The feeling everyone is trying to reach everyday, no matter their mental health status. The feeling that you are the best person in the universe and you can do and accomplish anything. That’s what everyone wants right? To feel like they are on top of the world and no one can touch them. Motivational speakers get paid a lot of money to inspire and motivate people to obtain this feeling. How lucky am I that it comes naturally to me. Well, to that I would say that first of all, it is not a constant feeling, I am going to fall from grace eventually. Why not hang onto that feeling? Because it can lead me to unrealistic beliefs in my actual abilities. If I get to overly inflated, I can cause myself to schedule all those engagements I wrote about earlier. I begin to believe I can do any task, all the tasks and that there literally isn’t anything outside my reach. That just isn’t reality and if given the chance, my mind will wander to feeling like I can take on the world as the next genius or Masaya or my time. Is it possible to do anything you set your mind to? Or course, if that dream is your goal and you plan other small goals with it. Then yes, you can obtain your dreams. But having too many dreams all together, literally thinking you can walk on water, and feeling like you are the greatest person in the whole world has it’s downside. At least, it does for me being that I am very self aware at my core. I do not wish to believe that I am better than everyone or any more important that them; I want to care about others feelings and take them into consideration. Thinking you can fly is great, climbing on the roof and jumping is not. Allowing myself to believe that anything is possible, opens the door for me to enter a psychosis based thinking. I will, and have, begin to believe that I can actually save the world by lifeguarding every pool in my neighborhood and clocking how quickly I can get to each of them in care of an emergency. And yes, in psychosis I have actually done that.

Overall I do also carry some impulsivity in mania. Although for me it just looks like having more sex with my husband instead of promiscuity. Instead of overspending, I go to the dollar store or grocery shop for items we actually need and use. My online shopping addiction looks like making a wish list of all the things I want and then going to the thrift stores and looking for them overtime. I do not let myself be an impulse buyer. This is because at my core I am frugal. Being not so impulsive made it hard for other psychiatrists to diagnose me as manic, as I only have subtitle impulsive behaviors. Paying attention to my spending and giving myself a budget each day, allows me to stay on track with my impulsiveness. Realizing that I am manic and trying to celebrate my strengths and staying mindful keeps me out of psychosis. Here’s to hoping that this early morning is going to lead to a better day, with a good nights rest tonight.

-An Actually, Literally Manic Monday