How Will You Get Through This Week?

Self care is not my best subject in the best of times. I can establish a routine, get up, eat breakfast, go to work, walk in the afternoon, and so on. I can hang on to good habits, eat a healthy diet, wear amber glasses at night. But that place in the list where I am supposed to do something for myself? Here is how that goes:

    Therapist: What will you do for fun this week?

    Me:

Okay, so what will YOU do for fun this week? (Clearly, I could use some ideas.)

And now there is this insurrection. How did that word work its way into daily conversation?

What Happened to My Bipolar Brain and How Do I Fix It?

The most troublesome statement in Goodwin and Jamison's Manic Depressive Illness may be this: "Complete symptomatic remission does not ensure functional recovery." This is no small problem. For some 30% to 60% of patients with bipolar disorder, simply treating their mood symptoms is not enough to help them return to a full life.

There’s a third pole that needs to be addressed for that to happen: cognitive symptoms. These often persist even when patients are euthymic, and they range from problems with memory and attention to more subtle deficits such as picking up on social cues and making wise decisions. 

Chris Aiken's article, Eight Ways to Improve Cognition in Bipolar Disorder, opens with these paragraphs. Ironically, what Aiken calls troublesome, I find immensely reassuring. My experiences are real!

How Does the Mind Learn? The Neuroscience of the Way of Love

This month I have been posting at Batshit Crazy Preacher instead of Prozac Monologues. It's a series of daily reflections for Advent, the Christian season of preparation for Christmas. Watching and waiting, not so much shopping and decorating. Lots of people are posting images and reflections on social media for #AdventWord. But me, well, you could expect that mine would have a Prozac Monologues flavor, regardless of the venue.

So in case you don't follow both blogs, here is the link to one of my posts in which I explain the neuroscience behind a particular spiritual discipline. Not meditation, mindfulness, breath prayer, those typical crossover exercises that regulate cortisol. No, I'm talking about learning, at the cellular level, complete with my drawing of a neuron.

Blessings, all.

Prozac Monologues Moves to Batshit Crazy Preacher

Advent is the season of spiritual preparation for Christmas. The idea is to slow down, not speed up. Spend some quiet, reflective time. Remember the reason for the season... Honestly, I think about setting up an Advent wreath, that sort of thing. But our candle holders broke. They broke years ago. I guess I'm just not into the candle thing.

Most years, the closest I get to Advent wreaths, calendars, whatever, is a box of twenty-four wee drams of Scotch from Master of Malt. I know, I know, Scotch is not what your psychiatrist recommends for your recovery toolbox. At least it usually take me well past the twelve days of Christmas to finish the thing.

Anyway, this year I found a practice that does spark my imagination, #AdventWord. It is an international community of prayer that you can enter in whatever way appeals to you. There is a daily meditation to read, based on a different word every day. Advent Word, get it? The ones so far this year are tender, deliver, strengthen, earth, rebuild, fellowship, and glory. People post photos on Twitter or Facebook, or scripture passages, or songs inspired by the word. You can get a poster with spaces to color in each day. You can doodle, decorate the word, or draw whatever comes to you. When it's finished, it's supposed to remind you of a stained glass window. The whole project lets you do whatever prayer style works for you.

Gingerbread Houses and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Thanksgiving is one of my hypomanic seasons. I'm getting better at not taking on projects that worry my wife. In fact, I have given up gingerbread houses altogether. Which is not to discourage you, just to acknowledge that they were once my one great weakness. That woman in the fringed dress down there? - Each bit of fringe was an individually placed sprinkle, separated out from a container of red, green, and white sprinkles. See what I mean?

But I did learn some things from my hypomanic gingerbread houses. And learning is good for the brain. The following post is a repeat from ten years ago, when I was in the throes of it. It explored the relationship between gingerbread and cognitive behavioral therapy. I am one of many who have a love/hate relationship with CBT, which I freely acknowledged to my CBT therapist in our first session. Nevertheless, she persisted, and I persisted, and I do rely on it daily and have written about it from a variety of angles. So here it is again, for those of you who want to explore CBT and also for those of you who want to know how to make a nine patch quilt out of fruit rollups:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - Gingerbread Style, 11-25-2010

First Cognitive Therapy Technique -- Distraction

Ritual, Stress, and Surviving a Pandemic Thanksgiving

Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. Place us in an absurd situation, we feel stress. We respond by ritual behavior, or clinging to biases, or even inventing an explanation. Does this sound like anything happening around you for the last several months?

Some of these responses serve us better than others. Biases preserve energy by saving us the time it takes to make case by case evaluations. But they also can be mistaken and rob us of original insights.

Invented explanations are how we manage the terror of acknowledging any bad thing that is out of our understanding or control. Why did Daddy hit me--again? Who is to blame for all these fires lately? How could my candidate have lost? We tell ourselves a story that makes sense of the event, relieving the pain of uncertainty, and thus gaining control over our emotions.

Between Stimulus and Response

I went searching for a Viktor Frankl quote. Mental health pro-tip: When desperate, Google "Viktor Frankl quotes." I mean, how does even the most desperate, darkest depression argue with a Holocaust survivor?

Here is what I found:

Okay, I confess, when you put an inspirational quote on top of a beautiful peaceful scene, it loses its inspirational value for me. That's just the way my brain works.

So I'd make my own image if I were inclined to that sort of thing, like if I were having a hypomanic episode. It would be three boxes, left to right.

On the left would be a screenshot of a webpage saying something like, Cannot open page because search timed out. Maybe, Cannot find printer. I saw those images on my laptop a lot last week.