This article is about figuring out how to become mentally-well over the long term with bipolar disorder. My twenties were a battlefield. A decade spent fighting my mental illness. I recall the few beautiful victories, the many crushing setbacks, and the ground eventually gained towards figuring out how to live well with bipolar. I am grateful that I am not still fighting the same battles that I was back then.
In the last article focusing on depression I wrote a little about what it feels like for me to be depressed, how to recognise it, and a way to build a simple daily ramp out of depression. In this article I will describe long term perspectives and strategies which I have found useful for long-term wellness.
Cultivate and protect the will to get better.
Before everything else comes the will to survive. If hope for the future is something beautiful and fragile, then the will to survive is something tough and powerful. Hope is very sustaining when we have it but in the desperate moments when we lose hope I think it is the will to survive that keeps us going. It is this precious, gritty, spirited thing: to just keep going. Just keep fighting. Just keep waking up and getting up and eating and gazing out upon the world and seeing what happens next. Admit defeat when we have been defeated but don’t ever give up. Hope sustains us on our journey to become mentally-well over the long term.
I stopped sleeping for more than three hours each night. Inside my head it felt like all the meat and substance of who I was was being slowly scraped out with a chisel. The darkness around my eyes became so deep and sunken that it looked like an ‘X’ carved between my eye sockets. The world started to stutter: I would be walking to the bus stop and the next moment entering into a lecture theatre, having blanked out the intervening journey. Sometimes time skipped forward like a video and before I knew it i’d be back in bed at 3:00 a.m. excruciatingly awake again.
Adjust self-expectations to support making progress.
Chronic mood disorders are long term, persistent, and complex. They aren’t something that people tend to snap out of.
When I expected to achieve ‘straight A’ grades at university, an expectation based on high-school but ignoring that I was deeply ill, I created a world of anxiety and denial. Clearly my expectations were way off.
It takes time to accept a big loss. It took two years for me to accept that I had lost my mind, and most of that time was spent looping through various denials. Eventually I realised that I had to prioritise my health and figure out how to live well with bipolar. I stopped expecting my studies to be perfect and began expecting any real progress to come from learning my illness. This helped me to gradually build up the skills I needed to navigate my bipolar life.
Figure out how to live sustainably.
I chose the words ‘figure out’ intentionally. Bipolar is different for each individual and is far too complex for a one-size-fits-all solution. You can be given ideas of what to try, like the ideas in this article, but it is entirely up to you to figure out what works. In fact I would beware any offer of miraculous help that seems too good to be true.
A sustainable life is one that fits us well, makes us healthy, and helps us move towards what we want. Self-Expression, Well-Being, Achievement: mental illness can make it impossible. When I was twenty I didn’t have the tools, skills, or knowledge, so I got nowhere. I didn’t even have the mental capacity to learn how. More of my mind needed to be freed up for learning, fortunately lithium gave me enough headroom to work with. I didn’t want to be on medication long-term so I worked towards eventually living well without any.
I pictured my illness as thick clouds pressing down on the earth so closely that there wasn’t any space in which to move. The medication lifted those clouds up slightly, giving me a little room to start work. I expected that if I learnt how to lift the clouds up for myself I would no longer need to take any pills. Four years later my doctor approved me to stop medication permanently. The trick was to keep finding more mental space, pushing those heavy clouds away into the sky where they belong.
Build up tools, skills, knowledge, and kindness.
Focus on doing things. Practical things, technical things, there are countless tools to help us. It might be getting some exercise daily or taking a course in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The skills and knowledge we acquire empower us. The more we practice a skill, active listening is a good one, the better we become at it. Even simple things like knowing what can trigger us or knowing if situations are risky can be transformative. The best education comes from observing ourselves and paying attention to what’s happening to us. The word education actually comes from the Latin root ‘Educari’ (meaning: to draw out). Learn to draw knowledge from your own experiences as well as what you read in books. Skills, strategies, and techniques are the foundation of becoming well over the long term.
Protect and nurture your relationships with others.
I think that the enduring relationships we form with one another are the most precious things in our lives. It isn’t uncommon for people with severe mental illnesses to become socially isolated from time to time, often resulting in distress and disruption. This is where bipolar has affected me the most.
Do express yourself and your emotions, don’t express your illness. I think good communication is letting another see what is inside us without hurting them (although the truth often hurts). Mental illness can cause us to communicate in destructive or abusive ways. It is better to practice managing your illness so it doesn’t spill out onto others.
Take responsibility for how you treat other people. Self-victimisation can justify abusing someone else. It isn’t ok for me to make someone who cares about me feel terrible simply because ‘I am ill and they are not’. It is far better to say “Give me some room because I am feeling very ill today, I am not totally in control of myself, and I need you to be aware of that.”, than to act out your illness and hurt someone. If we are capable of knowing what we need it is important to communicate it.
Learn how to apologise and forgive yourself. Despite our best efforts we will make big mistakes and we will hurt people close to us, probably many times. Honest apologies mend relationships with the people we might have hurt or offended and shows that we are taking responsibility for our actions, acknowledging that we have hurt another, and willing to make amends.
If all else fails, act from kindness.
Just keep working at it.
Imagine how good it would feel to be unaffected by mental illness. Figuring it out is hard but necessary. We don’t have to make progress every day, and we won’t anyway so don’t sweat it. All we have had to do is to keep getting up and working at learning our illness.
I hope this article is useful to you, thank you for reading it! I believe that these articles will help to educate people with bipolar and give them skills for a future of mental wellness, not mental illness. Please consider Supporting KindBipolar and joining our email list (we never send spam). Be kind to yourself and have a great day.
