Images by Adi Goldstein

We cannot make progress unless we act on the importance of our well-being to prioritise bipolar health. I was once offered an amazing opportunity to work for a whole year on an isolated tropical island in the pacific ocean, thousands of miles distant from any civilisation. This island is an active volcano, we experienced thousands of earthquakes, and were bruised by intense sub-tropical storms. With a population of only seven, we had to be able to cope independently.

I remember our manager asking my colleague and I what would enable us to be successful in our deployment. “Productivity,” was my colleague’s answer. “Self-maintenance,” was mine. You see, I had learned that I could do anything if I was healthy and nothing if I wasn’t. Self-maintenance forms the core of my life and I prioritise it above almost anything else. At the end of the year I was so thankful for everything that having bipolar had prepared me for: I had been through a crazy experience but it hadn’t made me crazy at all. In fact, the skills that I used to manage my bipolar life helped me to support others in the situation when they were having a hard time with the isolation. It all comes down to priorities.

For an integrated strategy to manage bipolar see: A Practice-Based Cure.

How to prioritise bipolar health.

1. Get enough sleep

Humans need four things for physical survival: air, water, food, and sleep. Air is everywhere (although some of our cities are becoming periodically un-breathable due to pollution) food and water are obvious basic needs, but what about sleep? Most people fall asleep easily and sleep reasonably well but people with bipolar often have a different experience. I have struggled to sleep for the last decade and it is still something I am working on. Without sleep my mental, emotional, and physical health becomes degraded. Useable energy vanishes from life: first my thinking slows, then my memory becomes hazy, and before I know it I am barely functioning. When we are manic we may have a delayed reaction to sleep deprivation, fueled ever onwards by the rush of mania, but this is a trick of the mind; mania can hollow us out to the point of self-destruction. We need to forget the rush and prioritise bipolar health.

See: for a guide on how to manage manic episodes by BAILing.

It has taken a very long time to learn how to sleep regularly again. When I was super-depressed I would sleep a lot but it would never replenish me. When I was manic I learned to prioritise sleep above all else. In my experience, sleep manages mania pretty well (in fact, it seems to me that a manic episode can be effectively diffused if I am able to regain control of my sleep). Deep, restful sleep is like medicine but I will always take restless sleep over no sleep at all. If it is late at night I will get into bed regardless, and I don’t worry about whether I fall asleep or not (sleep anxiety makes it impossible to drift off). I simply stick to the pattern and know that even if I am not falling deeply asleep straight away, it will come in time and, if nothing else, my body is getting rest. I will write a more in-depth entry dedicated to sleep in the near-future.

Are you struggling to get out of bed? See our guide to ramping out of depression.

2. Exercise for your mental health

“Exercise relieves stress, but nothing relieves exercise.” I can’t remember where I read this proverb but it has stuck with me ever since. Our bodies and minds are not independent of each other: use exercise to promote and prioritise bipolar health. I have often found that it is far easier to work with my body than with my mind. When I used to feel crippling anxiety that led to insomnia and sickness the best thing I could do was work it out physically. Walking or jogging somewhere pretty, going to a group session, or hitting the weights (if you know what you are doing) are always beneficial. I love to swim in the ocean and practice martial arts. The act of doing something proactive and constructive, even if it is just walking around the block, can have a big positive effect on my state of mind. Sunshine, fresh air, looking around outside, maybe seeing something that makes us smile – it is so good to get outside of ourselves for a little while.

So many times when I have felt depressed I have been surprised at the strength and energy in my body. The mind will trick us into thinking that we are weak and incapable so we need to constantly challenge and test this. Realising that you are actually stronger than you thought is very empowering, as is building a level of fitness despite what your mental state is telling you. Coming out of an episode in better physical shape than when you went in is something that can make us proud and prove, that at some level, we maintained control and progressed towards something positive despite the mental/emotional resistance.

3. Cultivate some empty time

I used to be so ambitious with my time. I had to fill up every minute with something productive or creative or social. Five evenings per week I would finish work and head off to the Dojo or to visit friends, or to teach a class. I usually wound up eating dinner around nine or ten at night, and my weekends would be equally crammed full of projects. Almost everything I was doing was positive but I was doing far too much. The result was either burning out into a depression or flaring up into a manic episode. I think that a major contributor to my near-constant bipolar episodes was simply refusing to ever take time to just relax and recover properly. Time spent doing nothing means learning to say “No” to the requests of others and the desires of your-self. Learning to create empty space in my life has taken me forever because I never realised how crucial it really was.

A little time spent doing nothing is gold if you have bipolar. You need it to settle, to re-evaluate, to recuperate, and to disperse the energy inside yourself. By not relaxing I was always fighting against or adding to whatever episode I was stuck in. Now I have two kinds of days where I do nothing much: ‘rest days’, and, ‘sit on my hands days’. A ‘rest day’ is exactly what it sounds like: I prioritise sleeping (often napping), eating well, reading nice books, and spoiling myself with kindness (see below). On rest days I replenish myself physically, emotionally, and mentally. ‘Sit on my hands days’, are days that I use to manage a risky or deceptive mental state. If I can feel on the verge of mania, or that my judgement is affected, or I feel strangely uninhibited, then I will basically ground myself and spend a day actively avoiding making any decisions or taking any actions. I will normally stay at home, limit all social interactions, and use my energy writing or reading or playing a game or watching something. I have learnt that there are some mental states that easily enable ruthless actions and terrible decisions. My solution is to isolate myself from the risks until I am stable again, and this has worked extremely well so far.

4. Communicate honestly and with trust

‘I have lived a very secret decade. I have done things that I am secretly ashamed of and others of which I am secretly proud, perhaps this is just being human. Increasingly, I compartmentalised my life, having different groups of friends or family for different facets. I strove to keep these groups separate from each other and each was given a little bit of information. Nobody was allowed to have enough information to see the whole me, it was an illusion based on omission.’

It is normal to hide an illness that you don’t want people to know about, especially if it carries a lot of social stigma with it. People don’t want to be pitied or treated differently or labelled or put in a box. I didn’t want to be avoided or left out or excluded for any reason, and I didn’t want to be judged or for assumptions to be made about me. I think it is wise to take your own privacy around your health very seriously, as your medical information is absolutely confidential. Just don’t shut out everyone, keep communicating with the people who you trust, even if it is in small ways. Having bipolar ensured that I had some freaking-weird days but it took me a long time to be able to talk about them. I used to just carry everything around inside myself instead. This resulted in nobody knowing what was going on and in me having a huge number of experiences bottled up that I had to work through by myself. People who have been through this will know what I mean.

When I began to share it was only a little bit at a time to very specific people that I trusted with certain aspects of my life. This seemed like a safe way for me to do it, and it was great to talk things over when in a confused and fragile state. The act of communicating an experience is often extremely helpful for processing it and deciding how to handle it. Other people grounded me when I had lost touch with reality and provided the feedback I needed to continue being successfully social; this advice was especially useful for maintaining close relationships.

I became so accustomed to suffering silently through my bipolar that it became depressingly normal. It wasn’t until I started to share things with people that I realised what an amazing job I had been doing and how much I had achieved. To then have people offer support, encouragement, and wise advice is a wonderful thing. I didn’t want to share everything, but I was rewarded for opening up and letting people in.

5. (and most importantly) Treat yourself with great kindness

Learning to live with serious mental illness is really really hard, especially at the beginning when we have no idea what is going on. The amount of new learning, new behaviours, and new attitudes that we need to incorporate day-to-day is enormous and in addition to everything else we may be doing. Working productively without enough sleep, or being social through periods of high anxiety, or being considerate to others through psychotic mania: this takes some doing. And some days it simply won’t happen. Some days things just won’t work out and we will fail at the first hurdle. Calling in to work sick, standing a friend up, failing to meet a deadline or appointment, staying in bed instead of getting up and going to the gym, curling up in a ball of misery and not doing anything else that day. Everybody goes through days like this, but mental illness can make these days more common in our lives. Learning to prioritise bipolar health will reduce the frequency of these days for us.

I have always set myself high standards and failing to achieve something is a huge problem for me. In the early years this basically caused me to have a break with reality because I literally couldn’t believe how much I was failing at everything. I became self-deluding, which is a hard thing to shake off. I used to beat myself up about having a bad day and I would look for things to blame. By doing this I would make the situation worse, it was an immature response because I hadn’t learned how to cope with constant failure; I also hadn’t shifted my priorities to recognise small successes. I had no resilience and was often on the brink of a crisis as a result.

Learning to treat myself with kindness, in the same way that I would kindly support a struggling friend, was a difficult thing to learn but has led to me becoming extremely resilient. Now days, if I fail at something I accept it, walk away, and try again with more heart and intelligence the next day. People who have never failed have never achieved anything that was initially beyond them. We can only do our best and then be kind to ourselves regardless of the outcome. This doesn’t mean we victimise ourselves or shift the responsibility, actually it is quite the opposite: we accept our share of the responsibility but we also keep it in context. This allows us to maintain our health and our goals overall, instead of progressing one thing at the expense of another.

“Sure I had to phone in sick to work this morning, even though I don’t have a physical illness, and that sucks because I like to do a good job. However, I haven’t slept in three days and I am experiencing mental illness so today I am going to prioritise my own wellbeing because that is what is most important.”

I think that if you are going through mental illness and trying your best every day, even in the face of failure, you definitely don’t deserve to feel bad. Instead, you should try telling yourself: “You are an amazing person choosing to bravely face a very difficult task with positivity, integrity, and toughness. Don’t worry about the small things because every day you keep on trying to get better, you are gradually achieving a happy and successful life.” Learn to treat yourself with kindness and you will find more stability and momentum in every day. And remember: before we can make progress we must prioritise bipolar health.

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.