More About the Bipolar Low

When I am in a protracted low, anything more than two weeks for me, I feel like the worst loser on the face of the earth.  Generally, even on the first "down" day, I cannot even think creatively.  I can’t imagine singing or doing much of anything productive.  Just getting up, making unimaginative meals, and taking care of my family’s basic needs are all I can handle.  I sleep ten hours at night and nap during the day.  When I have made advanced plans to do creative or demanding things and they happen to fall on a very low day, I have some tricks that work to get me through them, but they have consequences. 

One thing I can take is a banned substance, though completely safe for me, called ephedra.  It used to be sold over-the-counter as a diet aid, but too many people abused it by combining with caffeine, taking ten times the suggested dose, or combining with allergy or asthma medications with sometimes-disastrous results.  There were deaths and the easy availability made it that much easier for certain folks to buy in bulk and turn it into meth, ephedra being a main ingredient of that dangerous drug.  I have to order it from Canada in the lowest dose I can find, 8 mg.  It really works and doesn’t adversely affect sleep patterns like caffeine does, but I won’t take it for more than two days in a row and sometimes, rarely, it makes me feel creepy.  That’s the only way to describe it.  Maybe it’s because of product inconsistency.  Supplements are a completely unregulated industry and I love/hate that.  There’s just no way to tell for sure what is in any supplement, but government intrusion would only make our vitamins and herbs outrageously expensive.

 I try to avoid using caffeine because of the aforementioned sleep issues, but I do occasionally find myself drinking one cup in the morning frequently enough to get addicted. Coffee just tastes good and is so much easier to take than a pill on a cold morning.  Then, I have to deal with headaches when my high-energy phase comes on and I have to go cold-turkey.  Advil helps, though, and there's no way I can drink coffee when I'm "up."  I really should take the ephedra more often.  My bottle of pills usually expires long before I’ve finished them.  The thing is, my lifestyle is rather laid back as a home schooling mom and I can get away with giving in to my lows quite often.  I can usually cancel all plans except appointments, classes, and lessons and retreat into my own little mom cave with books and chocolate. 

These are my only real vacations anyway.  I am only home schooling one youngster these days, and she is easy, so she brings her books to me in bed and we work from there when I am low.  Between naps and my own books.  Our family vacations tend to be of the adventurous and exhausting sort, always fun, and I truly have to recover from them when I get home.  Lots of camping and bike racing.  Or visiting relatives and surfing.  Someday we will take restful vacations, but for now I often crave a week of low energy/low activity  just to recharge from the previous manic phase or from completing big projects that wipe me out physically and emotionally.   I am usually caught up on housework, shopping, and paperwork by then and can really enjoy being slightly depressed.  For about a week, that is.

After that first week, I begin to feel guilty.  Then, if there is a third week of depression, true self-loathing sets in and certain physical problems start to manifest due to too much sitting and lying around.  I think, when I'm in a manic state, that all I have to do is force myself to go on a short walk or even walk in place while watching T.V. or something every day when I go low, but it just doesn’t happen.  Unless, that is, I have made plans with someone and have some sort of obligation to live up to.  Then I force myself to go and feel better in the long run, though depleted.

With that in mind, I have committed to showing up three times a week as a ride leader for a local high school mountain bike team.  Mark, my husband, and I co-coached our own team for most of ten years and he is still involved with the league.  I wondered what it would be like for me to be obligated to this level of activity in a very low phase, but so far I have only stayed home and missed practices when I have been ill and low all at the same time.  The few times I have made myself go when I really didn’t want to, it was so rewarding that it motivated me to do so again the next time.  It has been good, now that I am feeling so much better and three-week lows are rare, to push myself this way.  I am finally losing some frustrating extra weight, too, which helps when I race at our local cross country bike series.  I do not race when I'm low, though.  Just can’t do it, even with stimulants.

This was supposed to be about things that help me and I have neglected to mention the very most important thing of all: prayer.  There was a study once, double blind, with very sick hospital patients as test subjects.  Half of them were prayed-for and half were not.  None of them knew they were being studied.  The praying people were from many different belief systems and, you guessed it, those who were being prayed-for often had much better outcomes by far than those who were not.*  Also, "those with belief in prayer saw different results than those with less belief."** No power of positive thinking at work here.  Something supernatural, I believe.  I’ll write more about that later, probably, but I will say that I am a praying person and I believe the God who made me loves me tremendously and answers all my petitions and wordless longings.  It’s just that sometimes the answers are “no” and “wait” as well as “yes.”   I’ll never really know on this earth how much of my healing has been from God.  Often my answers are pieces of information that He knows I’m disciplined enough to try.

I will talk about prescription medications next time.  And hormone supplementation.  And nutrition, maybe.

*There are studies that show no effect, but some good ones that do.  http://onlinesurgicaltechniciancourses.com/2010/25-intriguing-scientific-studies-about-faith-prayer-and-healing/
** http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/1075553041323803