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For those with bipolar disorder, episodes of mania/hypomania cause racing thoughts that make it difficult—if not, impossible—to work. For me, racing thoughts are a mix of bursting creative ideas and intrusive onslaughts of useless and unrelated mental chatter. As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to work. I'm either too busy trying to keep up with my ideas or too distracted and overwhelmed by the never-ending chatter. I get frustrated by my inability to focus, irritated by disruptions, and the chaos in my brain leaves me completely drained. For me to get any work done with racing thoughts, I need to carve out an environment that eliminates as many triggers as possible.
Should a loved one or a friend ever be allowed to force a switch in someone with dissociative identity disorder (DID)? What does forcing a switch mean? Let's go back to basics first.
The therapeutic alliance between you and your therapist is an important one whether you discuss mental illness or physical illness. I started therapy to better manage the mental symptoms of chronic illness, an autoimmune disease called Behcet's. After all, there's plenty for me to work through. Because I develop abdominal pain when I eat, I have developed a complicated, even disordered relationship with food. I have anxiety when I leave my apartment, fearful that I'll have a flare and will be trapped in a less than ideal setting. When I take steroids, there comes an unfortunate depression side effect. The list goes on.
"Feel the fear and do it anyway" is a popular motivational phrase, but its wisdom is often difficult to actually implement in your life, especially if you deal with anxiety. Fear and anxiety are huge, overwhelming emotions, and many of us struggle to even allow ourselves to feel them, let alone feel them and then continue functioning like a healthy person. Still, that doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means we may need some help to "feel the fear and do it anyway." These are three tips I've developed through years of living with anxiety.
Tragedy can bring people together and cause them to rally together for a cause, including mental health. While coming to arms to foster awareness is great, when we do so is also important. Don't wait until tragedy strikes to fight mental health stigma.
You may be experiencing some end-of-year pressure as the fourth quarter starts because it is common to start thinking about all the things we set out to do and haven't yet. Maybe you wanted to lose weight or get a huge promotion. If you haven't hit those goals yet, you may feel the pressure to get it done before the year ends. This may cause you to feel overwhelmed, pressured, and anxious. If you're feeling anxious due to end-of-year pressure, continue reading below.
The best way to take on anxiety is to cultivate self-confidence. When you feel capable of handling the things life gives you, vague anxieties are not so much of a problem. But how do we develop the self-confidence to fight anxiety?
While we would all love to build our self-esteem as quickly and effectively as we can, sometimes the process feels daunting. When we get lost in the expectations of self-esteem and forget some of the realities that go along with it, we can feel lost. Here are three things to remind yourself about building self-esteem.
Self-esteem takes a hit when you live with verbal abuse, but you can do something about it. Here's how you can rebuild your self-esteem after verbal abuse.
Our cat George recently passed away. George was such a comfort to me as I struggled with schizoaffective disorder. I miss him a lot. Find out about grieving a pet when you have schizoaffective disorder.
I believe she will only be able to rid herself of her demons, and hopefully her BPD as well, when she's ready to confront the abuse of her father. If she can put the blame where it belongs, she may stop projecting that victim/perpetrator cycle on the present men in her life. These demons are a metaphor for the purgatory she has created for herself. That reality has consequences in the real world, but it need not be real in the tangible sense. Exorcising her demons will require the expenditure of real physical energy and probably the destruction of aspects of her personality. If this ever happens, and it's possible but not probable, then these demons will evaporate. They are only as real as one's personality is real. In short, reality is not the question, it's what you make of the things you feel to be real.