How can you love yourself more daily?

  I think I can love myself more by being consistent in my habits. I miss being able to tick off lists and to go off to work or school. The schedule of life has been hazy these days as my body just hasn´t been working right. My body feels frozen sometimes, and just recently I felt my insides freezing up also like I´ve been deathly motionless for a long time. I´ve also been getting some stress headaches in the afternoon. I think I can attribute it to the lack of a sustaining drink - that could be some vitamin water or regular water, I don´t know. I can´t really mix my bipolar medicine with water anyway. It has to be swallowed whole and not dissolved or it´ll taste like the worst thing in the world.

By the way, my meds have been effective so far and actually, if I don´t take them, I get all sorts of symptoms. I feel irritable, unable to rest, restless, uncomfortable and sometimes I also feel like I´m stuck in a vortex where I just stand motionless while experiencing a mild stroke. It might not really be a stroke, but the feeling is similar to when my mind explodes. It´s so high that I feel hyper and if I don´t control myself, I kind of feel like running around and kicking things. It gets low too, my mood, but I have to get up quickly or I will feel really uncomfortable like my skin is crawling...

Those are just my bipolar symptoms. I´ll add, if I just don´t pick myself up from a low episode, I will feel like screaming from mental pain, just if I don´t quickly pick myself up and talk to myself about reality.

I really wish I had some tea. To just lessen the high episodes. We just have a lot of coffee, thereś some orange juice and milk sometimes, but I guess the most helpful fluid is just water.

Music helps me also. I´m getting into a new wave of relaxing mental music like indie songs that match my mood and do something for my brain waves.

I just want to add, that for some time in the past, doctors have used shock therapy to treat patients with severe depression and I think that was kind of inhuman. I really suggest music therapy and water therapy (just drinking lots of water) instead. I think art therapy is really useful for diagnosing mental illnesses and it relaxes your mind if you draw patterns. I think relaxing coloring books (those mandala adult coloring-books) are useful for dissociative disorders, to be used to assist ego integration.

There could really be many forms of therapy out there that use ordinary everyday things and don´t need to alter your body.

So, I described my high and low cycle in the paragraphs before, and I just want to say that it kind of happens on a two-day basis if I can´t control myself, or three-day to weekly basis if I can.

Just yesterday, I had a hard time sleeping in the night, but in the morning until the afternoon, I felt terrible cold waves and stiffness in my body. I think itś called mania.

I think these symptoms of mania really happened to me:

¨When Someone Is Manic

During this phase, people feel super-charged and think they can do anything. Their self-esteem soars out of control and it’s hard for them to sit still. They talk more, are easily distracted, their thoughts race, and they don’t sleep enough. It often leads to reckless behavior, such as spending sprees, cheating, fast driving, and substance abuse (too much coffee). Three or more of these symptoms nearly every day for a week accompanied by feelings of intense excitement may signal a manic episode.¨ - WebMD.com, ¨Bipolar Disorder¨

Iĺl compare it with a depressive episode:

¨What the Depression Phase Is Like

Without treatment, a person with bipolar disorder may have intense episodes of depression. Symptoms include sadness, anxiety, loss of energy, hopelessness, and trouble concentrating. They may lose interest in activities that they used to enjoy. It’s also common to gain or lose weight, sleep too much or too little [...]¨ - WebMD.com, ¨Bipolar Disorder¨

Ahhhhh!!!!! What a hard life it is. Anyway....I think the things I need to care for myself more are:

1. 1. journalling - recording my feelings, scribbling my thoughts
2. 2. reporting - telling my family or my therapist about my symptoms
3. 3. drinking water - filling myself with mostly water when my body craves fluid intake...
4. 4. less coffee - it kind of makes me too hyper...
5. 5. sleep at regular hours - i try to sleep at 8-9pm or try to nap anytime i feel like it because it´s really hard to get to sleep, not knowing if you´ll have another night of sleep...
6. 6. reading about mental illness to just have the words to express how i feel....