Mind Pilot – Take Self Control

Here’s a few thoughts on posts which I plan to write over the next few weeks:

• Explaining manic depression to the novice.
• Living life to the full despite such mental chaos.
• Developing a decent social life when working alone from home — the hardest challenge of all.
• Yes, there might be a lot of stigma about mental illness, but that doesn’t always mean I want to speak out about it.
• Using diagrams to explain situations which might need thousands of words to unravel.

Well, I said in my last post that I would have to get out and go for a jog in the next few minutes, and fortunately I managed to do just that, and of course, I’m feeling much better for it as always. So why can’t we all just do this each and every day? Or even just four or five times a week would be enough for most of us, we’re not trying to be Olympic athletes.

So, what was I thinking about on my jog? To be honest, that doesn’t really matter, the key thing was any thoughts were far more positive than they were earlier on today when I was just lying around in bed doing nothing. When I’m in a more positive mood, it is certainly much easier to appreciate all those little things — dare I be cliched — like the birds twittering in the trees above (sorry, but that t-word is going to feature quite a few more times I think), and the city also takes on a much more positive light. Granted, Coventry can be a pretty miserable looking place in the day, but when jogging in the twilight zone, and when the moon is almost full, the urban lighting scheme actually looks quite impressive.

On the way back, I popped into a newsagents for some milk and (well-deserved) chocolate, and saw a headline in the local paper about the local stadium finally getting its own railway station — interesting though this might be, I wanted to finish this update first, before going back online again.

I have been having a bit of a low period over the last week or so, but now I am starting to climb out of it, I am trying to put together a list of ways to get out more quickly in future.

Much of this stems from Friday, when I eventually managed to get out on my bike, after asking myself a load of questions along the lines of “what do I need to do to get from where I am now to the front door, so I can go out and enjoy a bike ride.” Perhaps a little unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with the bipolar mind (or perhaps just any depressive mind), taking those first few steps is significantly more taxing than the actual bike ride itself.

I broke the bike ride requirements down into over 20 steps – for example ‘find helmet’ and ‘put on helmet’ counted as two – but once the list was done, it became so much easier to see myself getting out of my slumber and moving down towards the bike.

Now I am working on doing the same exercise for other activities, but I have come to a realisation that it is going to be quite a long list, and for me, that often means another unfinished project. So, rather than leave that in the lurch, I thought I’d just put up this post first, pointing out the two basic ways out of a slump:

Do Something

As I was saying above, the key thing is to have an arsenal of activities at the ready, and to always have something which can be done regardless of current conditions. So as I type this, it is getting dark, and I don’t currently have any lights on my bike. But I am still keen to get some exercise today, so I am getting geared up to go for a jog as soon as I finish this.

Change Perspective

With bipolar disorder, it is just so easy to put a negative perspective on any situation, instead of seeing the positives. It can’t always be as simple as this, but in many cases, a simple bit of re-framing can do the trick. This might just involve looking at the situation and asking new questions (Is this really that bad? How can I see this in a positive light?). Sometimes, it might be a case of looking at the situation over a longer timeline – so if I say that last week was bad, that shouldn’t be a reason to say that I am feeling down as a whole. Looking over the first two months of this year, things have actually gone pretty well, despite very difficult external circumstances. I am thinking of putting together some kind of ’scrapbook’ of positive re-framing methods – as with so much of what I’ve written above – more on that later………

Now back to ‘do something’ – if I’ve committed to that jog here, I really must get out there in the next 5 minutes, especially as that means still enjoying the twilight. Anyway, here’s the start of that diagram, more to follow – oh don’t I just love the scrappy nature of blogs!:

Here’s a few things about myself which I hope can help put some of my blog posts into context:

• I’m 33 years old, male, living in the English Midlands.
• I run my own small business which employs two other people.
• My business is web-based, and its main subject matter is aviation, hence the idea of the mind pilot.
• My aim is to exercise five times each week, which should be much easier for someone working from home, but finding the motivation to this is often a different story.
• I have been diagnosed with, and have received a variety of treatments for, bipolar disorder (manic depression) and ADHD.
• Most of the content on this blog is created using voice recognition (Dragon professional 10), so please accept my apologies to any errors in the text. I like to publish posts exactly as I dictate them, so I don’t ask anyone else to check the accuracy of my posts.
• Because of my distractibility, I often deliberately work with no Internet connection, often disabling the modem by removing the power cable.
• I don’t understand the exact biochemistry, but I’ve always found it hard to get started at the beginning of the day. This is a source of constant irritation to me — maybe I should just let it go, but I know I can manage an early start each morning if I focus hard enough on it. Please forgive me if I go to ridiculous lengths talking about my desire to start a reasonable time — it is just that when I do get the day off to a good start, it is so much easier to let everything else slip into place, so for now at least, I’m going to keep my efforts going here.
• Despite the seriousness of the condition I am afflicted by, I also know that the same personality traits can produce tremendous advantages in terms of creativity and drive, but is often easy to forget this when feeling down. Looking at the ten-year timeline since I left university, the positives have far outweighed the negatives, but the last 18 months have been much more the struggle.

It might be another late start, but at least I’m getting up with a view to turning things around, and coming up with a coherent strategy so that I don’t allow myself to slump like this again; correction — so that I have a way of getting out next time these feelings come around again.

Surely, apart from the tardiness, this has to be the way to start each work day — last night, I left the microphone so it would be pretty much in my face when I sat back down again, and pulled out the modem connection, so there was no Internet connection to spark off a run round the usual depressing distractions.

 Where it really doesn’t help to go when online:

•   (Website) Traffic check – there just isn’t much happening at the moment.
• (Website) earning check – again, this is so much lower than last year, and I am not really likely to act on the results to improve the situation. So I might aswell get a colleague to take care of these two.
• Has Google indexed new pages? Eventually, it will do, and over time, it will give them the rankings they deserve, but this might even take a year. Just have faith that it will happen and get on with creating more content, otherwise I will sit and wait for these pages to get indexed, only to find that when they eventually do, there is no more new content to wait for.
• E-mail — there just isn’t enough interesting e-mail each day to justify checking more than once or twice.
• Blog comments — these should be notified via e-mail anyway.
• Forum threads — there is relatively little new information to catch up from there — far better to learn from people I trust — read their blogs.
• MSN and Skype — at least it does involve talking to real people, but it would be much better to meet them in person — that should always be the aim of such conversations.
• Facebook — again, there are real people behind this, and it is already much less addictive than it was, but as with MSN and Skype, this should be used as a way of actually meeting people in person, not just as a way of catching up with lightweight gossip.

17:34

Well, the initial “waffle” (voice recognition) session was working quite well for a bit, then I decided to try and put these thoughts into a diagram. This was coming along quite nicely, but when I printed it, I had the settings wrong, and it was blurting out page after page instead of just the one page I wanted. Then the microphone stand collapsed. At this stage, my patience had waned, so I have delved online and done all the usual ‘checks’ above that I know I shouldn’t be doing.

Having said that, it was interesting to see how rapidly my twitter account had developed. Should I make a link between Mind Pilot and my Twitter, Facebook, personal blog etc? Not sure if I’m ready for that quite just yet. Perhaps I will be when I feel more stable. But I won’t hide if anyone asks – and there is a link here from my main blog, just not in the other direction.

I guess that I do actually have quite a bit to say, and if I got into a better routine, I’d have enough time to say something across all the different platforms that are out there, and I would feel it was worth the effort. In the meantime, only physical words (as opposed to maps, photos etc) on my main website can have any direct ‘value’ attached to them, and as times are very tough for us right now, that has to be the main focus. Still, I can’t put all my efforts in that direction, as I just burn out very quickly. When I put it in the context of dealing with bipolar, and last year’s boiling back over just when things were starting to look ok, this year really hasn’t been that bad at all. Anyway, this is being typed when I should be using Dragon for Voice Recognition, so will be back later. At least this blog is live again – at the very least, I should update it once each week.

There should be another post out there from back in the middle of February when things were going very well (to be uploaded later), and I wanted to note down a few thoughts on how I have managed to make that happen. Since then, I’ve had two or three so-so weeks, followed by a real slump over the last seven days. Now, I’m looking at ways of getting out of this, and staying out.

Much of these ideas come under the banner of cognitive therapy or perhaps ‘cognitive redirection’ might be a better term. My low periods are serious enough to make me feel extremely lethargic, and to lose all interest in doing any work, or making any effort to see people, but they are far from life-threatening. Perhaps this is their hidden danger — when I’m go through one of these phases, I can appear completely levelheaded when speaking to people, so they will be none the wiser. In fact, last week, I went to a concert on Tuesday, and saw some old school friends on Saturday, and had a really good time on both occasions, without giving off the slightest hint to the people I was with that I was going through a bit of a low patch.

Having said that, the concert might well have been a bad move, not so much in its own right — it was over by 11, but because we spent 2 1/2 hours driving around Liverpool after the show, and then didn’t get back home until three in the morning. It is probably fair to say that this knocked my routine out for the rest of the week.

Anyway, I’m working at a step-by-step process for getting out of future slumps, but isn’t quite teacher giving me a slap on the wrist and saying don’t do it again, because I know how easy it is for these feelings to repeat themselves.