I get up in a reasonable mood, but I still needed a highly indulgent 12 hours of sleep.  After a quick breakfast, which thankfully stays down this time (unlike yesterday), I decide it’s about time I picked up my bike wheel, which has been with the shop for two weeks.  This requires a short drive over to the nearby town, and by the time I’m back.  It is raining heavily, and I have little motivation to get out of the car.  Instead, I find some old magazine to pass the time for half an hour, before working out what to do next….

6:30 p.m.

Shall I go up to the office and try to do something useful, or shall I go to the gym first?  Either of these options means getting rained on, as soon as I leave the car, and my negativity is allowing far bigger focus on this than is really justified.  At the end of the day, what harm is there in 30 seconds of rain, we’re all over 70% water anyway?  Last night, a whole load of new material came from Amazon, and I had a quick browse through each of the books.  One of the recurring themes from both the general self-improvement titles and from the bipolar management literature was to focus on things, which created the greatest mood enhancement for the minimal risk.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that exercise has to be very high up any such list, so the gym won the toss.

11:45 p.m.

Going to the gym has certainly helped elevate my mood, even if I only had a 35 minute session.  Normally, I think I go for longer than this, but following a psychiatrist suggestion last week of only doing 20 minutes each day, I don’t want to overdo it.  Having said that, I don’t know if he knows how much exercise, I used to be previously, and I just can’t see any point in only doing 20 minutes.  Sure, if you aren’t used to exercising regularly, and need to start somewhere, then three sessions of 20 minutes each week might get you going, but I feel that I need much more than that, and I think that anyone with an overactive mind who wants to keep them self physically and mentally fit also needs to do the same.  There are several different reasons for this:

Medications such Depakote and Quetiapine have weight gain as a common (but seemingly underreported) side effect. Doing more exercise should help counterbalance some of this problem.
A mind that is naturally restless is always going to be much harder to calm down at the end of the day, so a good exercise regime should make sleeping much more easy.  Last year, I was finding that on days when I did no exercise, I could almost certainly expect some restlessness before going to sleep, whereas I could usually expect to be asleep within half an hour.  On days when I’ve done at least 90 minutes of cycling.  Other forms of exercise, such as swimming, or an intensive gym session, might only require 45 minutes to one hour, but I don’t think that they are as enjoyable as cycling.  I enjoy playing football even more, even though I’m not very good, but I’ve always found it much more hassle to get a game going.
Exercise releases endorphins, which are well known for their mood enhancing properties (also known as a runner’s high).  It naturally follows that a more intensive exercise session will produce better results, as long as you don’t overdo it.

Right, where was I?  Oh yes, next time I do some exercise, it will be for a bit longer.  I come into the office to clean up a few bits, and if I can have a bit of catch up on where the week has gone — but I don’t think I’m going to try to do any ‘ proper ‘ work right now.  To be honest, the week has been a bit of a disappointment, and that’s something I’ll review in a moment.