Join me on Facebook at Julie A. Fast and Julie A. Fast Books

After you enjoy the posts on this blog, I hope you will join me on Facebook and leave your comments on my more personal posts. I also do a weekly Q&A session on Facebook that is a lot of fun! Click here to read one of my posts about athletes and mental health. Facebook readers help me with research. Here’s an example regarding bipolar disorder and focus problems.

Click here to read a Q&A session. The questions and answers are posted in the comments below the post.

The best way to reach me with your bipolar disorder questions is through one of my live sessions! My next session is

Sunday, May 14, 2017 at 4:00 PM PST. Details are on my Facebook page.

Julie

Bipolar Happens! Receives Best Individual Bipolar Disorder Blog on the Web Award from HealthLine

I have some great news. My blog BipolarHappens! received a top blog award from the HealthLine website. This is quite an honor and one I want to embrace with great gusto.

Thank you to HealthLine and congratulations to my fellow award winners.

Click here to read the full list of The Best Bipolar Disorder Blogs of the Year from HealthLine and the other great bipolar disorder bloggers including Bp Magazine!

Julie

What I Do When I Can Tell I’m Getting Depressed or Manic

1. I feel a bit sad for myself and upset and worried and lonely and scared and bummed out and pissed and…… you get the idea.

2. I ALWAYS look for a trigger. If I can find the trigger, I change the trigger. This is always upsetting because my trigger is usually doing too much work and I LOVE to work.

3. If it’s depression, I do everything possible to stay out of bed and keep myself from isolating. I use the ideas in Get it Done When You’re Depressed ever minute I’m depressed. There are a lot of ideas in this book that work immediately and I truly use them.

4. If it’s mania, I work on my sleep first. If I can’t get it to calm down with my management plan, I take 5mg of lithium orotate and that often knocks is out.

I HATE getting sick. But it’s ok. I will survive. I stop it early now. I am so much better than in the past.

I have to adapt to the hand that life deals me.

Julie

How to Say THANK YOU, NO THANK YOU when You Have Bipolar Disorder

Julie, come to the concert with us! We have a box and I know you love the band! You will love it!

Thank you so much for thinking of me. I want to go and the stable me would LOVE to go. Unfortunately, the bipolar me, the one I dislike but have to live with every day simply can’t handle the big crowds. I get overstimulated and this can lead to so many symptoms I simply can’t have in my life right now. I am sad to miss this. I know you are going out to dinner first, and I can definitely join you for that part of the evening. Thank you very much for asking me!

Julie, I don’t see why it’s so hard for you to travel. You love it so much. We are just going for the weekend. It’s the coast and it will be fun. I will drive! Come with us!

Thank you! I wish with all of my heart that the regular me you see in public is the me I have to sleep with at night. I can’t and don’t want you to have to understand what I go through to be honest- it sucks, but I can say that as much as I want to go with you, I want to be stable more. I have to give up so much so that I can be the friend and family member I want to be. Please send me a video. In fact, a video chat would be amazing. I feel sad I have to miss this. I feel that I miss out on a lot of things, but I can say that I’m healthier than I have ever been since I’ve been really watching my triggers. Travel at this time is too much for me. I hope you have fun!!!

***

It’s all about trigger management when you have bipolar disorder.

It’s hard for people who don’t have bipolar disorder to understand that FUN things can make us sick. Triggers are ANYTHING that causes mood swings. There is no positive or negative to a trigger. It’s just a trigger!

Learning to say no in a way that also educates people about how you take care of yourself really makes a difference. People know to keep asking you- because maybe you can go in the future, but they also get to see that you are committed to staying stable so that you can maintain the relationship!

Woo! hoo!

Julie

Signs a Loved One with Bipolar Disorder Needs Help

1. Current behaviors are not in line with past behaviors. For example, – a person who has been empathetic throughout life suddently becomes selfish and callous and says, “I don’t love you and never have! You are finally seeing the real me!”

2. They stop paying attention to what has always been important. This can include being with their children. People who once cared about helping animals will forget to feed them or might kick them for example.

3. They don’t listen. And when you point this out, you are always the one with the problem.

4. They simply can’t see that they they are doing or are about to do isn’t going to end well.

Julie

I’m not as disciplined as you might think………

I often read comments that I must be very disciplined in order to write books and do a blog. If you guys think I’m disciplined- think again. HEHE! It’s a daily struggle and sometimes a minute by minute struggle for me to get things done. Ask the people I work with and they will all say the same thing.

Working with me is like herding cats.

Work is a huge issue for me- a lifelong struggle with focus that started when my bipolar got serious at age 19, over 30 years ago. I also have a right brain injury from a 2012 biking accident that greatly affected my memory around dates, times and numbers.

I think I had a breakthrough today as to why I have not been able to improve my focus over the past few years and it’s not about the brain injury. I call this…….

#SocialMediaQuestioning

How much of my extreme focus problems are due to social media being on my work device?

I am easily distracted- many of us with bipolar are this way. What does it mean for my brain that the computer is literally my work station and at any second, I can click off of my work and look at something that gives me a hit of dopamine?

I am addicted to the Daily Mail Newspaper in a bad way. I feel better when I look at it even though it is filled with destructive stories. I see this as calming myself down when my work anxiety is high. Maybe it is the opposite. Maybe the dopamine is calming- but it’s also distracting and addictive. The research is VERY clear on this now that social media and our instant access to information has been around for a decade.

Dopamine. What a lovely feeling. But it is NOT helping me work in any way. It is distracting and destroying in terms of my focus.

I also see how this affects my beloved 15 year old nephew.

It’s not pretty.

I am doing something about this. It’s experimental and I am not sure of the results in terms of working, but I have to do something. There is too much I want to accomplish. Not being able to focus is harming my life.

My Social Media Limitation Experiment

As a brain researcher and someone who wants to get better every day, I am now limiting my social media. For the first time ever, I turned off my phone while watching my beloved football (soccer) this week. And today while watching Barcelona LOSE TO JUVENTUS!, I turned off my phone and put it in my bag.

I have decided that when I am with friends, the phone goes off. I am addicted to information. I want to be fully present for my friends and family.

It starts with me.

The next step is figuring out how to write without having social media so easily accessible. This may mean using a different computer with disabled internet access for working on my book project. Then, I will come back to my MAC when I have to do my social media work.

I am not able at all to simply NOT look at the social media. I go to it automatically as most of us do. I have OCD and simply saying no while it is still turned on has not worked.

We are adaptive creatures. We can manage our brains.

Join me!

Julie

This pic is by Eron Hare. I love it!