oh my god I just saw the cutest thing in the world. little Black girl with beads in her hair for the first day of school and the beads were pink then silver then a bunch of yellow then beige then grey to make them look like pencils 🥺🥺🥺 brb I will draw an artist’s rendition
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Both of these tags are right. I love when a cat will just put up with your silly human games. They love you and know you love them and are just happy with you.
I wonder WHY breathing exercises have always been such a dogshit "coping skill" for me.
It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.
Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.
It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.
In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.
Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.
I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.
I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?
I kept trying to do breathing exercises for years after I knew they didn't work for me. I think I had the idea from therapy that coping skills weren't necessarily supposed to feel good or different or helpful at all, and that I had to keep doing them to "get better" which was something independent from "feeling better."
fun fact about breathing exercises is that they just. don't work for a lot of people with anxiety/people who get panic attacks. and nobody tells you that. which like. idk what the point of breathing exercises is then
I knew this from my own experience, but therapists kept telling me I was wrong.
The foundation of most therapeutic techniques for "anxiety" seems to assume that what your body does, what your body knows, how your body reacts, it's all fake and wrong and you have to forcibly make your body do the right things.
It has been hard as fuck to unlearn all that, and to re-learn how to just. Be an animal with survival instincts.
Like, my "anxious" feelings/thoughts are not "lies." They're information about my survival needs as an organism, even if the way they explicitly articulate themselves is weird or unrealistic.
Oh, yeah, I can't do breathing exercises for shit. And luckily I've had therapists who are willing to listen and work with me on that.
What I've found more helpful are things like progressive muscle relaxation (when you have chronic muscle tension from anxiety it can be hard to consciously relax, but by deliberately tensing muscle groups first you can then feel how to do the opposite of that) and those corny but actually helpful grounding exercises (trying to find an object for each letter in the alphabet, or naming 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, etc.). Obviously your mileage may vary.
Breathing exercises always just played into my sense of not being able to breathe, when what I really need is to redirect my attention from the panic attack until it passes and not go to the "oh god I must be dying" place.
I feel like part of it could be that no one's really ever taught how to breathe. It's so much more complicated than "breathe in, hold, breathe out". I am having so much trouble with a lot of my PT exercises because I'm supposed to be pushing my ribs into my stomach. Apparently I flare my ribs too much, which means my diaphragm isn't doing as much work? It's unrelated to the panic attack aspect, but I have also always thought my anxiety felt worse when I had to control my breathing so it could be related.
I don’t know if this helps but my sister taught me to breathe properly while singing (she has a music degree in voice), and then (unrelatedly) I had my first panic attack, over nothing I can think of. I’ve had a lot since then, always over nothing I can connect to. It took me well over a decade to even notice when they were starting, although sometimes they’d be so sudden, it wouldn’t matter if I noticed them happening. I’ve never been formally taught breathing exercises, but my panic attacks are primarily hyperventilating so badly that my whole face and chest and even my teeth would feel numb. And the only way I could stop them was to force myself to exhale—because I was already inhaling too much, too soon, without expelling air for longer than a second. It wasn’t a grounding technique for me, so much as someone else counting out the exhale time so I knew how long i should be taking before I breathed in again. It did not happen instantaneously. They’d count to five but I’d be inhaling at two, then slowly, it’d be at three, then four, then five, until finally it regulated out. The first person who breathed with me had EMT training, and kept reminding me to inhale through my nose (because you take in less air that way) and to exhale through my mouth (because I already had too much air in).
I don’t think a lot of people know how to breathe properly. I was taught that when you inhale, your diaphragm needs to drop down, so you lungs can expand at the bottom, where most of their area is. My chest doesn’t rise at all when I inhale. It barely pushes out. What you do see is my abdomen expanding out, which needs to happen to make room for the additional air. Then when you exhale, it’s like you’re sucking in your gut, but really, your abdomen is almost forcing your diaphragm to move up, thus making your lungs smaller, as the air leaves your body. I never understood why people would say to “suck in” when trying to make themselves smaller to fit into clothes, because to take proper, even, full breathes, everything should expand when you “suck air in.” The reason women were always fainting back in the day was because their corsets wouldn’t let their lungs expand down, and instead, they could only take air in at the top, which is ultimately insufficient.
Obviously, this advice isn’t a blanket fix for everyone, but I do think knowing the mechanics of how to breath makes breathing exercises easier
This could be useful information, thank you. I always thought I was breathing more correctly than some people because I sang choir in high school so I breathed into my stomach rather than my chest. I guess inflating your lower abdomen is NOT the way to "breathe into your stomach"!
I wonder how much of my problem is proprioception (body awareness) and the fact that the people saying "breathe like this" have a whole bunch of assumptions of what a typical person's body does that a whole bunch of other people don't.
Foxgloves also known as fairy thimbles, witches’ gloves, and dead man’s bells, and 'fox fingers' due to the belief that foxes wear them on their paws to enable silent hunting - notably they often grow in the vicinity of fox dens on woody hillsides.
They are believed to be a plant beloved by fairies, and often appear in charms or protections from maleficia. In Roman mythology, the goddess Flora touched Hera on her breasts and stomach with foxglove in order to impregnate her with the god Mars.
In Norse mythology foxes wear the bell-shaped flowers around their necks; the ringing of bells was believed to form a spell of protection against hunters and their hounds.
Digitalis is used in contemporary medicine for slowing or strengthening of heart muscles, and was historically used to treat epilepsy. In Nicholas Culpeper's 1652 herbal digitalis is mentioned as a treatment for healing wounds, a purgative, for 'the King's Evil' (scrofula), 'the falling sickness' (epilepsy), and for a 'scabby head'.
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I wonder WHY breathing exercises have always been such a dogshit "coping skill" for me.
It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.
Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.
It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.
In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.
Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.
I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.
I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?
I kept trying to do breathing exercises for years after I knew they didn't work for me. I think I had the idea from therapy that coping skills weren't necessarily supposed to feel good or different or helpful at all, and that I had to keep doing them to "get better" which was something independent from "feeling better."
fun fact about breathing exercises is that they just. don't work for a lot of people with anxiety/people who get panic attacks. and nobody tells you that. which like. idk what the point of breathing exercises is then
I knew this from my own experience, but therapists kept telling me I was wrong.
The foundation of most therapeutic techniques for "anxiety" seems to assume that what your body does, what your body knows, how your body reacts, it's all fake and wrong and you have to forcibly make your body do the right things.
It has been hard as fuck to unlearn all that, and to re-learn how to just. Be an animal with survival instincts.
Like, my "anxious" feelings/thoughts are not "lies." They're information about my survival needs as an organism, even if the way they explicitly articulate themselves is weird or unrealistic.
Oh, yeah, I can't do breathing exercises for shit. And luckily I've had therapists who are willing to listen and work with me on that.
What I've found more helpful are things like progressive muscle relaxation (when you have chronic muscle tension from anxiety it can be hard to consciously relax, but by deliberately tensing muscle groups first you can then feel how to do the opposite of that) and those corny but actually helpful grounding exercises (trying to find an object for each letter in the alphabet, or naming 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, etc.). Obviously your mileage may vary.
Breathing exercises always just played into my sense of not being able to breathe, when what I really need is to redirect my attention from the panic attack until it passes and not go to the "oh god I must be dying" place.
I feel like part of it could be that no one's really ever taught how to breathe. It's so much more complicated than "breathe in, hold, breathe out". I am having so much trouble with a lot of my PT exercises because I'm supposed to be pushing my ribs into my stomach. Apparently I flare my ribs too much, which means my diaphragm isn't doing as much work? It's unrelated to the panic attack aspect, but I have also always thought my anxiety felt worse when I had to control my breathing so it could be related.
This fic does not have nearly as many as hits as it deserves. What if Irina had had an older brother, who left for America before she was married? This OC is so beautifully drawn. Highly recommend.
#i appreciate how genuine and non-judgemental this comic feels
#like left one is not upset at right one for caring while being powerless
#and right one seems genuinely distraught and not performative
I'm glad the facial expressions are coming across accurately!
It can feel so absurd to say gosh I hope the torment maze removes some fire and rusty nails soon, but alas, sometimes that's all one can do.
Also sometimes you and your friend are both in Torment Mazes, different ones, and while yours is way hotter, you know that your friend's has just so many more rusty nails than yours does, and so you and your friend vent to one another about your respective Torment Mazes and sympathize in a way that makes very clear that it's not a Torment Maze Olympics, there is no competitive element about whose Torment Maze is worse, and you both just genuinely wish the other to be freed from their Torment Maze as soon as humanly possible
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hi. i hope this ask is not an imposition and that you're doing well. (side note, i still remember you fondly from the nano region, and as being a really good moderator, so thanks for that.)
how did/do you learn to deal with bipolar?
having to keep a sharp eye on my moods is exhausting, and i'm wondering if it ever gets easier.
(i'm currently undiagnosed because they're trying to figure out if it's bipolar with psychosis or schizophrenia. i've had one confirmed hypomanic episode this year and at least two others that were probably hypomania, along with sustained depression through my younger years. i'm 23 and there's history of unipolar depression but neither bipolar nor schizophrenia in my immediate family as far as i know. they say i'm having persistent psychotic experiences, but i'm not sure i believe that. anyway.)
also if you have any tips or resources or things you would've liked to know, i'd love to hear them.
Well hello there! Thank you for the compliments, they mean a lot. And thank you for reaching out to me. I'm so sorry that you're looking at this as a potential diagnosis, but I'm super fucking happy that you're looking at it so young, because the earlier you know, the easier (IMHO) it is to start understanding and living with it.
I would like to invite any of my friends with bipolar to contribute in the comments or reblogs if they wish.
My bipolar background real quick for context: diagnosed at 27, now 43, medicated since age 27, a number of hospitalisations since the first one, mainly due to depression, one due to a mixed state episode (more about those later). Two family members with bipolar before me; jury's still out on anyone else in my same generation. I predominantly experience low moods (depression), with occasional hypomanic episodes and rare psychotic episodes.
The biggest thing I can think of is that yes, it gets easier. It gets boring as well, and periodically it gets really frustrating, but that's true of managing any chronic condition. I get sick of monitoring my moods sometimes too, but I also get sick of pain management for my osteoarthritis, and unfortunately, we've just got to battle on and keep doing it. But from that first diagnosis, spending a month on the ward and then a couple of months in recovery at home, I'm now capable of recognising impending trouble and nipping it in the bud without it necessarily being a huge deal.
My brother once told me to check myself but not bully myself (that was essentially the phrasing, but I don't remember exactly). I do a daily mood check-in (more on that shortly) and try not to harass myself about how I'm feeling. I try to look at the logical and illogical reasons behind it, resolve problems if something specific is messing me up, and let go of the things I can't change.
I think the approach that my former psychiatrist took when first getting me onto medication was sensible, which was to worry less about the specific label and more about treating the symptoms. Meds can vary hugely in what they do for people, but I have personally always done better on them than not. I have a regular antidepressant as part of my morning meds and then a mood stabiliser and antipsychotic at night. I'm personally very in favour of meds for bipolar, having seen how adversely being unmedicated can affect people. The caveat is that most of the times I have been hospitalised since the first time (2010, when I was diagnosed), it's been due to meds issues. All I can say is to be extra aware of yourself if you're trying different medication.
Tips:
It's SO boring sometimes, but keep a mood diary. I use Finch for this, along with tracking meds and a few other things. It can really help to see the patterns in your moods; it's how we established there's a seasonal component to mine, and so my meds get bumped up in winter (I do know people whose symptoms get worse in summer, though, so that's one reason it's better to track your moods for a while). I do a daily check-in and on Finch it's literally just a scale of 1-5 with emotes, so it's very low-pressure.
Let your doctor(s) guide your medication, but don't hesitate to speak up if you feel totally flattened out, or excessively wired up, or like it's just not working. Not everything will work the first time.
Read up on your medication side effects and interactions. Try not to get too hung up on them, but also, if you're getting shitty side effects, there's frequently going to be an alternative medication you can try.
Be kind to yourself. Get to know how your bipolar affects you personally, because it affects people so differently. Get to know your warning signs. I know I'm headed downhill if I feel too wrung out at the end of the day to brush my teeth and shower. I know I'm experiencing hypomania if I'm functioning on less sleep than I ought to be, my mind is racing, and I suddenly have a bunch of ideas for creative projects, especially if I'm looking at buying lots of stuff for them. It doesn't mean they're unequivocally a bad idea, but it does mean I should write down the project and the components and give myself thinking time, rather than jumping straight onto eBay.
Do the art therapy or singing group or whatever thing is on offer on the ward if you end up in inpatient because if you stay in your room all day your social skills will atrophy. Also, go outside if you can.
Go outside in general. Nature is so good for mental health. I am actually very bad at following this advice, so callout post to myself here.
Just because it's not curable doesn't mean it's the end of the world.
Resources:
I found The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide by David J. Miklowitz to be a very good read that provided a lot of information without getting too dense or horrifying.
Having a good therapist/psychologist to talk to in addition to whoever is prescribing you medication is really good. I've gone through a bunch of them simply due to people moving to practice elsewhere, retiring, and so on, and it can be very frustrating to have to recap everything to a new therapist, but if you can get on someone's books, try to. The bulk of the therapy I've undergone is cognitive behavioural therapy.
I've called Lifeline before when I've needed to because sometimes crying down the phone at a stranger is enough to reset my awareness of my mental state. 13 11 14 or Lifeline.
Take online self-tests with a grain of salt, but Black Dog Institute's information sheets are generally pretty useful.
Health Direct has some information and some further links.
Things I wish I'd known:
Bipolar disorder, or bipolar affective disorder, or manic-depressive psychosis as it was back in the day, is a horribly reductive name, because in fact there are (at least) two other potential 'poles': rapid cycling, which means switching between depression and mania very quickly in a short period of time, and mixed state/episode, which means experiencing symptoms of both at the same time. I don't tend to get rapid cycling, but I do get mixed episodes, and they fucking suck.
Meds aren't supposed to fully flatten you out. Actually, I was somewhat aware of this going in (again, other family members had their diagnoses before me), but it's pretty key in finding meds that work for you without making you nonfunctional. Especially if you go down the antipsychotic route, which could apply whether it's bipolar or schizophrenia. A good psych will start you on low doses and go up if needed.
It's worth trying the stupid coping mechanisms at least twice (once to see if it does suck, twice to see if you were wrong the first time) despite how stupid they sound at the outset because sometimes they actually are stupid and sometimes they turn out to be incredibly helpful. I thought breathing exercises (some examples at Beyond Blue) were pointless because if I was spiralling into, for example, an anxiety attack, I didn't think I could focus on my breathing. As it turned out, practicing them often enough has made them become an instinctive thing and I can stop myself from what would otherwise be exhausting crying fits with them.
It's okay to ask for help. The first time I was hospitalised, after months of struggling with deepening depression, I had to be told that that was the necessary step. Later times, I reached out to family and my partner and my psych. The most recent time I went into inpatient, I actually called Triple 0 and had police come do a wellness check on me that led to them taking me to the emergency, which I don't recommend for everyone, but because I knew I was only (potentially) a danger to myself, I took that step.
If you have any other questions, please ask and I will share experiences.
finished this up before my 25th birthday (today!). been muttering it to myself so might as well get the feeling out :P
yarn is knitpicks palette in blush and orange, stranded colorwork, size us 5 knitting needles
not my first colorwork but i knit this in the round and steeked it which was a wittle scary, and it's a bit warped cause i forgot the garter border, but looking at it makes me feel at peace which is what matters!
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