twelve symptoms #8

8. Sleep Issues

I have had quite a lot of sleep issues in the last 2/3 years and I’m not sure that I have got to grips with sleep hygiene as yet.  Though I have had a sleep hygiene module with the Great Yarmouth well being service.

As I have maybe previously mentioned, manic episodes often involve large bursts of energy and euphoria. These symptoms can make it incredibly difficult to sleep. This is a reality for me when my mind is buzzing and racing and it’s very hard to calm the mind down, even with CBT, mindfulness, distraction, medication.  Unlike the normal response to this which is allegedly that an individual will not feel tired or exhausted I feel tired and my mind becomes muggy.  I also find that I seem to wake up far to early and then can not get back to sleep, this is disruptive and I now do not fight it but just get up and get on with stuff as I can, even if it’s 3/4am.

The sleep hygiene course did offer me some ideas which I do generally follow.  They were:-  Don’t use screen based tech for a couple of hours before sleep,  Don’t have caffeinated drinks in the evening,  Don’t start a piece of work so late at night that it will drag to bed time, Have a hot bath that you step out of about 45 minutes prior to sleep  ( warm down aides sleep allegedly ).  I have also found that listening to relaxing music helps and also listening to monotone spoken word books can also help  ( the more animated narrators are less helpful ).

An individual experiencing symptoms around sleep may require less sleep, but won’t necessarily feel tired or exhausted. Sometimes these symptoms are often mischaracterized as insomnia.  A person suffering from insomnia experiences persistent difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep  ( I tend to have this during a depressive state ) . This isn’t quite what happens during a manic episode. Patients typically just don’t feel tired to the same degree they normally would, and as such, they choose to stay up and use outlets to expend their energy rather than try to sleep.

twelve symptoms #7

7. Casual use of drugs and alchohol

One symptom of bipolar that Im absolutely unaware that I run risks with is casual use of drugs and alchohol.  I just don’t seem to go down this route at all.  In fact I don’t drink alchohol hardly at all because of possible side effects with my medications and the fact that I have really experienced:-

Sometimes, people suffering from bipolar disorder will turn to drugs and alcohol. Careless use of these substances may be a warning sign of deeper issues. Worse still, illicit drugs and excessive alcohol consumption have both been shown to further destabilize the sufferers mood, which just makes the condition’s symptoms all that much worse.  Drugs and alcohol are also known to increase the sufferers anxiety that can accompany hypomania.  It’s then fairly obvious that most  treatment programs stress to patients that they must limit or eliminate alcohol consumption and avoid street drugs altogether.

Agile Thoughts and Ruminations ( work specific blog )

I was just thinking that I haven’t really blogged anything about my work role

Now I’m not saying that I’m any good, in fact with my condition for a lot of the time I just think I’m mediocre !!

Soooooo, some very simple thoughts on Agile as I’m having to try and re-establish my connection with Agile.

There appear to be three elements that I’m struggling with recognising for myself, I think they are key to me getting my ‘Agile MOJO’ back !!

1.       Being more flexible in my attitude and actions.

2.       Knowing & Believing in the Agile mindset

3.       Understanding where I am on the Agile continuum

Now I know that when I was executing my role well, I was I hope flexible in my attitude and my actions.  I was a Scrum Master and I was there to be inward facing and benefit the team by removing impediments, running a lot of the Agile ceremonies and generally just ‘getting it’, that is Agile.  Getting that we needed to be a team that commited to a feasible set of stories and delivered them in a sprint. No blame just the ability to facilitate velocity as an Agile scrum team.     For Agile to work, all the team need to let go, let go of the command and control philosophy that has driven our IT for so many years.  We need to be able to then trust what we as a team commit to and the actions we take to deliver the backlog for our Product Owners.  We need to be able to look retroactively at our prior Sprint/work and have an open, honest and constructive discussion about what works, what didn’t work and what might work.  Basically remaining flexible in our attitude and our actions.   I hope that makes sense.

Now I think I believed in the Agile mindset, which effectivelty for me was believing in the Agile manifesto.  People over Processes etc.  I’m struggling to get fully back to that position in my head because my last 2 projects before I was off unwell had allowed me to question my own contribution and then allowed me to question the agile  mindset as I was struggling with my teams to deliver the backlogs for the Product Owners.  Not just me, but a whole team, though I was laying the blame primarily at myself.  I have been reading a lot of Agile texts to try and reconnect with the Agile manifesto and the Agile mindset, feels like its alluding me but perhaps its just around the corner as I am feeling a tad more optimistic at work.

I would have said that I was quite advanced on the Agile continuum but as I have questioned everything else about myself I have questioned this as well.  Concerned that I have in the past effectively been lying to myself.  I’m worried that I now might make the same decisions that I used to make in Waterfall though those decisions may now be outdated and not fit with Agile, a sort of resorting to a comfort zone in my old IT world.  I need to rely on my own ingenuity to help facilitate projects and work as well as the Agile mindset and believe that I can recover my place on the Agile continuum.  I need to move away from a reliance on ‘tried and true’ to a position of ’inpsect and adapt’ !  It may also be hard as moving away from ‘tried and true’ might seem counter-intuitive.  So my condition means that I blame myself for most things that go wrong on any project, even if it’s not my actions that have resulted in a specific outcome.

One problem I’m always fighting for some reason is my catastrophic thinking so even though I have never been performance managed I seem to always think it’s just around the corner.

twelve symptoms #6

Increased Physical Activity (manic phase )

Hope people are finding this series of blogs helpful ...............

When I have had my rare manic episodes I have often had extremely high levels of energy and have almost run/walked in the office between meetings.  Some sufferers turn to physical activities but I have tended to keep to my normal activities but proceeded to do them at 100 miles an hour, losing the benefit of my energy by probably losing my friends and work colleagues in my wake.  My energetic mania is interrupted by long periods of lethargy and depression within my type 2 bipolar it seems, it’s a sort of carch & burn scenario it seems.  I don’t tend to see my mania so I need my wife/friends to spot this in me really, in order to arrest that mania in its throws hopefully.

I don’t find though some sufferers do that I engage in compulsive sexual behaviour during a manic episode though it could be said that a few high energy activities I may have randomly taken to could be seen as having risk associated with them.  I need to get to places ASAP and so I cross roads without the normal respect for the traffic on the roads.

Hope that makes some sort of sense.

twelve symptoms #5

5. Irritation

I'm not aware that I exhibit the symptom of irritation but I am aware that I exhibit agitation as I have sat on the bus into work completely agitated as the anxiety and depression overwhelm me.  
Irritation & Agitation are common when in either the manic or depressive episodes of the mood cycle, the thing is that those with bipolar are irritated by common all garden things that they would not normally be agitated with.
The mood instabilities of the condition are said to be present during both manic and depressive episodes and sufferers can quickly switch from one extreme to another.
Euphoric and Despondent baselines are said to be very different from one sufferer to another.
Treatment, as does mine, primarily focuses on stabilising the mood ( Im on Quetiapine to this end ), preventing hopefully the sudden and longer cycle shifts between happiness and sadness, between euphoria and depression.
The mood swings hold over the sufferer is used by clinicians to understand how ill someone is currently.

twelve symptoms #4

4. Racing Thoughts

With type II I don't have mania/hypomania as often as type I sufferers but racing thoughts are a common manic bipolar symptom.  You have a difficulty in concentrating on one thing at a time and tend to over-analyse your thoughts as well.  You can appear to jump at random from one thing to another and as you are distracted by your own racing mind you are unlikely to keep attention on any goal you might have work or home wise.  

It's true that you can enjoy clarity of mind during hypomania and it may feel productive when your thoughts are racing, flitting from one thing to another.  I tend to talk over people but I do need others to spot this in me as I rarely see it.  If/as you flip into full blown mania from hypomania you will find that you crash & burn and any high productivity is then lost.

Hope that makes sense.

New Years Eve of Destruction

I'll get in early with a Happy New Year for the morrow.

I don't think New Years resolutions are for me, they become just another stick to beat up on myself. However I am hoping that 2016 will be a better year.  I've still got my 50th birthday outing with work colleagues c/f from 2014 and I hope that i'll be able to do that in May this coming year.

On the listening front as we step into the new year, I'm still behind the times and listening to CD's whilst dabbling with amazon prime music.  The car is currently seeing me shift between Frank Turner ( Positive songs for negative people ) , David Bowie ( at the Beeb ) , Public Service Broadcasting ( The Race into Space ) , God speed you! Black Emperor ( Asunder, sweet and other distress ) ,  Sex Pistols ( Never mind the bollocks ) and the MOJO punk CD this month.

Thanks to all my friends for being the best you can be in 2015, heres hoping for adventures in living in 2016 and the return of my Mojo.