One of the things they are very adamant about when you have
bipolar or ADHD is that you stick to a routine. You’re supposed to wake up at the same time, eat at the same time, take
your meds at the same time, exercise at the same time, and go to sleep at the
same time every single day. Unfortunately, I don’t do routine, and my work isn’t routine either and
I’m assuming this adds to the sleep trouble I already experience and likely
also affects my moods. The reason I’m
bringing this up now is that I arrived at the field station a little over a
week ago and had to deal with a 3 hour time change and a whole new, incredibly
sporadic schedule. For the first week I
was happy, energetic, and didn’t sleep very much (hypomania at its finest)
which would have been great if I had had work to do but work-wise the first
week was pretty slow. Unfortunately a
few days ago I experienced the not-so-unfamiliar crash into depression
(although somewhat milder than I used to experience). I’ve been oversleeping, I’m always tired, and
I’m completely apathetic about everything, I just can’t get myself to care (which
is not ideal when you only have a few weeks to get experiments done). On top of that, I feel like a failure because
I can’t motivate myself and I’m worrying about what other people think when I
stay in bed for 12 hours.
One of the worst things about it is that the depression
phase always lasts so much longer than the hypomanic phase so my times of not
being able to get motivated are not completely balanced out by my times of
extreme productivity. One of the other
worst things is that I have had zero success in finding a way to overcome my lack
of motivation. I can’t seem to overcome
the extreme desire to ignore the alarm and fall back asleep for another few
hours, or to just lie on the couch and watch TV. This is also the one area where my therapist
has been very little help. She refuses
to suggest ways that I could get myself motivated, she just sits there and
waits for me to come up with something on my own but I never can so we end up
just sitting there in silence for a while. I get that your therapist wants to teach you to become self-sufficient
when it comes to solving these sorts of problems but there has to be a point
where they can give you a hand. I’ve
been struggling with these periods of depression where I can’t get myself
motivated for a long time and clearly the things I try aren’t working so I could
really use some help. Anyway, getting
back to the disruption of my not-so-routine routine, being at the field station
has definitely affected my mood but this happens at home as well, probably
because I’ve never fully followed a routine. I abhor the idea of a 9 to 5 workday and I enjoy being able to get work
done on my own terms but I may have to give this whole routine thing a try when
I get home. I just hope I can find the
motivation to stick with it.
