Break Out 'The Routine'

       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.