Mood forecasting

Are you able to forecast your moods with any success? I'm looking at my mood graphs for the last six months and not seeing any patterns. But maybe statistically, I could figure out that if this is the shape of the jaggy line lately and this is what day of the week it is, and here's how much sleep I've had, there's a 70% chance of hypomania tomorrow.

I'll know when to put off washing the car because I'll just get depressed about it not being a newer one.

hi dark, i'm bp2, and it great to have you cyclos here where you belong . although it is a biological illness, there is always an external trigger of some form. my response to your question would prolly for you to look more closely at triggers and what type incidences seem to trigger specific cluster of symptoms. besides your personal triggers it is well documented that anything that raises the adrenalin levels to a significant level, in those on the bipolar spectrum, can expect a depression two days after the incident. Sometimes it can be 36 hours for me, after a really severe adrenalin rush. So in essence yes you can forecast your mood a little once you become intimately acquainted with your trigger/response cycles. Until we get detector chips in our noggins thou, I think we are prolly going to have as much success as the bureau of meteorology had, before satellites. Great question!!!

Hi, I am BP1 and the best I can do when it comes to mood forcasting is that I know I dip after I get high and that has just been learnt from experience. I think experience is key and you willl start to recognise patterns, although i think it is difficult to forecast things for sure a lot of the time.

Thinking of you

Cracked

Chalk this up to hypomania. Sunday, I opened up the spreadsheet I use for mood graphing I described in another post and ran some tallies. To ignore the sharply jagged line, I told the spreadsheet to count how many days I was up or down by more than a certain amount. That smooths out the lines a lot.

54% of my days were normal or close to it. 30% were hypomania days. 15% were subdepression days. The missing 1% is presumably lost in rounding.

I had the least depression on Saturday and Sunday, 7% of them. The most depression on Thursday, 24% of those days. The least hypomania on Sunday, 24% of them. The most hypomania on Friday and Saturday, 38% of those days. The most normal day of the week is Sunday, 69% of the time. Just 45% of Thursdays and Fridays were normal.

After a quick glance at that, it seems like there's a correlation to the work week. But the above were tallied after a couple two-week periods of close to normal mood, a four-week period of normal punctuated by two up spikes that barely reached the up threshold, and one high period that lasted almost three weeks.

Next time I'm hypomanic and have a day off, maybe I'll try smoothing out the lines with a three-day moving average and see how the stats shape up then.

Sounds like you are getting to know you mood patterns well - certainly a whole lot better than I know mine!

Cracked