How do you chart it?

A normal mood day should be one when happy things made you happy and sad things made you sad, right? So if you have a legitimate reason for feeling happy most of the day or sad most of the day, how do you chart it?

I realize I'm a bit late to the party, but I wasn't very sure where my invitation was until recently (that would be my lame metaphor for "I just discovered this forum and your post caught my attention").

I feel that a lot of our feelings are valid and are hence just. Honestly, I believe that they all are. So, chart them as such. Always, no matter how maddening or how dull. I keep a journal, not a chart (my psychiatrist doesn't give me many assignments, so I'm left to my own devices). I can tell the inconsistency of my thoughts through my handwriting alone, which tends to stray from the margins illegibly or become large and grotesque... I try to keep it neat, but I believe my pen has a mind of it's own. Or rather, the mind behind the pen has some insidious plot to slaughter the journal.

...I apologize for the tangent. My point is that your feelings are always real, and that's likely why you've been assigned to chart them. So that you can tell where they're coming from, and which ones to avoid and how to avoid them if at all possible. Keep in mind, this advice is also coming from someone who suffers a bit of PTSD along with cyclothymia... so I'm just all sorts of crazy and taking my advice might not be in your best interest. This is just an opinion from one who barely knows you, and nothing more.

(***Edited because of grammatical errors)

Unordinary,
Hiya! Welcome to the board! Very glad you found it!! I just wanted to comment here because something you said REALLY struck me... your mention of how your penmanship is indicative of your moods. O-M-G... that went off in my head like a big ol' buzzer! I have tried relentlessly to chart my moods but have failed every single time because I can't seem to stick with it. I'm totally type-A, so it aggravates me to no end that I can't seem to regularly chart my moods (even tho I seem to be able to regularly take my meds??!!). One time I looked back at a hand-written journal I'd kept over this past summer in which I'd written every day or every other day. Although I had thought about writing my moods at the top of each entry, upon reviewing my journal, I saw that I didn't need to do that at all... when I'm upset or in turmoil, my penmanship is messy and all over the place (mostly because my mind is racing and I'm struggling to spit the words out onto paper, but the words are usually coming faster in my head than my pen can keep up with). When I am calm and balanced, my penmanship is neat as a pin... the writing is pretty, it's neat and within the margins and lines, and usually I'm not writing about a whole lot. The difference is so starkly different that it almost smacks you when you see it. i actually didn't realize this until about a month ago when I was looking back through a journal to shred it (I keep journals to get stuff out and then I shred them... therapeutic for me).

Thanks SOOOOOO much for mentioning that. And don't think you're some crazy person... everyone is off in their own way (yes, even the "normal ppl") and what you shared was outstanding! Please feel free to post more as you wish!

Many hugs,
Kosh

No, I truly am mad. I've come to accept this. I denied it long enough. My goal is just to make it less of a hindrance, because I must admit... mania ignites a flame that I can't imagine being apart from.
I keep journals to make sure that myself is still intact and that I'm not being consumed by the definition of being cyclothymic (or bipolar, the inevitable future...).

Haha, I was actually reading an entry from two nights ago. It was strangely written, because the words became larger, then smaller, then larger.. and there wasn't much of a time lapse in-between. This was an entry written under the influence of insomnia (which I was trying to cure with alcoholic cider atop my sleeping medication which simply does not work anymore). After reading it, I've decided to take quite the hiatus from alcohol and talk to my psychiatrist about switching my medication... again. Oh, joy...

I'm oddly immune to sleeping pills. I remember going under surgery a few years back to have a tumor removed, and the anesthesiologist had injected me with something and asked if I could see/hear/understand him. I replied with a simple "Yep!"
...He was astounded. The same thing happened when my wisdom teeth were removed. I can only assume that my ancestors had some serious drug problems and passed their tolerances over to me through genetics (or is that genetic concept a myth?).

If I understand your last question, that's not the way evolution is thought to work. If you cut off rats' tails generation after generation, they continue to produce new rats with tails. Change the game so there's some survival advantage for rats with no tails and if there's a mutation somewhere in the line, you'll start seeing more new rats without tails.

Now when you're talking about drug use, it's possible sometimes to cause genetic damage. Probably though, you have the resistance to sleep meds by pure luck of the draw.

So, possible but not proven. I'm going to assume that the possible is possible, despite that.

To back this theory, I'm going to use my sister (who is adopted) as an example. My sister's parents' were avid drug users, alcohol included. She was sent into foster care after being abandoned for several days by her father. Her mother was in jail for drug trafficking or something of the like.
My sister has a high tolerance for alcohol, and for marijuana (not that she's an alcoholic or a stoner... she's more interested in her studies). She had this tolerance initially, so when she had her first drink and when she (after much pondering) tried marijuana, there was little to no effect. Her friends were high or drunk around her, and she was quite lucid, according to what she's told me.

There are also people who are hypersensitive to drugs, although being one who's been in and out of the psychiatrist's office more times than I can count I cannot fathom that phenomenon.

My dad and his family are heavy drinkers. There have also been several addicts amongst them, and I believe that one can be predisposed to addiction (not helpless, just more likely to find solace in a chemical rather than find the activity in itself dull). So, if tolerant minds breed with tolerant minds and so on and so forth, I think that the product could be doomed to be tolerant despite her own attempts in following doctors' orders.

Of course, I myself have built a tolerance to Valium (in very little time)... and so it's difficult for me to find a proper sleeping medication based on that alone. Still, as a child, I was more tolerant to things that I hadn't been introduced to before, like anesthesia (from as far back as six, having my tonsils removed and being quite frightened because it took me longer to get to sleep than it should and I couldn't convey this to the doctors... or maybe I tried to, my memory of it's fuzzy). So, while my theory holds little feasible evidence, I'd like to assume that it's true.

Unordinarymadness wrote:So, if tolerant minds breed with tolerant minds and so on and so forth, I think that the product could be doomed to be tolerant despite her own attempts in following doctors' orders.

Now that sounds like a good hypothesis to study. You'd need to clear up whether the parents are addicted or tolerant. They are two different states and don't always go together.

Someone told me once of a study of how people of different nationalities metabolize alcohol and how it supposedly backed the notion of stereotypes being true that certain groups really do hold their liquor better and could drink people from other groups under the table.

Unordinary,
I share the experience of resistance to medications with you. For some reason my body seems to be very resistant to narcotic pain killers (prescribed), almost all benzodiazapines, almost all sleep meds, and it takes a TON of anesthesia to knock my butt out. The problem with anesthesia was noticed by docs when I woke up in the middle of having my appendix out at age 9. I opened my eyes and heard "oh, SH1T" and then the anesthesiologist juiced me up with more anesthesia to the point where I didn't wake for 2 days after the operation. Ever since then, every surgery I've had, the docs have informed anesthesiologist to elephant-gun me to keep me knocked out for surgical procedures. When I take certain meds (the aforementioned) they will work for a very short period (about a week) and then totally stop working. Dunno why. This has caused me A LOT of issues when dealing with pain meds or controlled meds, as when I complain about them not working, docs have thought I was simply drug-seeking. Man, I WISH. Funny thing.... ALL of the females on my mother's side of the family share this resistance. Wanna hear the wierdest part? ALL of the males on my dad's side share this monstrously high level of pain tolerance and they never need pain meds at all. Sheesh. So even if research wouldn't support that there's some genetic connection to this resistance thing, my family's trail of drug-resistance and pain-tolerance flies in the face of that. I have dredged my brain for any common environmental factor as a thread to these phenomena, but there simply isn't one that I can come up with.

Hugs,
Kosh