![]() ![]() Physical: We could contract STDs, or liver disease, and increase our chances of a heart attack. If you’ve not been affected to this extent, bully for you.) (This is an accurate portrayal of my own life pre-diagnosis, not me being misleadingly melodramatic. We continuously disappoint and frustrate our families, relationships fracture, then crumble, to be swept away by the wind. By then, we’re prisoners inside our own homes, until we lose our homes altogether. We can’t pay our bills, have our electricity and gas unceremoniously cut off. We may purposefully mislead our colleagues, choosing to explain we were very, very, drunk at the time, to protect our ‘bipolar secret’.įinancial: We require funding to fuel our impulsive addictions, so we fund our extravagant lifestyle on credit cards, take out huge loans, or giant mortgages we don’t have a hope of repaying. Vocational: We cause upheaval in the workplace, and can risk losing our jobs (especially if our employers have no inkling of what our disorder is, or does). Social: We are forced to deal with the excruciating and devastating ramifications of other people’s reactions to what we said or did. Relational: We lose friends and alienate people, sabotage family dynamics. We’re hopeless, useless, every negative word that ends in ‘ess’. Our impulsive actions cause us private humiliation, public humiliation (especially if we are arrested), as well as humiliation to our families and close friends.Įmotional: Our self-esteem takes a giant hit. Personal: We experience intense, debilitating shame, guilt, fear and embarrassment once our tsunami of mania has passed and we’re left flailing and drowning in a sea of destruction. Impulsivity wreaks havoc in (at least) eight areas of our well-being: ![]() Whether we’re spending, gambling (our money, or our lives), drinking, taking (unprescribed) drugs, engaged in risky sexual encounters, investing in crazy schemes, shop-lifting, driving an insane speeds, living in the fast lane in every possible way, if we’re bipolar, and we’ve not yet accepted treatment, there are countless, calamitous times when we’ve failed to control our illogical compulsions, manage our mouths, or abort self-sabbotaging actions. There is no limit to our impulsivity during manic episodes. We act without any regard to the consequences, or fall-out of our actions. We crave excitement and have intense needs for the highs (and subsequent mania-combating mellowness) associated with taking risky actions. We get bored fast and the rational side (chink?) of our bipolar brains is overpowered easily by our impulses. We don’t think about the future carefully, or at all. “If I have, or do this, my impulse will be quietened and my life will improve.” ![]() So, we act rashly, giving in (without knowing we’re giving in) to our urgent desire to avoid the negative feelings associated with resisting what we want. Impulsivity has been identified as having 4 tributary dimensions: Our bipolarity creates a vicious cycle of extreme behaviors. For us, our irrational impulses when we’re manic are often the reason we hate ourselves when we’re depressed. Impulsivity is generally interpreted to represent acting and speaking without thinking, or caring, about the consequences. (And if I sound a little bit sarcastic about my experiences at the hands of the No Hope Saloon (NHS), I’m not being sarcastic enough.) ![]() Before that, the good old NHS in England had accounted all of my psychotic, rapid cycler bipolar 1 mood swings to a problem with my thyroid. My kamikaze impulsivity to spend, spend, spent (yes, ‘spent’ is not a typo) eventually led me to a diagnosis. In order to fan, or douse, the flames of mania, we are prone to the most vicious and costly forms of impulsivity. Y’see, non-bipolar readers? We’re just like you. While others may spontaneously pick up a chocolate bar in a supermarket queue and chastise themselves later for impulsively buying and eating it (big deal!), our careless conduct can lead us to cataclysmic credit card sprees, alcohol and cocaine addiction, reckless sexual encounters, speeding, stealing, divorce, homelessness, sectioning, arrest and a prison sentence. For those of us living with bipolar disorder, impulsivity adds a whole new chaotic dimension to our lives. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |