sunshower wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
sunshower wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
vigorous exercise [the dripping sweat-huffing and puffing kind, for at least an hour daily] saved me from depression. the pills also helped but mainly it was the physical activity which did the heavy lifting.
I do this too. It's nearly always been enough to pull me out of even the heaviest "drops" (I call them "drops" because I have bipolar and sometimes I can drop suddenly into quite severe depressive states) except for yesterday, when I experienced complete disassociation in the middle of an intense exercise session.
I've experienced extended Major Depression periods when I was younger, felt almost like becoming robotic where you mindlessly go about daily living without feeling anything except occasional despair.
being robotically numb would've been a vast improvement over where i was in the depths of my despair when i was feeling totally worthless and ugly and undeserving of life. i would've been so "happy" if only i could just be robotic at those points.
I've had both, and being numb isn't an improvement. It's its own form of despair, which is hard to explain until you experience it.
I've had depression where one feels worthless and everything seems intensely bad and negative. That's very bad, but I can have states where I get
even worse, where I can't seem to feel anything. The technical term for this is anhedonia. It is truly awful because it is extremely hard to get motivated to do even the most basic of things. If I'm in the earlier stages of depression, sometimes vigourous exercise can slow down or stop the descent, but if slip past into anhedonia than I can't out without medication. The problem is it often takes me
days (I am not exaggerating) to start thinking about see my dr. and start taking meds. I have lost jobs because of this where I can't go to work, but also can't seem to do anything much about it.
Exercising is great, I can actually lower my dose of mood-stabilizer if I'm exercising regularly. I tried 3 times in my 20s to control my bipolar without meds and using exercise alone. Sadly, it did not work. I need a mood-stabilizer or I won't be able to function in life often with some other meds too.
It is interesting you call them "drops". It
really does feel like the "bottom just falls out" sometimes, almost overnight!
Yes, I need stabilizers too although I find exercise helps. I've had periods of complete anhedonia (although I didn't use the technical term before because I know many people don't know it). For me the drops can happen in a matter of seconds - I might be in a state of negative/despairing depression, then suddenly "drop" so fast into a lower state that out of the blue I seriously think of killing myself in that moment, or (without meds) I actually sort of collapse onto the ground into a state of mental oblivion. I think it happens so rapidly for me because I'm an ultradian or ultra rapid cycler (off meds I was ultradian, on meds I'm ultra rapid cycling; weekly to fortnightly).
17 May 2012, 8:09 pm
