#168: My volatile mood
Over the last 18 months I have begun to notice a volatility in my mood.
I’m not sure whether it’s always been there, and was perhaps covered up by the daily commute and a busier life and now with more time and more quiet I have begun to notice it more.
My mood oscillates between happy, sad, excited, anxious - there’s nothing special there - I imagine that’s the same for everyone.
What I have noticed recently though is the extremities of those peaks and those troughs.
I can have very intense periods of feeling unstoppable, feeling on top of the world, where I’ll feel a surging in my fingertips, intense joy for everything around me. I’ll feel completely connected and present I’ll love all of life and everything around me. I’ll spring out of bed, I’ll take on every challenge as if it’s a joy to participate in. I’ll be high on life.
These feelings of euphoria and a pure love of life can last for a moment, a day or a week. Every time I experience them I surf them and try my best to enjoy the ride whilst it lasts.
Sometimes I gently return to a more neutral mood, where I may still be upbeat but the oscillations are less extreme, there’s a peak but the incline isn’t quite as sharp.
The positive extremity of my mood is quite intoxicating and genuinely enjoyable. It’s exhilarating.
My output and creativity are often off the charts, I’m able to think extremely expansively, I feel very creative and I can type like the speed of light. I’m in flow.
However, the high peak is unsustainable and untethered sometimes from reality, it’s as if I’ve sailed off into the clouds, possibly a little deluded along the way.
What comes up, must go down and just as I can experience intoxicating feelings of joy and elation I can also find myself feeling the opposite, to the same extent.
Just as often as I have those highs I experience real lows in my mood too.
These periods are as frequent as the above, yet just as I can feel like my head is in the clouds, I can feel at rock bottom with nowhere to go.
I experienced a low like this earlier this week. I think I was feeling it all week. I began by feeling numb, where I couldn’t really feel much at all and as the week went on I descended into a pit of sadness and despair with no clear reason as to why.
I felt empty, dark and desolate. I felt deeply sad and upset and didn’t know why, as if my whole world was crumbling around me. That was my Friday night.
Lying on the floor with my legs up the wall (a yoga pose before bed I’d recommend), I just began to cry, close to a sob. Again, I couldn’t understand why. It just happened.
The world that just a week ago might have looked beautiful and rich with colour and life suddenly didn’t seem real, it looked bleak, stale and hopeless. The same place, just with a different view.
Then the following day. A slow climb back to neutral. Feeling a bit raw and slightly embarrassed by my despairing evening the night before, but climbing back to neutral nonetheless.
This pattern of my mood I have experienced for about 18-24 months now. The soaring highs and the depressing lows, coming once a month each perhaps. A google search and a self-diagnoses could possibly categorise some of those behaviours under the bi-polar label. Whilst I often push labels away, there is something about those mildly manic tendencies that I find reassuring to label, it helps me understand and accept them more.
I’m not writing this to come out about my mental health, nor do I feel like anything is particularly wrong or that I desire to change. I’ve come to accept the high highs and the low lows as part of what make me, me. I want to experience all of life fully, to it’s extremities. To go up to space and to go far below the surface with all the peaks and troughs along the way, that’s the full range of the human experience for me - something I crave.
It helps to have people around me who pull me out of the holes or bring me back down to earth, without that I think this might be a different kind of post, one where I might not feel too good about the volatility of my mood.
I wonder too, if many creatives experience what I am describing. I know that many Artists, Entrepreneurs, Actors or Musicians can feel and experience life very intensely in every direction.
Writing about this feels important to me, because this is me and it’s part of how I operate and function (or don’t) in this world.
Today, I’m somewhere in the middle, which feels a good place to be. Funnily enough I’m writing this outside looking at the river going out, the outdoors has a neutralising affect on me.
I wonder if this might nudge you to notice your own pattern of mood too? I hope so.
Cheers,
James x
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