The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
Living with bipolar disorder sucks! Each week Michelle Reittinger and her guests explore tools and resources that help you learn how to live well with your bipolar. If you are tired of suffering and want to live a healthy, balanced, productive life with your bipolar, this podcast was designed with you in mind.
The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
EP 75: A Practical Path To Bipolar Recovery This Year
I share a practical plan to turn New Year hope into steady recovery by choosing one habit, building agency, and treating sources of symptoms rather than endlessly managing them. I outline seven habits for healing, from mood tracking and nutrition to therapy, mindfulness, yoga, exercise, and mindful living.
• healing as a long-term process built on one change
• shifting from victim mindset to personal agency
• mood cycle survival guide and early warning signs
• micronutrients as fuel for brain function
• therapy as a facilitator for resolving sources
• mindfulness to regain control of thoughts and body
• yoga to reintegrate mind and body
• exercise for stability, not intensity
• living mindfully with weekly reviews and a clear why
• invitation to pick one habit and start now
Join the Mood Cycle Survival Guide. It’s free. Check in with us in the Upsiders' Basecamp chat for advice. If you’re ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders' Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. Grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder.
FREE Mood Cycle Survival Guide: https://theupsideofbipolar.com/free/
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It takes time to heal. It takes time to correct these symptoms and the sources of the symptoms that have taken years to develop in the first place. And so it's really important to focus on not healing as an event, but healing as a process, and that you are developing habits for healing, habits that are going to help move you towards healing. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. I'm so excited for this coming year. I feel a tremendous amount of hope and optimism for the future. And I know that that can be really hard when you're struggling with bipolar disorder. If you've had these symptoms for a long time and you have been through a lot of new years, you may have been like I used to be, where you get really excited at the beginning of the new year and you feel like maybe this year can be different. You start making plans for changes and things that you're going to do differently and hope that this year it will stick. I know that when I used to go come into the new year in the past, when I was really struggling with my bipolar symptoms, I would try to make a whole bunch of changes all at one time. I was very unhappy in my life and feeling very discouraged on a regular basis and especially after the holidays. The holidays were really hard because I would get hypomatic going into the holidays and then crash afterwards. And so a lot of times what I was doing with my New Year's resolutions was trying to get myself out of a depressive episode and wanting to make changes to my life. I didn't like the cycles that I was living in. I didn't like the symptoms that I had. And I wanted to change things. And so I would set out with a whole bunch of goals. I'm a very goal-driven person. I have been since my childhood. And so I would set up a bunch of new goals in the hopes that I could make things different, that I could change my life, that I could change the cycles that I experienced, that I could stop the symptoms. And inevitably, every year, I would try to make a whole bunch of changes at one time. I would often get hypomanic in the attempt and then crash. It was just part of the cycle. I would get hypomanic and then crash, hypomanic and then crash. And I started to have this weird anxiety going into the new year. There was a little bit of me that wanted to continue to have hope, but there, you know, our brains learn from experience. And my brain had learned over the previous, you know, New Year's experiences that every year I would try and every year I would fail. One of the things that I learned when I went through the healing process, however, is that you need to change the way that you approach the new year. I think there's a tremendous amount of value in this opportunity to check in with yourself. When you approach the new year, though, it's really important to approach it in a way that you can actually make sustainable changes. And what I would encourage you as we go through this episode is to consider what your pattern is. What has your pattern been? Are you a goal-driven person? Are you somebody that likes to try and make changes to your life? Do you get caught up in the New Year's resolution craze? Do you try to make a whole bunch of changes to your life at one time and then fail? Or are you somebody that thinks I nothing's going to get any better, nothing's going to change, so I'm just going to keep keep on keeping on and just keep surviving my life? I'd love to hear from you. So if you want to let me know what kind of person you are and what kind of person you want to be, let me know. Send me an email and let me know. But in this episode, what we're going to talk about is how to approach the new year in a way that is actually going to help you start making changes that will be lasting and help move you towards recovery and healing. So the first thing that I learned is to make sure that you are focusing on one thing at a time. If you are approaching the new year and you want to make changes, what is the one thing that you think would be most beneficial to you? What is one thing that you could work on? And the reason why focusing on one thing at a time has value is number one, it helps keep your brain, your mind from being fractured and your attention from being fractured. When you are trying to make a whole bunch of changes at one time, you're trying to think about a bunch of different things at one time. And our minds want, you know, there's there's a term in science called homeostasis that we keeps trying to find equilibrium. And the way that we have been living up to this point generally is a product of habit. And we've been, you know, kind of gotten into a rhythm in our life. And so we even if it's a, even if you're living in, you know, bipolar cycles, if you're if used to living, you know, with mania and then depression and then mania and then depression, that is a habit. Like that cycle is a habit. And your brain knows to anticipate it. If you start feeling yourself getting in or starting to get hypomatic, if you start feeling yourself going into mania, your brain knows what comes afterwards. And it's in that habit. It's in that cycle. And so if you focus on one thing at a time, it helps you to focus on it and give your attention to it so that your attention is not fractured. And that attention can help you prioritize what you're trying to work on. Number two, it helps you learn how to keep promises to yourself. One of the things I struggled with for years when I was struggling with bipolar symptoms is failing to keep promises to myself. I would, I would convince myself that this time things were going to be different. This time, you know, when it came to like, for example, by my bipolar rage symptoms, next time I have an issue with, you know, a trigger, I'm not going to go into a bipolar rage. And so every time that would happen, and I and I would go into that dissociative rage, I would feel discouraged and I would feel like I couldn't trust myself, like I couldn't count on myself. So focusing on one thing that is that is attainable and sustainable, one goal, will help you start to make promises to yourself and keep promises to yourself, and you start to trust yourself more and you start to have confidence in yourself. The third thing that focusing on one thing will help you do is that it is easier to start adapting your life to this new goal, to this new habit. So if you're just working on one thing, you're going to work it into your life. You're going to in, I shouldn't say work it into your life. You are going to schedule the time in your life and you're going to prioritize that. But as you do that, it is easier to start working it into your life so that you are your your life and your rhythm and the natural flow of things is not resisting what you're trying to do because you are focusing on one thing and you are doing it consistently, so that you are making a change and you are adapting your life. It's easier to adapt your life to one new thing than it is to try and adapt it to a whole bunch of things. And one of the things that I have developed over time. So when I first started, I've talked about this in the past. So if you're new to the podcast, this will be your first time hearing it. But if you have been listening for a while, you will have heard me use, you know, some of these terms that I have in the past. And one of the things that I started calling these new tools and resources that helped me to go to through the healing process are habits for healing. I started recognizing it took years for me to develop the symptoms that led to my bipolar diagnosis. And then I lived with those symptoms for years. And so when I was going through the healing process, it was not going to be something that happened overnight. It was going to be something that took time. It takes time to heal. It takes time to correct these symptoms and the sources of the symptoms that have taken years to develop in the first place. And so it's really important to focus on not healing as an event, but healing as a process, and that you are developing habits for healing, habits that are going to help move you towards healing. And the habits for healing that help me to recover from my bipolar are outlined in my book. So if you haven't heard my book or read my book, you could hear it too. It's on, it's on uh um audiobook. But if you haven't read my book, I would encourage you to do that. I would encourage you to get a copy of my book, whether it's on audiobook or or a hard copy or electronic version and read the book. Because one of the things that I do in the book is I talk about how I develop these habits for healing. I actually go through the process of how I discovered it and how I started learning how to use it effectively in my life. And then I talk about the specific tool. The way that the book is designed is as a self-help book. It's designed for people to be able to use and apply these things for themselves. And something that I'm going to mention here, even though I talk about and focus on helping people who have bipolar disorder or who have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, these habits and this process can help anybody who is struggling in any way in their life because they are habits for healing. They are things that are going to help you take more responsibility for yourself and look for the sources of symptoms in your life and the sources of habits in your life that are causing distress. It will help you take more responsibility for yourself and help you look for the sources and then treat the sources using these research-based tools that will help you resolve the sources of symptoms, resolve the sources of the symptoms that actually leads to healing and recovery. It's really important to make sure that you recognize that you are not a victim unless you choose to be a victim. One of the things that's so hard on this, hard on people that are given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, is that it creates in your mind this idea that you are a victim, that you don't have any control over the symptoms that you are experiencing, that it is some kind of underlying disorder or disease that is beyond your control. And that is not true. It is possible to identify, for you to become a detective in your life and identify the underlying sources of your symptoms and treat those sources using these research-based integrated tools that lead to recovery and healing. But you have to recognize that you have the ability to choose that for yourself. You are not a victim unless you choose to be. You are not a victim to this disorder, to these symptoms, unless you choose to be. So I want to go through today and I want to talk about each of the habits for healing that I teach in my program, that I share in my book, that help me to recover and that are helping other people to recover. And as I go through these, I want you to think about where you are in your life right now and what do you think might be most beneficial to you? Because I would encourage you as we come to the go through this podcast episode, that you identify one thing that you are going to be working begin working on at the beginning of this new year. What is the one thing that you think will be most beneficial to you as you work towards healing and recovery and living a healthy, productive life? Living the life that you want to live, becoming the person you want to be. So when I first started the healing process, the very first, and I didn't know, I've I've told you this before, but I didn't know I was healing. I believed what I had been told about bipolar being a lifelong and curable condition. And I was just looking for a way to recover. I was looking for for a way to uh not recover, but I was looking for a way to manage it better. I had the experience that I've shared in my book and that I've shared before in the podcast, where I was home from my third hospitalization. I've made multiple attempts on my life at that point and had become totally hopeless. And I truly believed that everybody in my life would be better off if I was not around anymore. I was looking, my brain was looking for a way to find relief, and I was not finding it in the treatment. And I was convinced that I was ruining everybody's lives, I was ruining my husband's life, I was ruining my children's lives, and I thought they would be better off if I was gone. But I had an experience watching my young children play one day when I realized that if I ever successfully ended my life, that it would ruin my daughter's life, that she would believe it was her fault and it would ruin her life. And from that point forward, I became determined to find a way to survive. And then a little over a year later, after a third, a fourth hospitalization, I was watching my children play and I had this realization: nobody is coming to save you. You have to find a way to save yourself. And that was the beginning of me starting to take responsibility for myself. You know, the the beginning of, you know, this realization that I had to find a way to survive was kind of the beginning of that. But I was just hanging on for dear life. I still felt like a victim. I felt still felt very helpless. But when I had this other experience after my fourth hospitalization, I started recognizing you've got to stop being a victim. You know these symptoms are coming, you know they're coming. So find a way to manage them. Find a way to be more proactive about managing them. Stop being a victim to them every time. And that was the beginning of step one, it which was the mood cycle survival guide. And this is step one in my program. It's the free resource that I offer to anybody who just wants something to help them because it's the first time that you start to accept responsibility for yourself. It's when you start recognizing you can take ownership of these symptoms and do something about it. And the reason why this is such a powerful tool is that you acknowledge your need for assistance. You start recognizing you're drawing on other people all the time for help. But if you can, if you can set healthy boundaries around that assistance, you can maybe preserve the relationships instead of burning them out. It helps you to start becoming a detective in your life using the early warning system. Starting to pay attention to your symptoms and call them out for what they are. And look for triggers in your life. What are the things that are actually triggering the symptoms to occur? This is the beginning of becoming a detective. That's a beginning of you becoming proactive and starting to identify what the sources of the symptoms are. It's also you taking ownership in step three of this mood of this mood cycle survival guide of your emotional resources. We can feel like a victim to our symptoms when you're feeling tremendous depression, when you're overwhelmed with depression and you feel like you can't function and you feel like you're you're failing other people, but then you feel like, well, I can't help it. You know, I just have this disorder and I just can't help it. There is a temptation to give into that victim mentality and not take responsibility for yourself. But learning how to manage your emotional resources by setting power priorities is taking responsibility for yourself. It is recognizing what are the things that matter most when I have low emotional resources and I'm going to make sure those things get my energy. I am going to do those things when I'm struggling so that the things that matter most get done. And then the last step in this mood cycle survival guide is uh rebooting your system. What can I do proactively to get myself back into a healthy, balanced mental state? So this step one is helping you to stop to choose to stop being a victim. You are going to choose to be an agent to act, not somebody to be, you know, not a thing to be active acted upon by your symptoms and by your quote unquote disorder. You're not going to keep making excuses for your behavior. You're going to start being proactive about choosing how to proactively manage your symptoms, how to become a detective in your life and start looking for sources of symptoms, how to manage your emotional resources and how to get yourself back into a healthy, balanced mental state. That is the step, the first step on the road to healing is starting to take responsibility for yourself and choosing not to be a victim anymore. The second step in the healing process was making sure that you're making sure your brain gets what it needs to function in a healthy way. It's so interesting to me. I and if you haven't listened to episodes 70, 71, and 72 of my podcast, I would encourage you to go back. Those are life-changing episodes. I had that privilege of interviewing the vice president of True Hope, David Stefan, as he talked about the history of True Hope. It's a micronutrient company that was developed specifically for the purpose of helping the founder's children to get off of psychotropic drugs to help their brains start to heal and function in a healthy way. It's it is remarkable what they discovered in this in this process of trying to save his kids' lives. And it's interesting because we have become so convinced that a bipolar diagnosis is identifying a chemical imbalance. It's identifying an underlying disease. And it's not true. A bipolar diagnosis is only identifying a cluster of symptoms. And those symptoms have sources. And one of the underlying sources of most people's mental health distress is micronutrient insufficiency. It's one of the reasons why there is such a dramatic increase in the number of people who are developing anxiety and depression and even bipolar symptoms, psychosis, because our brains are not getting what they need to function in a healthy way. The four building blocks of the neurotransmitters in our brains, according to David Stefan and the research that has been done, are number one vitamins, number two, minerals, number three, omega-3s, and number four amino acids. Our brains need all four of those and adequate levels in order to build and produce the neurotransmitters that are responsible for all of our emotional response and the way that our brain functions and the way that we respond to the world and handle stress. And if it's insufficient, if it is not getting a sufficient level of those nutrients, it won't function in a healthy way. And it results, it can result in very serious symptoms. One of the things that I get a lot of pushback when I talk about the benefits of micronutrients and helping to heal, one of the main sources of bipolar symptoms is that people say, Yeah, but not psychosis, because we are convinced psychosis is a very scary symptom. It really is. So is mania. They're scary symptoms. And we've become convinced that because those symptoms are really scary, that they are somehow an indication of some kind of a disease that is genetic that we don't have any control over. Truly, what it is, is our brains are not getting what it needs to function in a healthy way. That is the one main, one of the underlying sources of those symptoms. And so that step two, once you start taking responsibility and start becoming a detective in your life, the second thing you need to do is make sure your brain is getting what it needs to function in a healthy way. And if you're on psychotropic medications and you're you're wanting to titrate off of them, I urge you to do that with the health of micronutrients because what that helps you do, instead of just taking the drug away, those psychotropic medications change your brain chemistry. They alter your brain chemistry, which is why people end up so symptomatic when they go through withdrawal. That's why people end up with serious symptoms. Sometimes Life-threatening symptoms when they try to withdraw from the medications. But if you will do it in a safe and very slow way using the micronutrients, what happens is your brain gets what it needs to heal. And then you're slowly withdrawing the medication so that it helps your brain adjust more in a safer way. And helps your brain actually heal and function. And so I urge you, if you are wanting to come off of your medications and you're ready, you think you're ready to start this process, listen to those episodes and check out my book and learn more about how to safely titrate off of medications and help your brain actually heal. The third step in the process, in the healing process, is learning how to use therapy in a proactive way to heal, not just for validation and coping. Therapy can be very destructive. If you are going to talk therapy and all you're doing is talking about your problems and you're getting validated constantly and your emotions and your feelings by your therapist, that is counterproductive and it is not going to help you heal. It is going to make things worse. It is really crucial, if you want to heal, that you learn how to use therapy in a proactive way. It's really important that you understand that a therapist is not an expert. They are a facilitator. And you need to find a competent facilitator that is actually going to help you heal and move towards recovery, not just help you stay stuck in your suffering. Yes, it might feel good to go to a therapist and talk about your problems, you know, talk about your issues with your spouse or your mother or whoever and be validated in your in your frustration and in your point of view, but that's not going to help you heal. If you are constantly getting validated by your therapist, you need a new therapist. You need a therapist that is going to help you look for the sources of your issues and treat the source in a way that you are in the driver's seat, not letting somebody else, you know, dictate to you because, you know, oh, you know, I I had a, and I'm not, I shouldn't, I need to be careful. I'm starting to get flippant in this, but it gets, I get very frustrated when I see people who are have been going to therapy for 20 years and are still no better off than they were before because they don't know how to use therapy to actually heal. You should not need therapy for the rest of your life. If you are in in therapy and you've been in it for 10, 15, 20 years, you need a new therapist. Because therapy, the goal of therapy, should be helping you identify the underlying sources of your symptoms. If you have underlying, you know, if you have trauma that hasn't been processed, you need to find a competent trauma, you know, therapist who is trauma informed, who has been trained in modalities like EMDR or internal family systems therapy. Somebody who knows how to help you identify the underlying trauma and treat that trauma in a way that will help you resolve it so you can move on with your life. You need a therapist who will help you identify unhealthy coping mechanisms and unhealthy thought behavior patterns that are producing symptoms. We can do this to ourselves. We can create these symptoms for ourselves because we've we've our brain has come up with an unhealthy way to cope with distress. And we could be causing our own symptoms by the way that we think about things. So step three in the program is helping you to identify how to use therapy in a proactive way to heal, not just cope and not get validated by your therapist. The fourth step in the program, and the fourth step on the path to healing, is learning how to practice mindfulness meditation in a way that will help you actually heal. And it's interesting, I've had a lot of people say that they've tried meditation and it didn't help them. And my pushback on that is that you probably haven't tried it in a way that was actually going to help you understand the value of the tool. Because I believe, I truly believe, every person on this earth would benefit from using mindfulness meditation. The point of mindfulness meditation is to put you back in the driver's seat of your mind. What are you, when you struggle, when people struggle with these symptoms, often it feels like your brain has a mind of its own and it's going to take you for a ride every time it feels like it. And, you know, symptoms like intrusive thoughts and negative thoughts and you know, these things that are that plague us in our minds can help us to feel like our mind is our enemy. And, you know, the symptoms, like the the physical sensations that go along with a trauma response, for example, can help us, can cause us again to feel like a victim, like we are helpless and we don't have any control over what's going on in our bodies and our minds. Mindfulness is a way to start putting yourself back in the driver's seat and to take control of what's happening in your mind and your body. Take back control so that you are not being pulled along like a helpless victim. Mindfulness meditation can be life-changing if you learn how to use it in a proactive way to heal. The fifth step in the program is yoga. And I again will get the same kinds of objections to yoga that I get to mindfulness meditation often. Somebody will say, I tried yoga once and I didn't like it. And again, I say, I think that maybe you just tried it, you know, a version of an approach to yoga that just wasn't beneficial to you specifically. But yoga, the goal of yoga is not to be a skinny girl in stretchy pants. The goal of yoga is to learn how to reintegrate your mind and your body. One of the terrible effects of these mental health diagnoses, and it is it kind of fractures our mind and our body because we become convinced that the distress is all in our head, that we have some kind of mental disorder that is, and it separates our mind and our body. And you can't, you shouldn't be trying to separate it. It fractures us as a person. The mind and body is all one. We're all, it all works together. You know, our brain senses distress and it sends signals to the body, and the body reacts, and then the brain reacts to the body, and it's it creates a feedback loop that that can put us into a state of distress that that makes us feel like we don't have any control over ourselves anymore. And learning how to practice yoga helps take that mindfulness practice into our entire body and helps us integrate ourselves again and become much more self-aware. And the more self-aware we become, the more effective we become at being detectives in our lives and looking for the sources of our symptoms and addressing those sources with tools that help us to heal. Yoga can be a really powerful tool in this in this healing process. The sixth step in this in this process is exercise. And when I talk about exercise for mental health and mental healing, it's really important to learn how to exercise in a way that supports that goal. We have, we are inundated constantly with messages of, you know, online about losing weight and getting fit. And those, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. But it's really important if you're working on healing and overcoming emotional and mental distress, that you learn how to use exercise in a way that will facilitate healing and recovery and not exacerbate symptoms. Some people will get hyper-focused and it can become, it can become a source of like hypomania when you get when you are exercising like that, and that is not sustainable. You will crash at some point. And it you don't want to do that. You want to find a practice, an exercise approach that is going to be sustainable, lifelong. And and it's you're exercising for your mind and your whole self, not for the scale. So learning how to exercise in a way that is beneficial to your mental health and your healing journey is really important. And then the step, the seventh step in this process is learning how to live mindfully, learning how to take all of these habits that you have developed and develop a habit for continuing to integrate these resources and these habits in your life in a sustainable way so that you continue to move down the path to recovery and healing. I want to ask you guys a question. I want you to consider this for a moment. What is the reason that you want to heal? What is the reason that you want to recover? I've talked about this in previous episodes, but I want to encourage you to think about it. If you are looking at the new year and wanting to set goals, why? Why do you want to set goals for yourself? Why do you want to improve? Why do you want to heal? Why do you want to live better? Think about the reason why you want to do that. And then write it down. And I want to encourage you to kind of dig down into the why. My why at the very beginning was my children. As I mentioned before, I had the experience when I recognized that if I ever successfully ended my life, I would ruin my daughter's life. And I knew her life had value. At that point, I did not believe my life had any value. I didn't think I had anything to offer the world because I was barely hanging on for dear life on a regular basis. I was just surviving my life. I didn't feel like I had anything to offer the world, but I knew my daughter did. And I was willing to survive for her because I wanted her to have a chance at a health, you know, at having a happy life. And over time, as I, as I fought to survive for my children, and as I started to heal, I started to find myself again. And I started to see my value. I started to feel my value and recognize that I did have something to offer to the world. And that why that I had originally of surviving for my children evolved. So I want to ask you to consider why this matters to you. Why are you willing to set a goal for yourself? Why, why would you like to? Why would you like to heal? Why would you like to change your life? What is the what is your motivation? And get that firmly in mind because when you're going through the process of trying to set goals that are designed to help you change significant things about yourself, you have to have a reason to keep doing it because it gets hard. On the days that, you know, if you're if your focus is mindfulness meditation right now, if that's the habit for healing that you want to focus on, you have to have a reason to keep doing it because sometimes you just don't feel like doing it. You know, some mornings you get up and you're like, I don't want to do that today. Or sometimes you're ready to go to bed and you you haven't done your meditation yet. And it, you have to have a reason that you're willing to spend 10 minutes meditating rather than just getting in bed and going to sleep. So make sure you have a clear reason why you're doing this. And I would love to hear from you what your why is. What is your motivation for working on, you know, working on healing and recovery? What is it that you want out of your life? What's worth the sacrifice and the effort of healing? And then I want to encourage you to think about what you can do right now that will help move you towards healing. And as I mentioned at the very beginning, when we view our lives and when you look at yourself and you think about all of the things that you're struggling with, we want to fix all of it at one time. You want it, you know, you want to get on a better schedule and you want to you want to be more active in your life, and you want to, you want to gain self-control over your outbursts. You want to stop, you know, yelling or going into rages. You want to stop spending money compulsively and and running your debt up. And and you want to be able to, you know, whatever it is, you you want to be able to stop living in in the manic depressive cycle. Whatever the thing is that you're wanting to change, don't try to change it all at one time because it won't be sustainable and you won't be successful. Pick one habit for healing that you're going to work on. What is the one thing that you think of these seven habits that I've talked about? What's the one habit that you think would be most beneficial to you right now? Have you developed a mid-cycle survival guide for yourself yet? Have you started working on choosing not to be a victim and choosing to be proactive and managing your symptoms, in setting healthy boundaries around the assistance that you asked for, in identifying the sources of your symptoms, and managing your emotional resources and learning how to get yourself back into a healthy, balanced mental state. Have you worked on that yet? If you haven't, I highly encourage you to go sign up for the mood cycle survival guide. It's free. Check in with me in the chat there. There's a Basecamp, Upsiders Basecamp chat that you can check in and ask for advice about how to develop your mood cycle survival guide. Make that your priority. Make that your goal. You're going to work on it for 10, 15 minutes every day. You're going to work on developing this mood cycle survival guide for yourself. If you're ready for cross-titration, if you're going to work on that, that's your priority. Make that your priority. That's the thing you're going to work on right now. If you're somebody who would like support, you know, I, as I mentioned before, that my book is designed as a self-help book. Somebody could potentially take that book and go through each of the steps and learn how to apply each of the steps on their own. I did it by myself. It was really hard and it took a long time that I was, I was able to do it. But I I encourage you, if you really are serious about healing and recovery, to consider joining the upsiders tribe because the upsiders tribe gives you a place to be accountable, to have a sense of community and be encouraged by other people going through the same process. You get feedback from me and from the other people in the tribe who are going through the same thing, advice about how to apply these tools and resources in an effective way. The way that this tribe is set up, number one, you've got each of there are seven modules for one for each of the habits that help you learn how to apply that tool, how to how to develop that tool for yourself and how to apply it and develop a habit for healing. Each module has weekly assignments that you're going to do and you know to work on, to start working on developing this habit for yourself. And then we have weekly tribe Zooms where everybody in the tribe, everybody who's in the program, joins the Zoom and they share how they're doing, you know, how things went that week on the whatever they're working on. And they get feedback from me. You get coaching from me in the in the group, and then also feedback from other members of the group who've maybe have gone through that already and have advice about how they were able to be effective in applying that tool and developing that habit. And then once a month, you get a one-on-one session with me so that we make sure that you are on track, that you are working on the things that are going to be most beneficial to you and at your point in the healing and recovery process. So if you're ready to heal and you want support, I encourage you to consider joining the Upsiders Tribe. It is a tremendous program that really offers support and encouragement and guidance in the healing and recovery process. Regardless, I hope that you will choose a habit to work on. What is your habit for healing that is going to help you move towards your why? Move towards the goal that you have for yourself, the desire that you have for yourself, for your life. Pick something and begin the new year with new hope that you can move towards healing and recovery. If you have any questions, I encourage you to go into the show notes and send me an email. My link to my email is in there. Comment on our social media and let us know how things are going for you. If you haven't started the Mood Cycle Survival Guide yet, join that. It's free. If you have any questions, let me know. And I will see you on the next episode. Until next time, upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders