Coping with arousal states better
(Mania Busting)
This article was written for those who have been told that they are suffering from something called "Manic Depression". It is a technique to be used if they find their thoughts and energy level speeding up again.......It has worked for me. It might do for you - B.D.
Mania is just a state of continual excitement. It is just as if your birthday was tomorrow when you were a child and you cannot sleep because of looking forward to presents and attention. There is no gap between impulse to act and action. You need to put that gap back in. To break the excitement the following is suggested:
1. Lie on your back on a firm but comfortable surface with your knees in the air and your hands lightly on your hips and a comfortable cushion for your head. This minimises the arch in your lower back and is best for relaxing tension in the shoulders. (Posture from the Alexander Technique)
2. In the racing mind there are a thousand things you tell yourself you have to do (underneath it is often to bring you greater glory and, if you think about it, notice how often you hope other people will think you are wonderful for doing all those things you want to race off to do.)
3. Redirect the energy of your racing thoughts "onto the brakes" - i.e. think why you should not do what you impulsively want to. Give yourself lots of reasons - e.g. because if you do not break the mania you will discredit yourself again, because it is all an egotrip to draw attention to yourself, because someone else could do it better, because what you want to do can be done with less effort if you think about it some more, because if it is important it requires careful planning, because wth so many things to do you require to schedule your time better, because with so many things to do you ought to be thinking of what you are going to give up doing etc. etc.
4. Once you have busted the impulse to act redirect your attention to your body. Notice the state of your body. (e.g. your feet are in a bad shape for walking around so much, in your hurry to do things you have cut yourself shaving, your breathing is shallow and faster, your heart beat is fast and furious). Do not try to do anything. Getting off mania is stopping doing things - just observe.(Returning to break any impulse to act with the brakes on action if you need to)
5. Observe the tensions in your muscles. If you were about to start a race you would tense yourself under starters orders. If you were sitting down and just about to stand you would tension those muscles needed to raise you before you moved. There is a brief period of tension before any body movement in the appropriate muscles. It is a "ready to go state"- a period of tension where one is on a hair trigger ready to precipitate into action. (Think of your adrenalin awash body and the body sensation corresponding to your mania as being like a runner poised to sprint).
6. Become more observant of this body tension. How does it work? You tense your muscles complex (interrelated muscular system) towards specific points. Look for these points. Observe where they are in your body in your excitement state. For example if you are startled you pull your shoulder muscles into a point in your body that raises your shoulders. Find these points of tension.
7. Let the normal process of breathing in and out of your body wash these tensions away. Once you have found the centres of tension let them go.
8. If this releases feelings like a desire to cry or old memories of hurts, or rythmic release of body tensions, let it happen. In the privacy of your room no one is hurt. Holding your body tense may have been covering up or blocking a desire to express other feelings - underneath you may want to snarl or sneer for example - something you have not done since you were a child but which express your true feelings about the situation that has wound you up. In privacy let yourself. (In the company of others you will be able to hide your feelings as normal if you want to!)
9. You may not have noticed what your body is saying to you for a long time. Do not be alarmed by your strong heart beat - you are probably not having a heart attack because it is going fast you are just getting used to noticing things you haven't noticed for a while.
10. Stay on your bed or hard surface till you have calmed right down. Doing this the first time might take one to three days all the way through but it might be much shorter. You will know when it is safe to get up when you don't want to because you are feeling deliciously lazy. If this seems to indefinite, particular on the first occasion set aside at least a day before you do anything.
11. After your "lazy bones" (experience of the body without much muscular tension) you might get bored. Then get up and tidy up the mess you made in your mania.
12. Reflect how you can use these ideas in your everyday life. For example, a part of yourself has been "observer and manager". Cultivate this part of yourself and give it space and time. If things are getting stressful and you are getting wound up set aside more and more time for self observation and for scheduling/ controlling how much you want to do and how you are going to do it. Let your "internal observer and manager" become aware of your motivations vis a vis other people. (A well functioning system, including the mind, must have a regulator/feedback system. This is what you are developing - self control!).
13. Restrain the urge to rush off to tell your psychiatrists or tell him off for misleading you about manic depression. It will only end up winding you up when he rejects what you say. The adrenalin will be back, the anger or frustration and the urge to do things. Reflect that some things are best achieved by not doing things. (c.f. The Chinese philosophy of Taoism). When psychiatric patients no longer need their psychiatrists they do not go to them. If these ideas work why bother to attack psychiatry. Psychiatry's ideas about manic depression will crumble quicker when it loses it patients not if they queue up to have a row. Ask yourself: are your manias really a reflection of something deeper in your life? Here are some thoughts on madness in general that may help you:
Developing Body Awareness
This section is meant to help you tune into your body as explained in points 6, 7 and 8. You do not have to wait for a threatened manic episode to try these ideas out and it might help you, indeed, if you know a bit more about what you are doing before you get stressed out and aroused. The rationale of doing this is to notice the way emotions affect muscles and body use. In early infancy there is no gap between emotion and emotional expression. - later most of us learn to hold back tears, anger, or the expression of fear. The tension is that holding back and our bodies can come to be thrown into chronic imbalances as we hold our bodies in particular ways. Hunched and held up shoulders in the 'startled posture' are an example. Our emotions have characteristic postural manifestations - weak kneed, stiff necked, twisted describe the personality through describing the alignment and pattern of muscular imbalances in the body.
One technique useful for becoming aware of this is Alexander Technique. Over time we do not notice that we are holding ourselves in a particular way. It becomes so much a part of ourselves. Alexander was an actor who kept losing his voice and noticed that this did not happen if he put his head forwards and upwards which relaxed his vocal chords. But breaking his old body usage habits proved more difficult then he thought it might. His old body habits had a familiar "rightness feeling" about them - he kept doing the opposite of what he wanted to do! Alexander set to work studying how one used one's body better. Part of this was about how one breaks out of familiar ways of using one's body in the old way. He came to the conclusion he had to do two things. 1. He had to break his old habit . 2. He had to use his body in a new way. Inhibition was his method of breaking his old habit. We cannot really develop new behaviours until we have created the space for them by inhibiting the old ones. This meant not moving but observing. In order to get a new use of his body he thought a permission for his body to take a more efficient alignment while he inhibited willed movement. (While standing he 'said the words in his head' "Let my neck be free to let my head go forward and up, to let my torso lengthen and widen, to release my thighs away and forward of my body to and to let my shoulders widen". ) Over time his body released itelf according to the directions for more efficient usage which he had given himself. He actually grew taller.
Learning to relax is about inhibiting active movement but giving yourself permission to release tension in your muscle system. It is about lying on your bed exploring subtly how your muscular system is tensed up.
Preliminaries. A firm but soft surface might be the floor with a doubled up duvet on it. Stay warm. When your muscles are cold they shiver - i.e. they do not relax!
The aim is to observe and to inhibit willed action and movement but your body and the muscular system must and will move. For example your heart will keep on beating with luck and you must keep on breathing.
Observe your breathing. Is it fast, slow, deep or shallow? Is it in your chest, your belly or both?
What is interesting about breathing is that most of the time you do it without thinking but you can bring it under conscious control. Breathing is at the boundrary between your body operating automatically and you deciding how you will use your body.
Think about this as a border line that is somewhat blurred and play with this idea gently. For example, observe your breathing without trying to change it for a while and then breath out, deliberately, say, an extra 5%.
Observe the feeling in your muscular system as you lie in the Alexander Posture. (point 1 above). Observe the systems of muscles in three dimensional space not just as "bits of your body". Become aware of the feeling under your skin.
Concentrate for example on your neck and think the Alexander permission for better body use (modify it yourself for a laid down position). Is there a tension in your head-chin-neck-shoulders space which if, when released, makes your breathing easier and deeper? Do not move your neck - observe for the tension, the holding, in your muscle system. Then release the tension, the clenched feeling in the muscles.
Is there a tension or a clenched feeling in the arch of your lower back? Release it slowly.
Observe your shoulders as areas in three dimensional space. Are they hunched, clenched and taught? Locate in your observation the exact point where the tension is and release/open up that shoulder area.
Notice how the release of a muscular tension will often release a deep breath. Notice how your breathing and your muscular holding go together so that when you hold or clench a muscle (or a group of muscles) it tenses your breathing which becomes shallower. By "opening up" you breath deeper and easier.
Doing these things may also bring back the memory of childhood or buried trauma - perhaps as you let go the tension in an arm it reminds you of how someone once grapped you painfully and violently by it. Perhaps as you release the twisted posture and tension in your thigh you might remember how you turned away and tensed yourself as someone regularly smacked you there. If so cry the tears that you have a right to cry for the younger self that you are rediscovering, the self that had to armour itself against the hurts and brutalities of the adult world.
What might also be alarming at first is that the release of holding at points in your body might release shakes or rythmic movement in the parts of the body attached to it. (e.g. in the arm after release of tension/"opening up" a shoulder). Do not be alarmed. When you want to you can regain control and stop this movement. After a while the release of holding at strategic points of your body may mean rather spastic like movements - do not panic at this. If you could control this spasticity before you can again but this time through choice of use of muscles in which combination. Console yourself by thinking how this is going to improve your sex life.....The rythmic release of body tension can take a number of different forms......(How far are some epilepsies due to stress, tension plus body postures and poor self awareness?)
You may find when you get good at this you that the muscle release sensation feels rather delicious.
As you become more sensitive to your body you can explore pattern of muscular interactions. For example, this morning while doing this kind of self observation with my feet soles downwards and knees upwards I felt a desire to swivel the toes of my right foot slightly outwards. I gave way to this desire but then thought better and moved my foot back to where it was. I then noticed which muscles in my lower leg were tensed by my foot in the (old) position that I had wanted to move from. I was then able to trace a line through my thigh across my body into my back. In fact it was that point in my back where the doctor told me I had fibrositis. This is also the point of tension in my body from a twisted way of standing and sitting where, when I have been crazy I have felt as if I was being regularly stung or whipped on. Actually this was the point of my body where energy flows in an very tense state were regularly discharging into and which led to some spectacular behaviour on the psychiatric ward (Perhaps this might be the result of a accident in PE which slightly jarred and twisted my spine and rib cage. The same twistedness has given me problem in the sesamoid bones in my right foot - the ball of the feet.)
All this is a long way from being manic. It is far more interesting than running around winding yourself and other people up.
Brian Davey
© BRIAN DAVEY