Caffeine – A Friend At The Gym

So this is a short one. Over at Science Daily they report that researchers at Sheffield Hallam University found that caffeine is a performance enhancer in sports when taken with carbohydrates. The results were two fold, and rather shocked me. First is that caffeine with carbohydrates increases stamina, and second, that it improves overall performance at tasks. This result, in addition to the fact that caffeine helps replace glycogen, the muscle’s immediate fuel source, leads me to now reconsider how I view caffeine.

Now, while staying within my tolerance, I’m definitely adding caffeine to my workout regimin. But I’m playing it on the safe side, since I’ve already researched the link between hypomania and caffeine.

General/Test Anxiety and Organizing the Chaos

It’s that time again in the academic year for tests. And tomorrow I have a big one. I can barely stand it right now. My entire body feels like it has electricity flowing through it. Which is something that I feel that many people do not fully understand about anxiety in general. It is a physical problem as much as a psychological problem. Right now, just about 16 hours before the test, I have a plethora of physical symptoms. I feel like there’s electricity flowing through my muscles, leading them to feel like they’re ready to cramp up. I’m light headed and can’t think straight. I feel wobbly on my feet. I also feel sluggish at the same time ready to bolt at a given moment. It’s the fight or flight response that’s doing this to me. And I know that, but knowing is not sufficient to overcome it.

But I think I’ll write about it.

So I have physical symptoms, what do I do when I have these? I usually do a routine of breathing exercises and mindfulness techniques. The primary breathing technique is an old one. I inhale for five seconds, hold for five seconds, and then slowly blow it out. All the time to make sure that I’m breathing with my stomach and not my chest. This tends to help settle the feelings of light-headedness and is crucial to restoring proper CO2 levels in the body. Otherwise I start to inadvertently hyperventilate and that’s what produces the feelings of wobbliness and light-headedness. It also helps calm my muscles down by the deep breathing relaxation that occurs. I feel less electric and am calmer in general.

Taking care of the physical symptoms is important in my book. Since anxiety is as much physical as it is mental, it’s important to tackle the physical symptoms. They are often also the easiest to take care of as well as the quickest to feed back into negative mental feelings. But the mental must also be taken care of.

For mental exercises I really just do a simple one of picturing a rock in a river. I try to imagine every last element of it. From the visual surroundings and how the water would flow around it, to the sounds, smells, and even how it would feel to touch the rock or be the rock. It’s a very simple exercise. The reason why it’s a rock in water is because it combines two very simple things to picture, something steady and something in motion. Visualizing this is not hard at all. Given common experiences it requires little brain effort to generate the image. In general, I find that meditative techniques work best when it is as simple as possible. One should not exert too much cognition in calming oneself down, one should just let it die down without effort. To just let it pass.

And then there’s blogging. Which is also good for stress. The act of examining oneself is another type of meditative technique and it works in a different way than the simple meditation. It works by distraction and organization. While the above two techniques allow one’s mind to rest and come back to neutral, blogging and writing causes the mind to refocus on something else. I find this to be incredibly helpful for stress of any sort. Writing things down allows the mind to organize itself again. Something that I feel that many meditative techniques lack. The act of organizing the thoughts gives a similar sense of peace that most meditative techniques do, but it also helps in other ways. When meditating, it can be very difficult to keep out the negative thoughts. At times it’s impossible to do so. This disrupts any sort of relaxation that might occur. It’s rather simple in fact, once I turn off the outside world by meditating, I open up myself to the screaming chaos of my internal world. And here the organizational nature of writing really asserts itself. It distracts one from the chaos, but it also imposes order. My mind rather likes order and finds it calming. So I write. No editing, no judgment, just writing as long as I need to, or as long as the anxiety lasts.

So I’m writing, and feeling better because of it. It could have been a journal entry, or in this case it came out a rambling blog post, but it still imposes just enough order to aid my mind in reasserting itself.

Managing Performance Anxiety with Technology

I’ve plugged Brain Workshop here before as a method to help counter act some of the cognitive side effects of the antipsychotics that I’ve been on. It’s a wonderful program for that and it does have its rewards in increasing fluid intelligence. But I’ve also noticed another change. It helps me with my performance anxiety.

I’m still unsure of whether it is due to abilify or if it is the program itself, but somewhere in my brain, I get a greatly diminished anxiety reaction to stressful cognitive acts. The reason that I can find for this decrease is due to desensitization to the act of cognitive stress by perpetually stressing my performance with the brain workshop. Before, whenever I began to become stressed, my palms would sweat, I would tremble slightly, my motor skills were fairly diminished. But now, working at maximum capacity, I find that these responses are slowly retreating. I still have some physical reactions, but my brain is able to concentrate and be more efficient in remembering tasks.

Another fascinating development is a greatly diminished fear of failure. Now, when I get a bad score or a task wrong. I simply carry on without being phased as much. I just keep going ahead and trying my hardest to keep up.

This brings up yet another reason for why I find this program so important. Not only does it allow me to have an objective measure of my mental performance on any given day with respect to the past days, and it helping to increase my performance in certain tasks, but it also provides a method of desensitization environment.

While I’m suspect on just how much it is just the brain workshop, I’m inclined to believe that it is a combination of abilify and desensitization. In that case, there is increased hope that abilify is truly stabilizing my behavior and mind. Right now, I’m almost giddy with happiness over the prospect that my anxiety might be controlled in addition to my depression and manias. The response is rather dramatic. I hope to relay some of this to my psychologist to see what exactly he thinks of the progress. Still, this is yet another wonderful example of just how much technology can be used to improve quality of life in manic depression and anxiety.

Managing Anxiety and Agitation with Music

Everyone has these at some point in their life. Whether it’s anxiety over an upcoming test or job presentation (or even just talking to your boss), or agitation brought on by circumstances out of your control or even over caffeinated, at some point everyone has these experiences. And these experiences are intensely unpleasant and generally interfere with getting whatever needs to be done, done.

For me, I understand this in terms of biology. These reactions are typically due to an adrenaline response to some minor stimulus. That shakiness and nervousness is your body telling you to run away as fast as possible from the situation. So there are two ways that I approach this, one is to try and fight the urge through breathing techniques, the other is to change the reaction.

I’ve already covered mindfulness exercises. But again, I cannot express just how important it is to take deep rhythmic breaths and try focusing on a particular sense. It has bizarre powers that cannot be understated. It works against the oncoming flood of adrenaline by diverting your mind. I often go even further and do a “thank you brain” exercise where I simply label the thoughts that are coming in as thoughts that cause anxiety and sarcastically thank my brain for them. Both exercises put distance between me and the offending stimulus.

The other way is one I like even more if I have some time. It’s listening to Metal. The heavier the better. The whole point is to change from a fright response to an aggressive tackle-the-issue response. Something that’ll get my head banging and bring out some deep bass will generally give anyone a little bit of adrenaline. But it accomplishes more than that. I also accomplish what I do above by focusing on a separate stimulus, but I also get an adrenaline response that I want. I want to feel like taking on whatever it is that is in my way.

This runs counter intuitive to most ideas that people have about how to deal with anxiety. Why would I listen to the most aggressive music I can when I’m out of my mind scared of something. Simply, it psyches me up and gets me going again. It drives out whatever is making me anxious. When I’m agitated, it’s a cathartic release of energy to have a slow headbang go. Common wisdom says that I should listen to calming new age music. I generally think that calmer music would actually be counter productive, it wouldn’t soothe me, it’d annoy me that I’m supposed to be relaxed but am not relaxed at all. So screw that, listening to music that I like is what I want to do at that moment, and aggressive music has done wonders for me. Next time you’re feeling anxious, subvert common wisdom and give something else a try. Metal does wonders for me, but it could be a good stomping blues track, or Knife-esque electronica, or even Johnny Cash. Give in to the darker side of your mind and find a release that doesn’t just divert your mind, but gets you ready to go again.

Inside a mixed state and what helps

So I’ve been inactive for the past few days. I had a small depression after 2 weeks of mania and now my brain is working its way out of it. In the mean time, I get mixed states. Mixed states are poorly described as a mixture of manic elements and depression. That’s so vague and doesn’t really describe the hell that mixed states are. They’re worse than depression.

Each person is different, so this is not generalizable, but it might be interesting for other people to know. When I’m mixed, my mind races at a manic clip. If you’ve ever been a dumb undergrad like me and had a whole pot of coffee, it’s similar. Your thoughts go at a thousand miles an hour and you’re filled with anxiety about nothing in particular. While mixed, my thoughts act like they would in mania, short, fast, constant stream, and vivid. I’ll find dozens of things to do, but unlike mania, there’s no “let’s do it” motivation behind it, just an “it should be done” thought. That’s where the depression kicks in, the executive function.

When depressed, thoughts of doing things go dead. I can acknowledge that something needs to be done, but there’s no impetus behind it to actually begin to act. It’s like the exact opposite of mania, where everything has the need to be acted upon RIGHT NOW! In a mixed state, I have all these thoughts racing at me, telling me that things should be done, but the depressive side prevents any of that from being acted upon. What I’m left with is a pile of thoughts about things I could be doing without any ability to act on them, and the pile just gets higher and higher every minute.

If I stay like that for even 30 minutes, my anxiety kicks into overdrive. I feel like the world requires everything and I can’t manage to do any of it. Time passes and I’m usually sitting, not able to stand at all, and stare as my thoughts begin to jump quicker and quicker from one thought to the next. Next, my memory goes as time wears on.

As my thoughts race from thought to thought, there’s little time for my mind to settle any of the information in it. A surprising amount of what I remember is due to my doing something. It’s similar to how you never really understand a paper you read without writing on it. The process of doing something forces analysis and categorization of things in memory to be stored for later. The chaff gets sorted out and what remains is what is vital to a task. But, if I’m jumping from thought to thought without action, there’s not even enough time for me to dissect the information and label it as important.

After about 90 minutes, I begin to lose my identity. I can’t pick out what thoughts are actually mine and the only way to describe how it feels is to say that there are people living in my head. It reminds me of Locke’s theory of personhood, where memory defines the individual, regardless of the body. Where a prince and a cobbler both fall asleep, and when they wake up, the cobbler’s brain/body has all of the prince’s thoughts and memories, and vice versa. The intuition is that the body is not what is important for identity, but the thoughts and memories. He’s got a really good point, after my memory begins to fade, I cannot lock onto who I am and connect which thought I need to go with. Instead, I’m pulled in every direction at once without a history to give it context. However, I disagree with this intuition based upon my own experiences in other contexts, and I’ll write very soon on how this can be remedied by Harry Frankfurt’s wholeheartedness.

Catching these states is of the utmost importance. It takes less than 60 minutes to render me nearly catatonic and then unable to even decide whether take drugs for it. It’s even harder to decide to medicate before hand, since somedays I just feel a little weird which does not develop into a full state and then the medication would be worse. But when I feel like this, what I usually start with a mindfulness exercise that I was taught which I think can be helpful to many people who have days where they are being pulled everywhere.

I start off by sitting, closing my eyes at first just to shut out some of the visual noise. I take a few deep breaths and focus on the air moving. Then I slowly focus just in on how my feet are feeling. Then slowly attempt to capture how my feet and legs feel, proceeding up my entire body until I can focus on how my entire body feels at a give instance. Then I add in other senses, from touch I proceed to sound, then sight, then smell and taste. All the while keeping slow breaths, but not worrying if I have to breathe quickly here and there. After I hold this in my mind for a minute or so (nobody’s perfect and can hold all five senses in their mind at the same time, but I still try), I imagine my brain as a stage where I control the lights where actors are the thoughts. I do not try to control them at all. They come in, they say their piece, they go out. I focus the lights on them to see them more clearly. My job here is to observe them and describe them to myself. The point is not to fight any of the thoughts, but to categorize it. Fighting makes it worse. Think of telling someone to breathe through the pain. Grunting and screaming against the pain just makes your body tense up and does little to help. Breathing through it and letting your muscles relax in the face of pain usually helps keep the pain down. This is similar, not the same of course, but in the same category of breathing through the pain.

By describing and categorizing the thoughts, I distance myself from them. My brain thinks at a second-order level, above the first-order thoughts telling me that I should do things. This puts distance between myself and the “you should do this” tag attached to every thought. After I feel more stable, not necessarily calm, I can often gain a foothold on my thoughts and let them pass.

This is obviously no substitute for medication. Also, I have to do this really early in my mixed states or I cannot do it at all. It also is not strong enough to overcome really powerful states. But when my brain starts to get fuzzy on somedays, this 5-10 minute break can do wonders for my focus by helping rise out of the white noise, or to stop the cascade of white noise from developing into a mixed state. I also find this helpful for that 2pm period where all I want to do is nap.