Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder: A Story (Part 1: Background)
Posted May 22 2011 12:00am
In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day . If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.
In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder . After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way successful or not it should be revealing.
I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.
My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age. (I am now 37.)
In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day . If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.
In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder . After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way successful or not it should be revealing.
I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.
My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age. (I am now 37.)