Bipolar disorder treatment with natural remedies

I propose a good way to manage bipolar disorder is to learn how to self-monitor the phases of your condition and then change your prescription to match the phase, so you would increase the amount of anti-mania remedies and techniques you take to prevent mania and include or exclude antidepressant remedies as the situation requires.

I have bipolar disorder myself and this is what I do to keep it completely under control without drugs using natural remedies, I’ve been a practitioner of nutritional medicine since 1988 and now specialise in treating and coaching people with bipolar disorder and other mental health problems how to use drug-free natural therapy techniques to combat their condition.

As yet there is no permanent cure for bipolar, you can’t fix your bipolar disorder and forget about it, however bipolar can respond very to treatment and with constant treatment we can manage the condition and keep it in remission so you can get on with leading a complete and productive life.

Many people come to my practice taking the same prescription medication day in day out between doctors visits, typical complaint I hear is people on heavy mood stabilising drugs experience bouts of low-grade depression but are expected to just carry on with the same heavy mood stabilising prescription regardless. I believe many people can do a better job at managing their condition with a combination of good self-monitoring and adjusting the prescription accordingly.

Bipolar treatment strategy:

1. Monitor the phases of your condition.
2. Adjust your neurotransmitters according to the state of your condition.
3. Go beyond neurotransmitters and improve your neuroplasticity and the overall health of your brain.

1. Bipolar disorder Self-Monitoring 

As you know bipolar disorder symptoms vary from time to time and my treatment strategy is to change your prescription to balance the phase you are in, so you take antidepressant remedies when you’re depressed and you stop taking antidepressant remedies when you are manic and increase the ant-manic side of your treatment. When you understand the specific effects different neurotransmitters have you can be quite specific in adjusting your prescription, see the diagram:

It’s not difficult to know when you’re depressed but if you are going to manage your condition yourself it’s essential that you can learn to recognise when you are in a manic phase or ideally when you’re just beginning to enter one so that you can immediately adjust your prescription to combat the mania.

I use a very simple and easy to follow self-monitoring system.

To self-monitor bipolar disorder you watch for changes in the following three things:

A. Your speed, when your thoughts, the flow of ideas, the rate at which you speak and the way you move your body are speeding up your going into mania, when these things are slowing down you are going into depression.

B. Changes in your sleep. You watch for changes in your need for sleep or the timing of your sleep.

C. Destructive or harmful behaviours.  You watch for yourself engaging in those destructive behaviours what I call your not to-do list or ways of thinking that create problems in the life that you do when you are manic.

2. Take control of your neurotransmitters.

When you are heading in a manic condition you would stop taking any antidepressant remedies you may be taking and up the anti-mania side of your treatment by

adding supplements, amino acids, herbs to dampen down excessive dopamine and glutamate activity in your brain, along with increased darkness therapy remedies to make you sleep and reset your sleep cycles.

 

When you are heading in a depressed condition you increase the antidepressant remedies but you keep taking an appropriate level of anti-mania remedies to prevent the antidepressants from causing you to overshoot and flipping you from depression up into mania. This last part is very important, I know from personal experience that anything that has an antidepressant effect from antidepressant drugs through herbs to bright light therapy has the potential to flip the bipolar brain straight up into mania so you must keep some anti-mania treatment in place whenever you use antidepressant therapies.

When you are in a state of balance neither depressed nor manic you would take a stabilising maintenance prescription of natural remedies to keep you well for longer periods of time.

See the following links for more information on Bipolar Neurotransmitters, Treating Mania with Natural Remedies, Managing Bipolar Depression

3. Going beyond bipolar neurotransmitters. Although we can gain a lot of control over the bipolar condition by taking control of our neurotransmitter balance bipolar is more than just imbalances in the level of neurotransmitter activity in the synapses; it involves an increased level of neuro-inflammation and neuro-inflammation increases the level of wear and tear on our brain and neuronal networks furthermore there the bipolar brain also suffers from a lack of a protective chemical called BDNF that combats wear and tear, this combination of increased neuroinflammation and deficient levels of BDNF results in a loss of what is called neuroplasticity and function in key structures of the brain that control mood. The loss of neuroplasticity can also result in a decline of cognitive abilities and an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease so if you have bipolar disorder you really want to go beyond just treating your neurotransmitters and improve the overall health of your brain; in my practice I employ treatments to combat neuroinflammation and I’ve put together a ‘stack’ of natural remedies and treatments strategies to boost BDNF production, maximise neuroplasticity and stimulate regeneration in the brain.

My BDNF/neuroplasticity protocol involves combining an anti-inflammatory and blood sugar stabilising diet with specific physical exercises and brain training exercises to switch off excessive stress responses and the stack of remedies to boost BDNF. I have rapid cycling bipolar in my case consistently six times a year my condition would try and return and hijack my brain, for more than a decade I had learned how to prevent the attempted hijackings by monitoring and quickly rebalancing my neurotransmitters however as I write this in the four years since I performed my BDNF/neuroplasticity protocol I have had one slight attempted hijacking, that’s gone from 24 attempted hijackings over four years to 1.

Neuro-inflammation can come from many sources: a leaky blood brain barrier, an unhealthy gut-brain axis (a leaky gut and or unhealthy intestinal microbiota), neuro toxins in the brain particularly heavy metals, chronic low-grade infections in our sinuses or teeth, chronic overactive stress responses et al.

Overactive stress responses, in particular, are known to be a central part of the physiology of bipolar disorder, basically we over-activate the fight or flight response resulting in over-activity in our hormonal stress responses (the HPA axis) and the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, the effects of this profound and wide-ranging, it affects the production and transmission of neurotransmitters, it promotes neuroinflammation which downgrades neuroplasticity diminishing the function in network and structures that control mood, it depresses heart rate variability, increases our risk for heart disease, increases the risk of developing metabolic disorders (think type II diabetes), affects our sleep cycles, the strength of our immune system and more.

There is an extensive body of scientific research demonstrating the involvement of imbalanced overactive stress physiology in the bipolar brain, the research points out the problem and regrettably, the conventional view is that we have virtually no control over our internal stress physiology and little ability to change it; I think this view is completely wrong! It may take a lot of hours of practice but you can train your brain to gain effective control of your stress responses and in my practice I focus extensively on brain training techniques to hardwire the ability to switch off stress physiology and techniques to release psychological trauma and or remodel traumatic emotional memories that trigger stress responses in the first place. Furthermore brain scans have shown that with as little as 30 hours of brain training techniques like mindfulness-based meditation you could actually see real structural changes in the size and density different regions of the brain, with these techniques you can grow the parts of the brain that enhance balanced emotions and shrink parts of the brain involved in triggering stress responses.

Putting it all together:

• Learning monitor and recognises the faces of your condition gives you better control.
• Understanding your neurotransmitters and how to down-regulate excessive glutamate and both down-regulate or up-regulate imbalanced dopamine levels gives you better control.
• Following an anti-inflammation and blood sugar stabilising diet (inflammation coming soon) improves the health brain reducing your need for strong treatment and making the natural remedies more effective.
• Training your brain to switch off excessive stress responses and remodel stress triggering memories has multiple effects on your general health, reduces neuroinflammation and improve the health of the brain.
• Changing the shape of your brain with a course of intensive meditation brain training diminishes the condition.
• We can boost BDNF production and our neuroplasticity with supplements, diets and specific brain and physical exercises.
• Utilise the new understanding of controlling blue light and darkness therapy to combat mania and depression and regulate bipolar sleep cycles.
• We can stimulate detoxification of our brain and reduce oxidative or free radicals stress which is believed to be significant in the bipolar brain.
• We can combat inflammation coming from a leaky blood-brain barrier.
• We can combat neuroinflammation coming from a leaky gut-brain axis and unhealthy intestinal microbiota.

There’s a lot you can do and each thing may reduce your symptoms by a certain percent and when you put it all together I believe we can radically improve our mental health. As you learn to master living with your bipolar syndrome and minimising the harm it causes you may even begin to value the few benefits that having bipolar syndrome can give you such as energy and creativity.

I hope my methods help you, good luck.

The Pros and Cons of Pharmaceutical Versus Natural Remedies for Bipolar Treatment

There are pros and cons of trying to treat your bipolar disorder without drugs using natural remedies.

The downsides of the natural remedies are that because they’re much gentler or weaker than the pharmaceutical drugs you have to take a lot of them to get a strong therapeutic effect, this means swallowing a lot of pills and you’ll probably a be paying for them out of your own pocket so it can be expensive. The downside of the pharmaceuticals is that they’re very strong and quite often cause a loss of side-effects, furthermore some of them, the antidepressant in particular can be quite slow acting taking weeks to work so they’re not really helpful for a dynamic flexible self-medicating approach.

The upside of the natural remedies is that they produce basically no side-effects at all, in fact they have multiple positive effects on your health, many of them are very fast acting making changes within days or in some cases hours, furthermore they can be mixed and matched without producing unwanted interactions so you can work out a unique combination for your individual brain chemistry; for me the possibility of being able to combine multiple remedies fast acting remedies to suit the ever-changing nature of my rapid cycling bipolar is what makes using natural remedies so appealing.

On the other hand if your condition is fairly constant and the pharmaceuticals works you without producing too many side effects they are a lot easier and cheaper to take; you can also get them paid for and because they are more mainstream and legitimate you are far more likely to get the support and approval of your Doctor and possibly family members.

As you probably already know bipolar disorder can be a serious and life-threatening condition so be safe and don’t throw away your meds and try replacing them with natural remedies without professional support and understanding what you’re doing. I believe many people can do a better job at managing their own mental health problems by learning how to monitor their condition and adjust their prescription accordingly and engaging in multiple self-help techniques including a better diet, brain training exercises physical exercises and natural remedies and this is what I have chosen to do for myself, however we are all different and your health and medical needs may not be suitable for this approach. You must exercise judgement and understand that these are my views, you are responsible for your own treatment choices, consult with your physician, responsible guardians/carers and appropriately trained practitioners if you are in any doubt about the safety all appropriateness trying any of these techniques. Be aware that a distinctive feature of bipolar disorder is impulsivity and risk-taking and you must also consider the possibility that if you have a mental health problem it may compromise your ability to make good choices and judgements so you should ask someone else for a second opinion to make sure you’re not making a crazy decision. In sharing this information I’m not making a recommendation that you should try these methods or will be better off coming off your mainstream medical treatment. I am well conversant with the capabilities and limitations of the techniques I use, how to implement them and when not to, I take safety seriously and if my assessment is that you should not try self-medicating with natural remedies I’ll tell you. I’m available for consultation at my London clinic or via Skype.

As you learn to master living with your bipolar syndrome and minimising the harm it causes you can even begin to value the few benefits that having bipolar syndrome can give you such as energy and creativity. I hope my methods help you, good luck.

If you’d like help with the problems discussed in this article I specialise in treating and coaching people how to obtain better health with natural remedies and techniques, click on the treatment tab above for more information.

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Description

to manage bipolar disorder without drugs using natural remedies self-monitor the manic/depressive phases of your condition then change your prescription to match the phase, so you would increase the amount of anti-mania remedies and techniques you take to prevent mania and include or exclude antidepressant remedies as the situation requires.