Understanding the Bipolar Brain: How Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions Work

Our brain and our mind are separate entities. Our brain is a physical structure found between our ears that integrates sensory information and directs motor responses. It acts as a control centre by receiving, interpreting and directing sensory information throughout the body. Our mind has no physical structure. It is a collection of thoughts, feelings and emotions. Although it feels like it exists in our heads, its exact location is unknown.

Our mind is unique to us, formed through life experiences, circumstances and perhaps genetics too. Some people have positive minds and are therefore optimistic, accepting and happy. They are often lucky, well-liked and successful in their chosen areas of endeavour. They see the world as a friendly place and, although they may face significant challenges, they tend to cruise through life with little suffering. Others have minds that are dominated by negativity. Negative minds create pessimistic, judgmental, unhappy people. People who are more likely to be unpopular, attract conflict and see the world as a hostile place. They may be successful but don’t get to relish their successes for long because their negative minds won’t allow it. Most of us lie somewhere in the middle of these two groups.

Whatever type of mind we possess, and it can change over time, it is something we usually learn to live with. We get used to our thoughts and emotions and we get on with life. From as far back as I can remember, my mind fluctuated between positive and negative but every so often my poles moved further apart. My optimistic side became ludicrously unrealistic and my negative side wrathful and despairing. I would jump between these poles without choice, warning or reason, sometimes flipping from overexcited to anxious many times a day. My moods were unpredictable and all-consuming.

Over the last thirty years, I have experienced a dozen or so depressive episodes which have varied in severity. The shortest was a few days and the longest lasted for nearly 12 months. Depression is an extreme expression of the negative pole and in its most severe forms it can lead to suicide or even starvation from neglect. Before I experienced bipolar, I had never been suicidal but once the condition revealed itself, suicidal thoughts and desires became a part of my life. By observing what was going on inside my head, I identified two distinct aspects of my mind that could push me towards suicide. These are suicidal thoughts and suicidal emotions.

Suicidal thoughts are voices, or words in my mind which try to persuade me to take my own life.

“I want to die.”

“You’d be better off dead.”

“I hate myself,” would be common ones. The voices that speak these thoughts use both the first and second person and sound just like me.

Suicidal emotions are wordless but pervasive. When I have these exaggerated emotions I feel them in my body, either as a thick oppressive fog in my head or a stagnant heavy knot in my chest or throat or stomach. My limbs may also fall heavy as I drag myself through life with great effort. Suicidal emotions are more powerful than thoughts. You might think thoughts that encourage me to kill myself would be more painful than emotions, but they aren’t. Suicidal thoughts exist in my mind and have no bodily sensations associated with them. These thoughts tend to appear and disappear quite quickly, whereas emotions hang around. If thoughts are like firecrackers on a cold winter evening, then emotions are the smoke left behind, lingering in the air as a thick grey mist, unwilling to dissolve into nothingness. This is not to say that loud, repetitive, suicidal thoughts are easy to deal with, but they aren’t as debilitating as suicidal emotions. When the two appear together, as is most common, I am in trouble.

The average person has between 20,000 and 60,000 thoughts passing through their mind every day. Around ninety percent of these are repetitive.¹⁷ If you are someone who has around 60,000 it means you experience roughly one thought every second and a half. This is tiring. Unless you have practised meditation or some form of awareness training, you have probably not learned to “observe” your thoughts. Unobserved thoughts are dangerous because we don’t know they are there. They are incognito, able to twist and manipulate us without our knowledge. We think them unconsciously and are hoodwinked into believing whatever they tell us. Thoughts like,

“I am ugly.”

“People don’t like me.”

“I’m no good at learning new things,” can do a lot of damage when we are unconscious of them because we believe them and live our lives as if they are true. When we have learned to observe our thoughts, they no longer control us in the same way. We can create a healthy distance between us and them. A distance that robs them of much of their power to make us suffer. Generally, most of us have no distance from our thoughts and believe whatever our fickle mind tells us without question. We have spent a lifetime listening to the thoughts in our head, trusting them, relying on them and letting them guide our thinking and actions. This puts us in a precarious position and this why unobserved negative thoughts can be so harmful. As the average person’s thoughts are mostly unobserved, the quality and quantity of our thoughts fundamentally affects our mental health.

How a thought affects me depends on my emotional state at the time. Suicidal thoughts are never pleasant, but when I am in a balanced mood, they don’t bother me too much. I can observe them, let them be, and after a while they usually disappear. If they persist, I take it as a signal that a depression may be on its way. When suicidal thoughts combine with suicidal emotions, they fuel each other and rob me of my ability to observe thoughts. It is like the fog of the emotions stop me from noticing that my negative thoughts are merely thoughts. This means the skills I have developed through meditation are no longer within my reach. Please note that during a manic, depressive or psychotic episode, I can’t observe my thoughts. For me, meditation is very helpful when I am well, but the skills it has taught me have little power against a full blown bipolar episode. Depression is contagious. It wants everyone to be miserable.

This is an excerpt from Oliver Seligman's book Befriending Bipolar: a patient's perspective. 

Oliver has a Youtube channel called: @livingbetterwithbipolar       

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/@livingbetterwithbipolar