Studies have shown that mindfulness is helpful for people with bipolar disorder.
By practicing mindfulness, you learn how to be present with your bipolar symptoms rather than try to get rid of them.
By doing this, your symptoms become less intense and more manageable.
This might seem counterintuitive, but suppressing our emotions or numbing them tends to make them even more intense.
Being present with your symptoms, doesn’t mean you like them, or you want them to stay. It simply means that you are not wasting any more time or energy judging yourself for having these symptoms, or trying to numb them.
Mindfulness helps you liberate yourself from your habitual thinking patterns and behaviors that keep you stuck.
People with bipolar disorder experience episodes of both depression and mania.
These episodes are often accompanied by anxiety (an excessive or inappropriate fear response), negative thinking and unreasonable beliefs about the self, and irritability.
Mindfulness can help you manage these symptoms.