Hi 👋 I’m Sonja I have late dx Bipolar 1 & Borderline Personality Disorder both in remission by natural & lifestyle plus very very late dx/very recent Inattentive ADHD & Autism, (History of PTSD/cPTSD/GAD)
Dx at 49 with Bipolar & BPD at 52 & #AuDHD just this year! All my belated diagnoses have helped me as maps to manage this extreme combination of conditions.
Never medicated, never hospitalised, my blogs contain a distillation of the natural means i’ve found useful to date.
This is a new blog as I feel like I’m a new person now that I’ve finally got all the pieces I need to make sense out of my broken/different physiology, nervous system & psychology.
Lemon Balm Tincture is kind of the love of my life tincture wise & it never fails to drop my nervous system down several notches every evening.
This is just the same link I’ve given in the side bar but I felt to highlight it with it’s own post as I recommend it ***so much*** for all & any & every mental/ nervous system dysfunction there is.
Other Herb tinctures have come & gone & I’d say that I’ve tried every natural anti-anxiety & nervine herb out there but this it the one that stayed. I always have Kava Kava (‘Now’ brand liquid extract) on hand for emergency insomnia, which happens less & less but Lemon Balm I have every evening to wind down & it’s usually enough.
And by far the most economical way to buy tincture is a big old half litre size - I buy from these lovely people at HomeHerbs.co.uk - https://www.homeherbs.co.uk/Lemon-balm-tincture-p/tinc-lemon-balm-500ml.htm This is a strong 1:2 tincture 💪 honestly one of these only lasts me about 6 weeks 🤷♀️ still much much cheaper than anti anxiety medication (if you had to buy it, which looks pretty likely incoming in the Uk right now 🙄) & no no side affects! Hurrah.
I’ve been dabbling with individual Amino Acids for mental health for a really long time, perhaps 15 yrs & the ones that really help me the most personally are: DLPA (which is the precursor of Tryosine) or Tyrosine, Taurine, NAC (precursor to L Cysteine & Glutathione) info links are in my side bar list. There are others I’ve tried that didn’t suit me but purportedly work for other brain/ nervous system issues such as Theanine, L-Tryptophan, Acetyl-L-Carnitine & others.
There are whole forums dedicated to very detailed discussion of this relatively speaking very harmless, compared to alcohol use, recreational drugs or the vast majority of pharmaceuticals it’s a very safe & very cheap form of self medication.
This little video popped up when I was searching for a good mini lecture to share & this ND has a very similar stance to my own. She also discusses the ability to alter any addictive behaviour at all via this kind of pre-loading of the brain with ready precursors of the neurotransmitters we are dysfunctional in & thereby altering the brain condition that makes addictive behaviour irresistible in the first place.
Cool.
A comment on the YouTube video 👇 the second word I believe is Glutathione, the master antioxidant that N-Acetyl-Cysteine is the best precursor of hence you would take either DLPA plus NAC plus Taurine or Tyrosine plus NAC plus Taurine for this Holy Grail anti depressant plus addiction affect. I would add high EPA Fish oil, Phosphatidylserine & Shilajit if you wanted to shot at becoming super human lol & I’m not joking!
With all things natural you should engage in any new protocol for 4-6 months before deciding if you’ve benefited from it or not. I usually notice really fast personally as I have a high response metabolism, nervous system & reasonably high body awareness I think.
I’ve just added a specific link to Jason of MindAmends free YouTube in my “Magic Side Bar of Harmless Healing Therapies & Things” because I’d only linked to his website before & that doesn’t instantly give you the content to try & you absolutely must.
MindAmend aka Jason Lewis’s has been my main man of the last year since discovering that beneath the emotionally stormy surface of my BPD & Bipolar, as that dissipated, beneath that churning surface lurked a cause to all the mayhem & that cause was not being able to maintain attention for more than a few seconds (plus other things but for brevity) & being endlessly agitated by the semiconscious & innately frustrating experience of that. Anyway Jason was one of my first finds on discovery of my ADHD a year ago.
His Isochronic Tone music essentially is a gentle form of brainwave entrainment that can attenuate mood & focusability making it particularly useful for ADD/ADHD as well as for BPD/NPD, Bipolar, MDD etc. His half million subscribers on YouTube are not wrong, his content is far & away the most healing & helpful & thoroughly trustworthy I have found & that last point being incredibly important with any brain affecting content you subject yourself to.
I have been using this free half hour Wake Up without caffeine: Sunshine in Bali video daily & though I actually have my only coffee of my day during it, it is a gorgeous way to wake up on headphones, like waking up inside a marshmallow & being birthed into the day effortlessly & weightlessly without the massive Cortisol drop that I have been prone to all my life, since, I guess ‘rushing’ was instilled into my young nervous system, I guess as a pre-schooler. As a neuro-developmentally hypersensitive nervous system battered into shape by an unnatural world unsuited to nurturing it, without considerable effort my tendency is to wake up with the level of adrenaline & cortisol that would be more fitting to attending the scene of a mass shooting & then the rest of my day spent attempting to disperse this corrosive neurotransmitter cocktail by various means & in the past predominantly failing & actually, without meaning to, escalating it.
Not perfectly explained but it will do. 🙌🩷
Thank you Jason for all that you do for us & you’ve done so much for me personally, I literally have you on Apple Music, hard to say how much but on a bad day you are there very much of the day. Your brain training material/ aka Amygdala Gym material still being a firm favourite so I’m adding one of those here too for other people to try. ♥️♥️♥️
Here is a lovely Dr Axe article on the all round goodness of the traditional Ayurvedic supplement Shilajit - https://draxe.com/nutrition/shilajit/. I like Shilajit a lot, it’s an expensive supplement but you need the tiniest amount daily to see benefits. During my several decades of missed diagnoses I developed an eating disorder twice, for an extended period of nearly a decade the second time, Shilajit was part of my post Anorexia healing with its black tar earthy, mineral rich, pungent taste & appearance.
It’s like a real world multi mineral supplement in tar form & you melt a bit in some hot water & drink it down in a tumbler to your own level of acceptable taste.
It’s a wonder supplement in my actual opinion & I would recommend it for all mental health conditions but especially the ones that twin with the eating disorders like BPD.
Some people don’t get on with NAC but I really do & I love it. You can buy capsules but I pretty much buy everything I use in cheaper purer powder form so I have a big jar of it in my kitchen & I add 1/5 tsp to my cold ginger/turmeric infusion before I walk my dogs (plus vit c/bioflavonoids/pine bark ex/ collagen powder then I have a tsp high EPA fish oil & vit E oil with some green tea ex powder & im flying out that door although not in a bad or ungrounded way, just right, just energised, feeling positive & nutritionally facilitated👌😅🥰
I am super sensitive to blood sugar disturbances particularly to do with mood & NAC marvellously also has powerful positive effects on blood sugar regulation.
I love love love my Lithium Orotate 5 mg - I have taken this supplement for about a decade & rarely miss an evening without it in my Cinnamon Yogi tea (I empty the capsule in as I don’t like capsules so much).
I can’t remember whether or not I was still taking it when I got high in 2015, ( this was my last Bipolar High FYI) I may have let it drop as I was taking a lot of different things whilst running a SuperFood/Herb shop for my friend. The reasons for that high are many & complex but by far the biggest reason for that high was the stress of impending benefits changes to benefits I had been reliant on since my teens & my sorry ass misdiagnosed undiagnosed nervous system did not know in which direction it should run so it went *up* & didn’t stop till it hit the *ceiling* lol but no, ouch, really seriously the most painful experience of my entire life was that high but especially the entirely unmedicated crash.
Also I would add that my life was literally saved that year by the fact that I didn’t drink alcohol & was generally rather introverted & unsociable. I’d given up alcohol at 40 & along with it my facade of ease at interpersonal camaraderie, so getting on easily with others went away also. This worked well for me on that high as being so unhinged from reality, in & out of that, makes a gal excessively vulnerable to more manipulative types, but not if you don’t interact with them of course.
Anyway, back to the supplement- the reason I’m curious as to whether I was taking it when I got high is that you can increase the dose to 20mg safely for an increased mood stabilising effect but I because I was undx bipolar, I’d been told unequivocally & wrongly that I did not have it by a Psychiatrist in 2009, I’d always thought I had bipolar since around 18 but that threw me the biggest curve ball of my life. So I was not taking it for Bipolar, so I had probably lapsed it & I certainly didn’t increase dose (you can also increase fish oil x2 or 3 to prevent a bipolar high see the excellent Peter Smiths work Balancing Brain Chemistry Naturally in my side bar for full details).
I’m explaining this to demonstrate that Lithium Orotate did not fail me in 2015 I did not utilise its full potential or any of the other things that I know about now & have been using that will pretty faithfully prevent a high taking hold. To be honest, the most important defence against that high in 2015 would have been having the diagnosis & some support & to have had protection from the benefits changes.
I’ve rambled on, it’s my blog I should definitely do that here 🙌
I’ve had some very well spent time with Phosphatidylserine - back after my major undx 9 month Bipolar 1 high in 2015, PS was one of my recovery supplements over 2016/2017 as I recovered from the, pretty transparent brain damage/cognitive deficits that occurred in that unmedicated nervous system free for all.
I’ve written in the side bar “short term” use because I seem to remember that it was most effective when used as a 6 month course or a couple of months. I haven’t felt the need for it for a long time but it absolutely served a magnificent purpose & I remember looking forwards to taking it just before sleep with a 3mg Melatonin I think & probably with my (still) best friend Lemon Balm Tincture or a heavier Valerian/Skullcap tincture bedtime combo & dropping off into a deep sleep easily despite the days typical mental disorganisation, confusion & ridiculously high anxiety.
I haven’t included high EPA Fish Oil/Omega 3 Oil in my Help for Mental Health side bar because I assume that, plus high dose B Vitamins as well as decent vit D or sun exposure everyone knows that these 3 kick so much ass for the brain. Maybe I shouldn’t assume anything & add those links as they are the fundamentals of brain/nervous system health & long term repair.
This US website https://platinumtherapylights.com/en-gb has a huge knowledge base section of articles, the link is half way down the main page, on the uses of NIR & Red Light Therapy devices for all types of ill health & it is absolutely exceptional.
I cannot recommend Red Light & NIR Therapy enough, it is fantastic for sooooo many reasons, if you have any physical issues or pain just buy one & use it daily you will not regret it.
So I’ve tasked myself to start a new blog, from a new, more up to date place of understanding & awareness of my situation as I’d let the old one drift away from me in the light of my recent neurodivergent diagnostic insights.
The jokes do just write themselves when you can justifiably describe yourself as having ***all*** of the most well known diagnoses but it’s also too easy to be blasé when trying to explain to others less knowledgeable when I’ve spent decades in depth delving into mental health subjects trying to get well.
And well I have got, comparatively well anyway by my own difficult difficult adult life standards only with an apparent default status of permanently disabled.
That’s emotive in itself. And then there is the arriving at the Neurodivergence Party only to discover that all my time in the wilderness has not been very well spent as all these youngsters are having an absolutely brilliant time at the ND thing & I still haven’t completely pinned down what the parameters are or even whether or not that attempted pinning is appropriate or actually possible.
