Hi everyone! Since it's #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek I thought I'd talk a bit about what lack of sleep does to me and my brain, since that's what I've been really struggling with this week.

These are my personal experiences and how it manifests for me & my #bipolardisorder. 1/

2/ First - sleep is incredibly important to me. Over time I've learnt that I need about 7 good hours of sleep each night, and at least 5 consecutive hours. More than that, and it starts triggering #depression. Less, and it starts triggering #hypomania. Neither are good.

3/ One of the things that I tend to struggle with is emotion regulation: specifically, I tend to feel emotions at a greater intensity than would be considered "normal". This goes for *all* emotions, anger, frustration, sadness, but also positive ones like happiness, joy etc.

4/ I only realised this in the last couple of years, and it explains why I spent most of my life feeling somewhat "disconnected" to the world.

It also explains the frustration when people just don't "get" you and think you're overreacting all the time.

5/ Imagine something bad happens, and a typical reaction is, say, level 3 upset. But my brain has what I call a "multiplier", any emotion is multiplied by that number. If my mulitplier is 2, then my upset reaction will hit a 6. And to people around me this won't make any sense.

6/ It's incredibly hard living like this if you don't realise it's happening. Most of the time it feels like you're being gaslighted, only it's your own brain doing it.

Over time I've learnt skills to keep my "multiplier" close to 1, sort of like keeping a buffer around my brain

7/ Maintaining this mental buffer takes energy, but helps me to absorb up to a certain level of daily stresses without damage to my mental health. However, lack of sleep destroys this buffer, and once this buffer is down, my "multiplier" starts increasing.

8/ The longer I struggle with lack of sleep, the faster the "multiplier" increases, until the smallest thing can send me into a complete tailspin. And of course, heightened emotions make it difficult to calm down and sleep, making this into a nasty loop.

9/ Another thing lack of sleep does for me is trigger what I call "brain noise" which is a constant, jumpy stream of thoughts in my head.

Normally, these continue at a mostly sub-threshold level, but lack of sleep exacerbates them in number, intensity, frequency, and incoherence

10/ Calming the brain noise is extremely difficult too, and frustrating. And with an additional multiplier, all this leads to an extremely stressful situation, that is very hard to calm myself down from. Especially when it's the middle of the night and I can't get to sleep.

11/ All these things together finally cause what I can only describe as a sensation that my mind is fragmented. It feels, inside my head, like a fractured pane of glass that is seconds away from shattering into a million pieces. Stressful doesn't even begin to describe it.

12/ This is how I was feeling on Monday, and it was awful. I've slowly been clawing my way back from the "shattered glass" precipice, but it's a very slow and delicate process, not made any easier by everyday stresses.

So take care of your brains y'all! Sleep is important!