How Social Rhythm Therapies Can Ease Mood Disorders

Social rhythm therapies can be extremely useful for some individuals with bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder is a psychological ailment that leads to excessive changes in mood and energy that can diminish someone’s life. This blog discusses how social rhythm therapy can ease mood disorders by reducing bipolar disorder symptoms.

There are 2 kinds of bipolar disorder: bipolar I and bipolar II. People with bipolar I encounter a highly elevated mood. Symptoms can incorporate difficult sleeping, increased activity, talking very fast, being irritable or agitated, involving in risky activities, thinking they can achieve everything, or impulsive spending. Moreover, they can encounter hypo-mania episodes that include elevated energy of mania and mood but on a less extreme level, episodes of depression lasting at least 2 weeks, or episodes integrating symptoms of both depression and mania. Bipolar II just includes episodes of depression and hypo-mania.

How Social Rhythm Therapy Helps Manage Mood Swings and Behavioural Shifts

This type of therapy concentrates on stabilizing an individual’s daily rhythms, like waking up, eating meals, and sleeping. It stresses the connection between how an individual’s mood impacts his life. A therapist might ask you regarding crucial or recent times the bipolar disorder impacted your love life, friendships, work connections, and more. This helps people with bipolar disorder test how their conditions impact their experiences so they can become more committed to staying with it in the healthiest way. Moreover, the therapist may ask some questions to recognize how your daily regime impacts your symptoms regularly because maintaining a lifestyle rhythm is an important part of this treatment.

The social rhythm part of this treatment is all about making a daily regime an individual can stick to. People experiencing bipolar disorder usually live an undisciplined life. So, adding a schedule and normal times to these things can help them control this irregularity.

This kind of set regime affects your circadian rhythm. This interplay is crucial because this rhythm impacts a lot of aspects of how your body and mind work, incorporating the discharge of hormones that can impact your mood. For this reason, getting sleep regularly is an important part of social rhythm therapy. As your sleep habits and the circadian rhythm are inevitably intertwined, poor sleep can undoubtedly cause depressive and manic episodes in some individuals with bipolar disorder.

Phases of Social Rhythm Therapy

In case you will get social rhythm treatment, there are 4 phases of therapy to anticipate:

1. Initial Phase – It’s all about you and the treatment specialist exploring how interruptions in your routine have caused bipolar episodes earlier.

2. Intermediate Phase – It involves forming a new structure for your social rhythms. You will actually begin charting things like your sleeping, mood, workout habits, and eating to find how they are related.

3. Maintenance Phase – It helps you strengthen social rhythms so you can stick to them.

4. Final Phase – It reduces how often you require social rhythm treatment.

Not all therapists are trained in social rhythm therapies. So, research well before finding a practitioner.