We have ways to describe anxiety and fatigue: Bone-weary, bushed, all in, dazed, dopey, depleted, drugged. Washed-up, worn-out, dozy, dreamy. Soporific, sluggish, torpid, tuckered, done. One of the hardest parts of living with anxiety is how tired you get. Anxiety can cause extreme fatigue. In fact, the fatigue of anxiety, that lack of energy, is often the first tip that something's really not okay.

I recently wrote a post called The Benefits of a Good Cry which talks about how a weeping session now and then can be good for you - both physically and emotionally. This video expands upon that topic and talks about my five favorite tear-jerker movies.

I think the name "More than Borderline" is an excellent name for the blog, especially since so many mental health professionals will dismiss people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as "just a borderline".

How are you? This is one of the most disingenuous, lie-provoking, overused sentences in the English language. How are you? We say it to fill time and pretend that we care about people whom we obviously don't. As no one is interested in actually knowing the answer, I have a series of pat answers I typically give. Snazzy. Fabulous. Wonderful. Delightful. Sparkly. Peaches and cream. You? But the truth of the matter is, when someone asks how I am, even if they really wanted to know, it would make no difference, because really, I have no idea.

We've covered depersonalization and derealization, two of the five core dissociative symptoms. As someone with dissociative identity disorder, both of those forms of dissociation affect me regularly. But the remaining three impact my life most profoundly. Dissociative amnesia, as I'll explain, is a deeply frustrating and disruptive part of living with DID.

Work and Bipolar or Depression blog is about having Bipolar Disorder or Depression and being in business or working in a business. Peter Zawistowski (Peter Z) hopes to offer meaningful hints, tricks and help for those individuals who are reentering the workforce or just trying to keep the “work thing” going. Peter has owned several small businesses and has also worked for various employers in the high-tech area.

All this talk about sleep is making me wonder--will I ever get any, myself? The recent discussions about sleep disorders and mental illness are unusually timely--I'd been planning to do this week's post on sleep problems, because we are definitely experiencing them at our house.

Balance is essential to combat anxiety. Something of an obvious statement but it always surprises me how easily things get out of hand. These past few days saw the autumnal equinox, where night and day are of equal length. Summer is officially over. Can you believe it's almost October already? Bring on the pecan pie! Money tends to get tighter around this time of year which can be a source of stress, too. There's that global downturn again. The switch in gears is also tricky to navigate if you're amped up on anxiety already. To help with all that

It is often the case that those around a person with bipolar disorder spot the disorder before the person themselves does. That’s pretty understandable as our actions are always louder from the outside. Not to mention our brain, which is supposed to be paying attention to our behaviors, is the thing that’s sick. So, you know, we miss stuff. Crazy tends to obscure reality. But what if you think a person has bipolar disorder and the person won’t listen? In this case, there are really only three things you can do.

I remember a certain meeting with a girlfriend in a coffee shop. I arrived before her and sat working on a crossword puzzle while I waited. It wasn't long before she was standing next to me saying, "Hi!" I looked at her, and even though I knew my purpose in the coffee shop that day - to meet her - it took me a moment to understand who she was. It was a jarring moment in her Dissociative Identity Disorder education. "You didn't recognize me," she said. She was right. I didn't immediately recognize her, even though by then we'd spent hundreds of hours together. But it wasn't amnesia, the form of dissociation one might suspect, that prevented me from recognizing her. It was a different dissociative symptom: derealization.