5 Ways to Boost Your Motivation to Manage Bipolar Mood Episodes

Last Updated: 1 Oct 2023
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Even small lifestyle changes can help stabilize mood shifts. Yet, when old habits persist or bipolar depression hits, it’s hard to adjust. Take heart, there are ways to steer you toward positive change.

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Motivation and Stages of Change

Motivation. It’s that mysterious quality that gets us moving and helps us accomplish what we need or wish to get done.

In a behavioral model known as the Stages of Change, the first three steps all relate to intention — recognizing there’s something you’d like to do differently in your life. (For the record, these stages are called precontemplation, contemplation, and preparation.)

Then comes the point where you actually take action — and that’s where motivation kicks in.

Just think about New Year’s resolutions. According to some statistics, about half of us set one or more goals back in January — eat better, exercise more, and so on.

By now, less than 10 percent of the resolution-makers are sticking with it. (Which touches on the fifth stage of change: maintaining and consolidating the new behavior.)

It’s not that we don’t want to change our behavior. The problem is finding the means to overcome inertia and do the hard thing when an easier path beckons.

You might be fired up when you decide to exercise three times a week, but what happens a few weeks later when you’re tired and a night on the couch looks way more attractive than working out?

Bipolar Depression amd Motivation

If you’re dealing with bipolar depression, motivation can be even harder to come by. Honora Rose, co-author of Two Bipolar Chicks Guide to Survival: Tips for Living with Bipolar Disorder, compares the depressive phase of bipolar disorder to “wearing 50-pound weights around my ankles, watching myself living in a black-and-white, slow-motion movie.”

“I find it hard to do just about anything,” she adds.

However, a few straightforward but effective strategies can help you overcome lethargy and “power up” when you’re feeling down.

1. Start Small — Very Small

You need to bring your expectations down as low as necessary to get over the hump of inertia — especially when every molehill feels like an Everest.

The key is to focus on some action you can reasonably accomplish, no matter how trifling it may seem.

Even if you can’t feel better overnight, what small thing can you do right now that might help you go from stationary to moving? If a shower feels like just too much to handle, how about washing your face — or even just your hands?

“Start with modest behavioral goals,” advises psychologist Dan Bilsker, PhD, author of the Antidepressant Skills Workbook and an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

“Maybe you feel like you don’t want to talk to people, so begin by thinking of one person to talk to,” he says. “Your homework might be to phone someone and [have a conversation].”

Momentum breeds momentum. Meeting even the tiniest goal contributes to “self-efficacy” — confidence and belief in yourself — and that can help you get out of bed and out the door.

Bill O’Hanlon, PhD, a psychotherapist whose books include Change 101: A Practical Guide to Creating Change in Life or Therapy and Out of The Blue: Six Non-Medication Ways to Relieve Depression, calls this “undoing depression.”

Everyone has a unique landscape of symptoms and tendencies during a depressive episode, Dr. O’Hanlon explains. Changing your personal landscape in any way, large or small — making that single phone call when you’re inclined to self-isolate, climbing out of bed when your whole self yearns to stay sleeping — will contribute to a chain reaction in the right direction.

“Depression isn’t a state or thing — it’s a process, so you want to undo that process,” he says.

2. Create a Rewards Program

Once you have figured out your small goal, write it down. When you accomplish it, Dr. Bilsker says, be sure to praise yourself.

“It’s important because learning thrives on reward — reward is like the fertilizer applied to a plant,” he says.

In behavioral science, giving rewards for “successive approximations” — any action along the pathway toward the ultimate desired behavior — produces more of that behavior and paves the way to another action further along the path. A more familiar term is “positive reinforcement.”

Or as Bilsker says, “Praising and rewarding and recognizing yourself for even small achievements will lead to continued and eventually substantial accomplishment.”

Kelly, of California, keeps a simple to-do list of tasks she wants to accomplish — and then rewards herself for getting things done.

“It always feels good to me to cross something off of the list,” she says. “A lot of times I’ll put something small on the list, like taking out the garbage, so I can cross it off the list. It feels like I’m getting something done.”

A reward for Kelly can be something as simple as a piece of fruit, or maybe a donut at the grocery store. “I’ll say, ‘If I can get that done, I can have one of those,’ and that helps a lot,” she says.

BJ Fogg, PhD, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and author of Tiny Habits, suggests an even more simple (if somewhat silly-sounding) way to celebrate your victories: Pump your fists and exclaim “Awesome!”

3. Set Yourself Up for Success

Setting up mechanisms to guide your behavior can relieve some of the need to call on flat-out motivation. One way to keep momentum going is to look ahead and make commitments — whether to yourself or to others — that give you a reason to get out of bed or out the door.

“The first step for me is to have something to do, someone to visit, or a place to go where you feel more energized,” says Alan, of British Columbia. “Calling a friend or family member can get you moving, especially if they know you well enough to look past your mood.”

Something as simple as jotting down a few “tasks for tomorrow” before you go to bed can be helpful. Even if he doesn’t have plans to meet someone, Alan sets a goal for his day in advance.

“As an early riser, having an activity or task ready to go to before 10 a.m. makes a huge difference — giving me a sense of purpose and productivity that carries into the day,” he says.

Take it one step further and ask yourself this: If you have an activity or task you want to accomplish, what can you do to make it as easy as possible to get started?

For example, laying out exercise clothes the night before solidifies your intention and makes working out seem more inevitable. If you’ve decided to increase your water intake, place cup and a full carafe of water in your workspace at the beginning of the day. If you need to balance your checkbook, simply setting it on the kitchen table with your bank statement and all your receipts creates both opportunity and expectation.

4. Pick a Prompt and a Peg

Prompts — reminders to do something we already intend to do — can have surprising power to guide our actions. Setting out your exercise clothes is a kind of prompt. Sticky notes on the bathroom mirror or refrigerator door serve the same function, as do alerts programmed into your digital calendar.

Research shows that prompts truly can trigger behavior, says Bilsker — and that takes away the “should-I-or-shouldn’t-I” debate that can bog us down.

Dr. Fogg, who developed a program (also called Tiny Habits) based on his research into behavioral change, recommends finding a peg in your daily routine for the behavior you want to add.

In his talks about Tiny Habits, he offers a humorous example from his own life: Doing two pushups after every visit to the bathroom. (He worked his way up to 80 or more pushups a day.)

We all do this kind of pegging or anchoring to some degree already. Typically, brushing your teeth is a trigger for flossing. (And if you have a hard time accomplishing that bit of dental hygiene, Fogg would say to start by flossing just one tooth — then telling yourself, “Awesome!”)

5. Make It Meaningful

Kelly volunteers at a ranch twice a week to work with kids with special needs who do therapeutic riding. When she’s lacking drive, she’ll look at photos of the kids and horses to remind her of why she goes in the first place — and what she gets out of it.

Keeping goals as meaningful and immediate as possible helps us stay motivated.

Bilsker points to research showing that the kind of large-scale, long-term outcomes we typically aim for — exercising to improve heart health or look more attractive, say — often don’t have the oomph to power us past inertia.

On the other hand, think about this: It’s well-known that exercise releases feel-good chemicals called endorphins. Research has found that taking a little time right after you exercise to recognize and appreciate that positive feeling makes you more motivated to exercise again.

The general principle of embracing any immediate benefit (psychological or practical) carries over to other activities, including Kelly and her volunteer work. As she says, “I feel really good when I can give back to the community, and it gets me out of the house — and that in itself is its own reward.”

Bonus Tip: Adjust Your Expectations

When you’re low on energy and interest, it helps to think about how you can streamline your obligations. The idea is to focus on and feel good about what you can accomplish instead of beating yourself up for what you can’t get done.

During one depressive phase, which lasted about a year, Krystal, of New Jersey, pared down her “have-tos” to one thing: her job at the time as a high-school teacher.

“I managed to go to work every day, but that was all I did,” says Krystal. “It was too much to do anything but work.”

To accomplish even that, Krystal asked for permission to come in late several days a week. That relatively minor change allowed her to keep up with her lesson planning and grading.


UPDATED: Originally printed as “Get Your Momentum Going,” Spring 2015

About the author
Kelly James-Enger, a health, fitness, and nutrition writer, lives outside Chicago with her family. Her work has appeared in Fitness, Woman’s Day, Runner’s World, and other magazines.
19 Comments
  1. Excellent article. One of the best I have seen in more than 30 years with Bipolar!

  2. For me a reward might be swinging on porch swing. Listen to music on TV or radio or CDs or phone. Pet cat. Write to a friend. Draw or color. Collect leaves. Make a wild bouquet. Find an old movie or show seen and just watch a little. Fix healthy fun food. Text or call someone. Get in car, go in town. Put on nice clothes, lotion, perfume. Do something in house not so much work but fun to have done, like sort socks or jewelry.

  3. Great article. I’d recommend B.J. Fogg”s book as mentioned here. It helped me.

  4. Awesome advice!!!!

  5. Do you know what i did today? My piwer company have granted me 5 free hours of power. So i booked an hour 5 minutes before then set to work ! I loaded the dishwasher and set it going , loaded the washing machine and set it going, vaccummed the whole hpuse and then was planning on moppjng the floors but im restimg before i do that. But the hpur was full on and kept me focussed on only power related jobs instead of drifting and its teally helped me . I shall do the same again

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