Put A Fence Around It

“Put a Fence Around It” is a way of thinking about Mania and Depression while you are manic or depressed. Consider the following analogy. Suppose you have a dog and a fenced yard. You leave your dog in the yard while you go to work. When you get back from work what can you expect? You can expect your dog to still be contained within the confines of your fence. However, it is uncertain what your dog did during those hours you were gone. Within this bounded region there exists uncertainty. Your yard is like your moods and your mind is like your dog. Mania and depression are bounded events in time despite their encompassing chaotic behavior. Each mood definitely has a beginning and an end regardless of the uncertain behavior of your mind within that mood. However, to help you gain certainty over the duration of your moods you must “fence your yard.”

 An imaginary “fence” can be constructed around your mood by actively predicting its duration while you are experiencing the mood. It's very easy while you are depressed or manic to forget that these things have beginnings and ends with or without your conscious prediction. These feelings as I’m sure you already know can be all consuming. You might feel like light trying to escape the event horizon of a black hole. There's no turning back despite travelling at the greatest possible speed in precisely the opposite direction. The gravity of these feelings becomes so immense that time itself becomes warped. A minute can feel like an hour and hours can feel like minutes.

When I came up with “Put a Fence Around It” I created a running tally of my moods on an Xcel spread sheet. However, I decided to add the mood called centered. I call it centered because it's somewhere in-between mania and depression. Centered turns out to be my dominant state of mind at least in terms of the amount of time that I experience it. However, the other two moods are so much more powerful than being centered. So they must be weighted in terms of their contributions. The amount of energy required to be either depressed or manic is greater per unit of time than being centered.