Bipolar Monasticism

Answering the sacred call of illness

Several readers have asked for details on how I manage bipolar II disorder. Surviving mental illness — surviving at all, for that matter — requires developing a system of structures and rules for maintaining a good life. For the past decade, I have committed myself to cultivating a life that reduces the likelihood of mental suffering.

I call the precepts that follow “monasticism” because living with mental illness is a call to discipline and responsibility above and beyond what the sound of mind must contend with. This call is sacred and cruel, setting us apart from the crowd. We must accept the bitter cross that God, or nature, has given us.

My monastic rule probably won't work perfectly for you because everyone is different. But, because I have been asked for advice, I have written this article prescriptively. I am writing to you as if are just like me.

You might look at this list and think, "holy shit, this is a ton of work for not a lot of payoff." I agree. It sucks. It takes an enormous amount of time, effort, and focus. You might decide that this rule isn't for you. If so, God bless you.

But I will only say this: crisis comes for all of us. You will lose everything you love. Those closest to you will die or leave you; your body will betray you; your deepest convictions will tremble and possibly fail you; you will eventually face death. Take it from me: it is better to be armored against these travails than not at all.

Expectations

Before we proceed, we need to put our expectations in order.

First, this isn’t about attaining greatness, riches, or acclaim. This isn’t about becoming Warren Buffett or some YouTube asshole with a chiseled chest and a sports car. This is about keeping yourself from experiencing profound suffering and/or killing yourself. That’s it. This isn’t the path to glory or extraordinary success; this is the path to not ending up in a mental hospital.

Granted, advancement in life is more likely if we have rigorous disciplines, but that isn’t the goal and certainly not guaranteed. While I’ve found moderate stability in life and become friends with a lot of cool, successful people as a content creator, I haven’t exactly covered myself in glory. I work at a grocery store and beg for money on Substack:

Second, this rule is primarily preventative and only marginally curative. Put another way, my rule is necessary but insufficient. If that were not the case, then you would not be ill.

Good, consistent habits will certainly protect you from future manic-depressive episodes, but they are, at best, a flimsy life raft in the midst of one. In my most recent crisis, every skill and scrap of wisdom I could muster only reduced my suffering from a 10 to an 8. When I’m in crisis, I am reliant on medical professionals and those who love me. The same is true of you in your worst crises, though you are likely still in denial of this fact — we all are until it happens to us. This means that the single most important precept is the final one.

Third, there’s nothing new or innovative here. This is because we already know what’s good for us, and it’s all boring. I haven’t reinvented the wheel; I’ve just taken seriously everything that we all know we should be doing. What’s good for me, a bipolar person, is also what’s good for every other human being. I just feel the cost of neglecting these habits more immediately. As a result, the rest of this article might be the most boring thing you’ll read all day, and nothing here will blow your mind.

Fourth, everything in this article requires a working knowledge of habits and the brain, which is too broad a topic to get into here. Atomic Habits by James Clear is an accessible guide to the science and discipline of habit formation.

Alright, with all that out of the way, let's get into it. This is my Sacred Rule of Bipolar Monasticism.

Precept #1: Keep a Core Document

A core document is a sort of source code for your life. It is where you keep all your habits, skills, disciplines, and values. It's important to keep this document so that you have something to return to when you have a manic bender or a depressive episode. These events will wreck your equilibrium, so you need a touchstone to return to. When catastrophe strikes, the Core Document becomes your north star, reminding you of your skills, resources, and coping strategies.

It is also a living document, in a constant state of evolution. It's where you can experiment and learn what does and doesn’t work for your life.

Every Core Document will be different, but I have found the following components most helpful:

• Life theme. Your life theme is why you are on this earth. Whatever it is, you get to choose. Keeping a record of your life theme is a way to remind yourself of why you are here, and why you should keep living. Everything you do in life then gets filtered through the lens of your life theme.

• Life philosophy. I don’t care if you follow Stoicism, Epicureanism, Christianity, Satanism, or something you made up. Have a philosophy of life and write it down. If you don’t think deliberately about what you believe about the world, humanity, and the self, then the world and your darkest moods will shape it to their will. That is the path to hell.

• Cognitive skills. These are the exercises and habits of mind that keep you mentally well. This is all the stuff you’ve learned in therapy, from your elders, and spiritual traditions — grounding exercises, cognitive distortions, reframing, mindfulness, etc.

• Crisis plan. What will you do when your darkest day comes? Write that plan here. I recommend using the VA’s Crisis Plan app as a good template for this section.

• Routines and disciplines. This is where you put checklists, routines, and schedules. If you have a particular order of events when you wake up in the morning, for example, it goes here.

• Commonplace. This is a section where you include quotes and wisdom from other human beings. My commonplace has quotes from C.S. Lewis, the Stoics, Nietzsche, the Buddha, various contemporary authors, etc.

It's ok if your root document is a mess. Mine certainly is. It’s a living document, so a bit of messiness is to be expected. But once you’ve written it, it will be your dearest companion. Review as often as you can so that it becomes your lifeblood. Memorize it, even. It will save your life.

Precept #2: Maintain consistent sleep

When some people get tired or stressed, they become consumed with the urge to gamble, drink, or do drugs. When I get tired or stressed, I get the overwhelming urge to injure and kill myself — wildly outrageous responses to mild inconvenience, which I suppose is a decent definition of madness. If I get only 6 or 7 hours of sleep consistently, I will have a full break.

The most important way to maintain emotional regulation so that you don’t go on some wild self-destructive spree is to maintain consistent sleep, by which I mean sleeping at the same time and for the same duration every night.

Catholic monks have a rigid schedule structured around religious devotion to God. Their day is ordered by prayer and work, and punctuated by the canonical hours.

Congrats: you have a new religion, and it is called sleep. Like a monk, the rest of your life will be built around the strict adherence to honoring it. Sleep is a vengeful pagan deity, as capricious as she is gracious: she will punish you swiftly if you don’t keep her commands, but she will bless you with long life, good health, and a clear mind if you respect her.

Sleep is also the foundation upon which all the other habits rest. Poor sleep wrecks the immune system, cognitive function, impulse control, motor skills, appetite, healing, hypertrophy, and emotional regulation. Furthermore, sleep lays down the infrastructure of your habits by reinforcing and consolidating what you have practiced during the day. As Matthew Walker writes in Why We Sleep,

A balanced diet and exercise are of vital importance, yes. But we now see sleep as the preeminent force in this health trinity. The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise. It is difficult to imagine any other state—natural or medically manipulated—that affords a more powerful redressing of physical and mental health at every level of analysis.

I maintain sleep by having a strict sleep hygiene regimen and reading for about 30 minutes to an hour before bed. Reading is the only thing that reliably puts me to sleep. Conversely, there is no surer way to disrupt sleep than gazing into a glowing rectangle in the evening, which leads me to:

Precept #3: Practice digital minimalism

We live in an eternal crashing wave of digital information, and it wreaks havoc on our minds. It is not only the content of this digital wave that causes such distress but the perpetual switching between bite-sized pieces of information. This trains us to think in tiny slivers, and we can only consume the tiniest of intellectual morsels.

Every fulfilling, wonderful thing in life demands prolonged attention. Beauty, truth, enlightenment, love, wisdom, the development of character – every single good requires prolonged and undivided attention. You are training your brain to be a goldfish via TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, and the pinnacles of human experience will be unavailable to you.

The answer is Digital Minimalism – a term coined by Cal Newport. Newport defines Digital Minimalism in this way:

Digital minimalism is a philosophy that helps you question what digital communication tools (and behaviors surrounding these tools) add the most value to your life. It is motivated by the belief that intentionally and aggressively clearing away low-value digital noise, and optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life.

I maintain Digital Minimalism by blocking all distrating media on my phone and laptop between 10 pm and 12 pm. Some apps, like TikTok and Instagram, are banished from my phone entirely.

I’m not a Luddite. I still watch YouTube, play video games, and use social media, but I do so on my own terms. If you don’t set hard boundaries with online media, then the incentives of these powerful companies will shape your entire life.

Practicing digital minimalism clears the space for you to start cultivating the garden of your life. Now that you have reduced the weeds of TikTok, YouTube, and social media, you can now fill your life with everything that follows.

Precept #4: Don’t eat too much

We all know that diet has a direct effect on mood, but there is a less appreciated facet here, which is a major theme of rules 4-6: suffering compounds suffering.

When I eat too much, I am more likely to have health problems down the road. Those suck. What sucks even more is having health problems and Bipolar II. Life is hard enough when I’m physically fit, and I don’t want the combined monster of having diabetes AND mental illness. One is enough work. The two combined would be unmitigated hell.

I’m the worst at following this precept. I’m like my cat Eli who, if left to his own devices, will stuff his face until he’s as perfectly round as a dinner plate. I’m not fat right now, but I have been for a good portion of my life, and I still struggle mightily with keeping myself at a healthy weight.

Like Rule #2, not eating too much also makes other rules possible. The benefits of Rules #5 and #6 are effective in proportion to how one eats, and Rule #9 depends largely on diet.

The only way I (kind of) keep my eating in check is to track my calories and plan my meals. Yes, it regularly flies off the rails and I eat the entire pizza. I’m working on it.

Precept #5: Move long distances

Last week, I noticed my mood slipping. Dark thoughts plagued me, vicious impulses to injure myself assailed me. I looked at my habit-tracking app and noticed that I hadn’t kept up my running regimen. I started this week with a three-mile run, and the dark mood dissipated like mist.

Running keeps my mood above water and helps me feel good in my body. I also do some of my most important thinking and processing during long runs and hikes. If I have some horrible weight on my shoulders that needs prolonged attention, moving long distances acts as a sort of cognitive defrag.

“I just run.” Writes Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, “I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.” Later, he writes,

“The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.”

I don’t understand the science of the Running Void and why it has such a medicinal effect on me. All I know is that it has always been there for me. Moving long distances was partly what saved me during my latest mental health crisis. I would wake up in the morning, feel good for a few seconds, and then start sobbing as the demons began cracking my skull open. I would then put on my backpack and ruck for miles and miles in the vast Appalachian wilderness. I would weep as I did so, but I kept that forward momentum going.

I’m happiest when I move long distances 5 days a week. When I can’t run, I ruck. When I can’t ruck, I walk. When my knees eventually give out as I age, I will switch to cycling or swimming.

Precept #6: Lift heavy things

Lifting heavy things is vital to maintaining a healthy life for the same reason not eating too much is necessary: it reduces the likelihood of compounding suffering. Lifting heavy things isn’t about being ripped or attaining a certain aesthetic. I’m not shredded — I have the body type of a gigantic toddler. it’s about being healthy when you’re 80.

Physical weakness gets progressively more harrowing as we age, and building muscle protects the body from injury. When I’m elderly, I don’t want to fall, slip a disk, or break a bone. Consider being an 80-year-old with both bipolar II and a broken hip. Very, very bad combo.

Like running, lifting heavy things also leaves me feeling better and helps me keep my head above water. The boost in testosterone and other endogenous drugs feels good. Like a lot of guys, I feel more confident when I have bigger muscles.  It’s also an excellent alternative to self-injury. I haven’t cut myself in years, but the urge to do so still assails me regularly. Working out burns off that self-destructive energy.

Usually, the heavy thing I lift is my own body. I try to work out three times a week for no more than thirty minutes. That’s enough to build functional, sustainable strength.

Precept #7: Meditate every day

The biggest misapprehension surrounding meditation is that it is merely a tool for relaxation, lowering blood pressure, and reducing anxiety.

But imagine, as Sam Harris has argued on his app Waking Up, if people made similar claims about reading books. It would be technically true – reading is relaxing, but it would also entirely miss the point of reading. Reading is about the formation of the soul, building the mind, and sharing in the wisdom of humanity.

Meditation is as crucial a skill as reading and is just as poorly served when seen as only a tool for relaxation. Meditation is about examining the nature of one’s consciousness and discovering peace as a result.

As Sam Harris writes in Waking Up (the book, not the app),

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement—when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it’s the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.

This insight is particularly profound for someone like me whose mind comes with an extra surplus of monsters. Meditation puts some distance between me and those monsters and helps me transform them through attention alone. No other skill has revolutionized my relationship to suffering the way meditation has.

Meditation is also the closest thing I have ever experienced to real magic because it presses us up against the most elemental mystery: consciousness. The direct examination of consciousness becomes the foundation for compassion, a functional ethics, and re-enchantment of a bleak existence. Even when the darkness of despair destroys everything meaningful, this irreducible, luminous spark of consciousness remains. That is a foundation for great hope.

I meditate for 10-30 minutes every morning with Sam Harris’s app Waking Up. If you’re interested in trying it out, feel free to email or DM me, and I will send you a 30 day trial of the app. I’m not paid to say this, I just think the app is great.

Precept #8: Read every day

I can’t explain the life-giving alchemy of reading, no more than I can explain the life-giving magic of running. All I know is that, if I don’t read, my world gets smaller, and that I am happy in direct proportion to how much I read.

C.S. Lewis might have hit on this healing quality of reading when he wrote,

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

My mind alone can be such a hideous place, but reading is the opposite of being alone — it is intimacy with the minds of humanity. It is telepathy, as Stephen King argues in On Writing.

I also firmly believe that if I don’t read, I can’t think. Reading is a form of meditation that sharpens the mind. I can feel myself becoming dull if I don’t keep a consistent reading practice, and having a sharp mind is protective against mental unhealth.

There are also the practical benefits of reading. Most of the things I am sharing in this article, for example, have come to me through reading. If I have a problem or a question, I can invariably find the answer in books. Isn’t that miraculous?

I try to read every day, and I do my best to swap out the screen life for the reading life. Instead of reaching for social media or a game on my phone, I reach for a book. I also read every evening before bed.

Precept #9: Have sex often

Many religious and monastic traditions require abstinence from sexual pleasure. I encourage the opposite. Sex, for me, is both a sustainer and an indicator of health. I can usually tell how well I’m doing by how much I want, and am having, sex.

I’m anticipating criticism for placing so much emphasis on sex and putting it side by side with meditation, reading, and other disciplines. Certainly, sex won’t be important to everyone, and people have a wide range of sexual needs. But sex is extremely important to me, and I think that’s fine. We can only compassionately accept our human needs. If, like me, sexuality is deeply important for your happiness, that’s ok.

Sex is connection, communication, and a sweet island of relief.  In my experience, sex has a similar effect to running. It elevates mood, releases mental knots, and is medicinal to the soul. This even includes the solo variety of sex. I think NoFap, semen retention, etc. is pseudo-scientific silliness. I’m ProFap.

Sex is also necessary for maintaining a healthy partnership. If you value your partnership with your spouse, keep sex alive. That investment will pay dividends when you need the support and love of your spouse in 20 years.

So yes, I am suggesting that you use sex. Sex is both animal and sacred — embrace both. Use sex for relief from anguish, for the joy of carnality, for loving touch, to relieve boredom, to pair bond, and to cultivate meaning by having children, if that is available to you. Nature isn’t often kind to us, but it has given us this rare gift. Take advantage of it.

Precept #10: Practice friendship and community

The quality of our lives is measured by the quality of our relationships. There is no greater investment, no greater meaning, and no greater joy than the cultivation of deep relationships.

When we are young, deep friendship comes to us. Our lives are structured in a way that makes friendship easy. As we get older, we retain the assumption that friendship just happens, and that it isn’t a skill, like reading, or meditation, or exercise. As a result, we become lonely and disconnected as adults. This is perilous. This makes you a lone emperor penguin, wandering the frozen wastes alone.

When every other discipline has failed you, when your body betrays you, when your mind turns against you, your life is entirely dependent on the people around you. Not only are relationships your lifeline in a crisis, they also keep us fulfilled and happy, thereby pushing crisis at bay. This is therefore the greatest rule, and it transcends all other disciplines: love other humans.

Relationships, for me, exist in a trinity: one-on-one friendships, community, and my relationship with my partner Jon. Each requires skill and attention, and I work on them as if my life depended on it. Because it does.

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I’ve written this article as a clarifying process for my own healing in the aftermath of my most recent mental health catastrophe. I’m currently renovating my own Core Document, and it occurred to me that I’m doing monasticism: embracing mental illness as a call to live more deeply and intentionally, rather than seeing it as a scourge that could only destroy me.

I’ve addressed this article to you, but ultimately it is to myself. If you have benefitted from the article in the process, I’m glad.

If you have any thoughts or comments, please leave a comment. If your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.