• Accept that one has the illness.
• Monitor mood easily every day using mobile app technology.
• Take medication as a preventative safety net.
• Identify and be vigilant of one’s own early warning signs.
• Learn about the nature of Bipolar disorder, especially high risk activities.
• Manage your particular stressors and potential triggers at work and play.
• Keep regular patterns of eating, exercise, sleep and relaxation.
• Formulate a wellbeing plan and work through issues which may be fuelling stress and triggering relapse.
• Work on relationship issues to ensure/improve cooperation with family or friends in detecting early warning signs.
• Allow trusted others to mention warning signs, and to learn to respond effectively.
• Alternatively, if family/friends are themselves problematic stressors, find ways to avoid/nullify those stressors.
• Take a preventative self-management approach overall to become adept at avoiding episodes.
• Cultivate mindfulness so that self-monitoring happens naturally in response to potential triggers.

• Please feel free to take notes both during our sessions and outside of them. Therapy is not just about our one hour session together it is also about what you do with your thoughts, feelings, and behaviour outside of our sessions! Therefore…
• Be mindful of what has been spoken of and agreed to in therapy and carry it through into your life. Take notes as experiences, feelings or thoughts happen. Bring them back to therapy. Successful therapy is a two way process whereby we both bring material to the table and work together.
• Be willing to take risks. During therapy I will be asking you to try out new behaviours and experiences. What this does is allow you to gather new evidence and start to think and behaviour in different ways.
• Keep an open mind. Creating change means being open to and willing to accept thinking, feeling and behaving in different ways. Please be open to new experiences and techniques that we might adopt along our journey.
• Provide feedback and ask questions. I will be asking you throughout our sessions for feedback on what is working for you and what is not in our time together. Please use this opportunity to be honest and reflect back to me if you do not understand or feel something isn’t working about our sessions. I encourage and appreciate feedback so that you get a better result.
• Commit to change. Change is a process that requires time and patience. You have been conditioned to think, feel and behave in a certain way for as long as you are old. It will take time to reverse these old patterns and patience and commitment to doing so. Be realistic in your expectations to change and commit to the process.
• Educate yourself. If we are working on a certain topic, psycho-education and self-directed learning are incredibly important tools to arm yourself with.  I encourage all of my patients to do recommended reading in their time outside of therapy.  Within my office is an extensive library that I often refer to and you can purchase or lend from so please do.

CBT is a widely used form of evidence based therapy that looks at the way thoughts and beliefs influence our behaviour. It adheres to the notion that if you want to change your behaviour you must first change the way you think. A lot of time in therapy will be spent looking at the content of your self talk and how this affects your behaviour in negative ways. I will be helping you to start thinking in less negative and more realistic ways. It will feel silly and uncomfortable at first but with time you will learn a more realistic view of yourself. The relationship between situations, thoughts, feelings and behaviour is called the ABC model and underlies the basis of CBT.

Mindfulness

‘Mindfulness’ is a hot topic in Western psychology: increasingly recognised as an effective way to reduce stress, increase self-awareness, enhance emotional intelligence, and effectively handle painful thoughts and feelings. Although mindfulness has only recently been embraced by Western psychology, it is an ancient practice found in a wide range of Eastern philosophies, including Buddhism, Taoism and Yoga. Mindfulness involves consciously bringing awareness to your here-and-now experience with openness, interest, and receptiveness. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world authority on the use of mindfulness training in the management of clinical problems, defines it as: “Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) treatment is a skills based approach that emphasises tools for emotional regulation – or how to cope with sudden intense urges of negative emotion. Whilst CBT focuses on behavioural change through thought challenging, DBT focuses on teaching skills to help people regulate and cope with intense emotions. Both approaches are helpful due to the thought-feeling-behaviour connection (thoughts influence feelings, which influence behaviours).
DBT is designed to help emotional regulation difficulties such as the following:

DBT also addresses other difficulties::