The Power of Routine By Melody Moezzi

The Power of Routine for Bipolar Symptom Management

By Melody Moezzi

Last Updated: 17 Feb 2023

Building a regular routine while keeping in mind my triggers for bipolar has allowed me to reduce anxiety, manage symptoms, and work toward long-term mood stability.

Resilience & Routine

Resilience thrives on ritual. I know this firsthand. After my bipolar I diagnosis in late 2008, I felt broken. But the process of crafting and modifying a series of habits around taking better care of myself helped saved my life.

Central to the success of this process were my morning and evening routines. While they have evolved over the years depending on my moods and circumstances, they have never led me astray.

Knowing how my days will commence and conclude—and revising the details of those beginnings and endings as needed—has helped stabilize my moods over the past dozen years while filling my life with purpose and direction. During this time, I’ve improved my overall health, maintained strong relationships, and flourished personally and professionally in ways that previously seemed out of reach.

In short, my life has become more fulfilling since my diagnosis, not less. Because knowing and naming my mental health condition has allowed me to build routines that both accommodate its burdens and harness its benefits.

Patterns, Habits, & Long-Term Mood Stability

Soon after my diagnosis, I spotted patterns in myself that I knew facilitated depression (chiefly oversleeping and overeating) and mania (chiefly undersleeping and undereating). Having read plenty of books about bipolar by then, I knew this was relatively common. I also knew, however, that just telling myself to stop wouldn’t work.

If I wanted long-term stability, I would have to establish better habits that made it nearly impossible to indulge these triggers. By doing so, I could enact changes that stuck, relying on rituals instead of being forced to rely on the limited resource that is willpower.

Enter my morning and evening routines. While they are different today than they were 10 years or even 10 weeks ago, they have always addressed and continue to address the same basic human needs we all share.

In addition to steady and sufficient sleep and nutrition, these needs also include proper hydration, reliable shelter, respectable hygiene, regular exercise, daily exposure to nature (especially natural sunlight, which can improve mood and sleep), as well as a sense of purpose and meaningful human connection.

Regular Schedules

In my case, I wake up and go to bed early, at roughly the same times every day and night, because doing so wards off the oversleeping and undersleeping that can trigger depression and mania for me. I also wake up to light instead of noise: two lamps in my bedroom automatically turn on at 6 a.m. thanks to an old-fashioned light timer that cost me less than $5. This kicks off my days with far more peace and less anxiety than my phone alarm ever afforded me.

Every morning, after getting up with those lights, I brush my teeth, drink a mason jar of lemon water with my daily medications, pray, write, and take a walk with my husband. This improves my mood, hydration, cardiac health, exposure to nature and sunlight, as well as my sense of purpose and human connection for the rest of the day.

Every night, I stop eating and dim the lights in my house a few hours before bedtime, fill a mason jar with lemon water, tidy up my office to prepare for tomorrow, track my mood and medication intake for the day in a spreadsheet, spend at least a few minutes journaling about how the day went and listing several things for which I’m thankful, take a hot shower, brush my teeth, and pray. This keeps me calm, clean, grounded, grateful, and excited about tomorrow.

In sharing how I start and end my days, I’m not at all suggesting you start or end yours the same way. Nor am I suggesting I always follow my routines perfectly. I’m simply inviting you to consider how you might better attend to your own basic human needs as the sun rises and sets in your corner of the world.

I know from experience that prioritizing your health by building daily routines that revolve around these needs will do far more than help you survive bipolar. It will help you thrive with it.

Printed as “Flight of Ideas: The Power of Routine,” Winter 2022

About the author

Melody Moezzi

Melody Moezzi, an award-winning author and visiting associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington, is also an activist, attorney, and keynote speaker. Her most recent book, The Rumi Prescription: How an Ancient Mystic Poet Changed My Modern Manic Life, joins her earlier works: the critically acclaimed Haldol and Hyacinths and War on Error, which earned her a Georgia Author of the Year Award and a Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Honorable Mention. In addition to her Flight of Ideas column for bp Magazine, Moezzi’s writing has appeared in many outlets, including Ms. magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, the Guardian, HuffPost, Al Arabiya, and the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She has also appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including CNN, BBC, NPR, PBS, PRI, and more. Moezzi is a graduate of Wesleyan University, the Emory University School of Law, and the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. She divides her time between Cambridge, MA, and Wilmington, NC, with her husband, Matthew, and their ungrateful cats, Keshmesh and Nazanin. For more information, please visit melodymoezzi.com and follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.