The first thing I would do if you're highly emotional, like, highly emotional,
volatile fly off the handle, a lot of mood variation, a lot of negative emotion.
The first thing you might want to think about
is whether or not, there's actually something wrong with you.
Like, physically, you might be ill because illness can do that to people.
And so you could go get yourself checked out.
You might have an inflammatory condition or something like that.
And the next thing I would check out is like, are you sure you're not hungry?
I'm dead serious about this.
I mean, with many of my clients
who've been anxious, like, a lot of them, they come in:
I'm so anxious. I'm so anxious.
I had this one client.
She'd come in and she say,
God, you know, I'm so dead, at the end of the day,
I'm just wiped out, no energy at all, all I can do is lay down.
She was like, 24.
All I can do is lay down and watch the same movie I watched the night before.
Is that normal?
I was like, well, no, it's not.
And I knew this.
I said, well, what do you eat?
And she said, well, I usually don't have any breakfast.
And then I have, like, a little ball of rice for lunch.
And I usually have something like that for for dinner.
And I thought, you live on two balls of rice a day.
And you're wondering why,
when you come home at night after full days work, you don't have any energy.
I said, Well,
have you considered the possibility that you're starving to death?
So, you know,
we talked about this and you can't live like that.
That's not going to work.
How about... Let's try this for a week?
You do this with therapy, you do experiments.
If you're a behavioral therapist is like,
you got to come to an agreement with these persons.
Like, look, is there some other things you need other than rice?
Like, four other things.
It's like we agreed maybe she'd eat an egg or something.
Like, I think it was eggs.
And there's a few other things I said, okay, look, here's what you do.
Get up in the morning and have two eggs.
You don't have to enjoy them, you know, because people say, well, I'm not hungry.
It's like, why is that relevant?
That's not the issue here.
It isn't like, gourmet time.
It's not starving to death time.
So eat your two eggs, and maybe in three months, you'll enjoy it.
Until then, it'll be like chewing down rubbery cardboard.
But it's not that big a deal.
So we opt her caloric intake by a factor of about four.
And she came back, and I was like, I think she came back two more times.
It's like, oh, I have lots of energy now. It's like, oh, good.
You're not dying of starvation.
And I'm telling you, if you're a volatile person, if you're a volatile person.
Try this, eat a high protein, high fat meal in the morning,
no sugar.
And a big one, like have a steak,
have something solid and doesn't matter if you like it.
Who cares? Cook at the night before.
If you don't want to cook it then.
Just try it for a week and see what happens.
My suspicions... Half my clients, I would say, have dropped their volatility
levels 50% by eating a high fat, high protein breakfast.
And then also notice that if you are crabby and volatile and touchy and you
can't get along with anyone, go eat something.
Like, have 2 teaspoons of peanut butter,
and wait 10 minutes and see if you're still a witch.
So, for some people,
and then if you are a volatile person, like your blood sugar levels tend to move
up and down more because you stress yourself more.
For some people, that really matters... And so, try it for a week.
It's nothing, right? And you might think, Oh, God...
What you'll find if it works is A) you don't get nearly as upset about
the things that used to upset you, and that'll be a shock.
You'll think, oh, my God, I would have flown off the handle because
of that before, and now it's hardly bothering me.
So that's a lovely thing.
And then the second thing is, if something bothers you, you'll recover way faster.
And so that's a good start.
So try that. That's no harm.
It's not going to hurt you.
Try getting up at the same time every day.
That's really important.
If your sleep wake cycle is not regular
and you're a volatile person, say biochemically.
Genetically having a sleep wake cycle
that's disregulated is going to be very hard on you.
So it doesn't matter quite as much when
you go to bed, although it would be good to regularize that too.
But at least pick a time.
You can pick whatever time you want.
I would recommend like 08:00 or 730 because that's what normal people do.
And unless you have a really good reason not to be a normal person,
you should start by trying to be a normal person if you're being an abnormal person.
So try to get up at the same time and try that.
You can combine that with eating and see.
Like, my suspicions are 50% improvement.
Virtually immediately, with that.
And then if that doesn't work, well, then there are more serious things
that you can consider.
Being checked out by an MD, and making sure you're okay.
You might want to go talk to a therapist.
You might want to consider something like
an SSRI antidepressant, because maybe you have a biological
condition, a biochemical condition that's wreaking havoc with your mood.
And like SSRIs Serotonin reuptake inhibitors don't work for everyone.
My experience has been that they don't
really work that well for people who have cataclysmically horrible lives.
And that's not the same as being depressed, right?
Depressed is when actually, your life's not too bad,
by normative standards, but you still volatile as hell and your mood's out of kilter.
SSRIs sometimes can help amazingly with that.
And usually, you know, within a month.
So try them for a month.
If they don't work, stop.
If they do work.
Well, thank your lucky stars, because how bloody much misery do you want?
Having disregulated negative emotion is no picnic, man,
and it's really hard on the people around you as well.
So...those are the that.
And, you know, I have this program online I mentioned.
The other thing you could try is go online.
I have this program called Future Authoring.
You could do the Past Authoring program and bring yourself up to date.
But Future Authoring is a program that helps you make a plan for your life.
You know, what do you want from your friends, your family, your career,
your education? How are you gonna take care of yourself mentally and physically?
Where would you like to be in three to five years? How are you going
to regulate temptation, drug and alcohol use and that sort of thing.
Keep yourself out of trouble.
And how are you going to stop yourself
from deteriorating to where you could deteriorate if you weren't careful?
You can do a credible job of the program in an hour and a half.
You know, it's proved very useful for people.
Maybe you're kind of aimless and you need a plan.
That's another possibility.
So, but don't live with it.
You know, there's lots of things you can try.
Sleep. That might be number one, food.
That's number two, number three, talk to someone, a professional if it's
really out of hand, because what do you want to do?
You want to suffer terribly for the next ten years?
And plus, if you do have a lot of excess
negative emotion, it's really hard on you psycho-physiologically,
because you produce a lot of stress hormones, and that makes you old.
So it's dangerous physically as well.
And it's hard on your brain.
So if you can get it fixed, fix it.
And if it has to be medication, then look, man, everybody, you're going to be taking
medication at some point in your damn life because you're going to get sick.
And my observation of people has been that A) everybody gets sick.
And then what happens?
This is eliminating random luck.
Some people get sick, and then they do everything they can
to not be sick, including taking medication, doing whatever they have to.
And some of them get better,
and others just they don't deal with it, and usually they don't get better.
So you swallow your pride and you think,
oh, yeah, I should be able to handle my problems myself.
It's like, yeah, well, maybe you should.
But maybe if you're really depressed
and you don't take an SSRI, then one day you jump off a building,
and that's pretty much the end of you helping yourself.
And so, you know, you can take the drug.
Hopefully, it'll help you out.
You can get your life back in order.
If you're fortunate, then you can go off it.
You can tape her off it.
They're relatively harmless.
Weight gains a problem, some suppression of sexual function.
That's a problem.
So they're not without risk, but neither is anything else.
So those are those are relatively straightforward things that you
can do that have a high probability of working.