Keeping your cool and bipolar. Does this happen to you? The person you happen to be with - the so-called normal one - starts talking with pressured speech or gets over-enthusiastic or over-reacts. You are the cool one.

Or, you are in a room with others, and they are the ones who raise their voices, not you.

Something similar happened to me on both fronts this week. In the second instance, everyone in the room kept their cool, but later, off the record, a number confessed to wanting to scream or storm out the door.

Really? I thought. I'm the one who is supposed to react that way, not you guys. It turns out I too was as cool as a cucumber, and I conveniently have a cucumber here for comparison.

So what is going on here? Are we seeing a paradox at work? Have our runaway brains, in effect, forced us to be far more disciplined in tight situations than the general population? Over time, do we get so good at mastering our emotions that we don't even notice?

Have the tables turned? Are we the sane ones?

I think this is the first time this topic has ever come up anywhere, and I need your help. Question:

Tell us about your own experiences in keeping your cool? Has your bipolar helped you or hindered you in this regard? What "keeping cool" tricks work for you?

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