mood changes in a flash

tell me i am not the only one - i know i am not.
but this morning, i was okay and then suddenly after a smoke, i just started to feel low.

why does this happen to people? there was no trigger - it just happened~

what where you smoking. maybe because the smoke left your breath sour>?

just a ciggy. i am relaxing now so hopefully i'll feel better

ciggies really relax you, they raise your heart beat.

it happens to me for no reason. i havent been diagnosed with bpd but i took the test here and it said i had it severe. i read a bit on it and it does sound like me. my mood changes for no reason at all !!

Same...plus cigarets are a depressant. I want to quit smoking...it makes me feel so dirty...but I love the time out. Sigh.... But yes...cigarets cause mood swings.

I don't smoke and this happens to me all the time

all the time, husband will ask what happened and I always say "I don't know" it's like someone flips a switch in your brain. Very frustrating.

It happens to me, too.

Billi

I haven't been diagnosed with any thing but rapid mood changes happen a lot, these past weeks I've noted them more. I wish you all well!

I can wake up in the morning singing and an hour later I'll be raging and throwing things...
(although most doctors will say it's because you're a smoker or you weigh too much and that's why you're having mood swings for lack of coming up with anything else)

Although people with BPD are very individual, emotional dysregulation (the erratic, wild shifts in our emotions from minute to minute) is probably the one thing that we all experience. In a sense, we have difficulty tolerating the different fluctuations in our emotions; we are acutely sensitive to any and all shifts in our feelings. I guess what I'm saying is that people who don't have BPD experience minor shifts and/or slight ebbs and flow of their emotions, but these non BPD people are better able to tolerate these shifts--probably a combination of a nature and nurture things.

I know that one of the things that I've come to recognize is that when I get upset/overwhelmed emotionally, my emotion hits a higher high and takes a LOT longer to come back down to base than someone without BPD. In other words, when I get angry, it goes up quickly and peaks at a higher level than someone else. And I tend to stay up there in the high angry range for a longer period of time. When I started treatment, I also began to realize that I had a harder time than other people expressing/verbalizing what emotions I was feeling due to the intensity and my difficulty identifying and expressing my emotions. This is critical because as you guys know, talking and sharing one's feelings is one of the most important ways for a person to begin to heal. The neat thing is that there is now reserach that has shown that a good, solid relationship with a talented, consistent and knowledgable therapist can help people like me develop new coping skills AND rewire the neuropathways, allowing me to recognize, identify and self soothe. The hard part is finding a therapist who understands BPD, and even more importantly one who actually LIKES working with people who are BPD!