4 Ways to Live With Borderline Personality Disorder

1. An Early Bedtime Eases Symptoms

One of the keys for living with borderline personality disorder is to get plenty of rest. Getting seven to eight hours of sleep will help you to feel refreshed. This helps cut down on your anxiety and stress levels, which will help lessen your borderline symptoms.

2. Get Physical and Feel the Endorphins

Regular exercise is another way to make living with borderline personality disorder easier. When you exercise regularly, you get a steady release of endorphins into your body, which produces a mild euphoric feeling. This helps counter the feelings of emptiness and mood instability that being borderline can cause. A regular exercise schedule also provides you with a planned block of time, which is reassuring and calming.

3. Three Square Meals

Having borderline personality disorder is a signal that your body's chemistry is naturally defective. Don't aggravate the problem by eating irregularly or eating a lot of food high in sugar and salt. Instead, eat three regular meals, and make sure your diet is heavy on the recommended servings of fruits, grains and vegetables. This diet will give your body the nutrition it needs, which may lessen the symptoms of being borderline. Another reason to eat healthy is that a psychiatrist may prescribe antipsychotic medication to counter any co-existing mental disorders. These medications may produce several side effects, one of which is weight gain. A healthy diet can help counter that.

4. Stick to Your Treatment

The symptoms of a mental disorder can ebb and flow, and borderline personality disorder is no exception. After a few months of treatment, you may wake up one morning to find that your symptoms have become almost unnoticeable. This causes many people to end their treatment. Rethink that decision, because the symptoms may return. However, you should tell your psychologist that you are feeling better. She and you may be able to agree to decrease your treatment. Continue going to your therapy sessions and continue taking your medication until your doctors agree that you are recovered enough to go off them.

Last updated on: Nov 18, 2009

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