Good morning @Blep
So ....... I now recognise potential triggers to a mood swing and am able to prevent it from being too big a swing, but that's also partly due to being on a really good mix of meds now and also having psychology most weeks (some mental health care plan and some funded by NDIS). Keeping the charts is the main way I'm able to see if things are changing for up or for down.
Learning to recognise those triggers took a long time. But I now know at least some of them are common for bipolar people. Excess stress, either chronic or acute spikes e.g. panic attacks, significant reduction in sleep, travelling, certain people, conflict near me (e.g. it was constant last time I was in public housing), traumatic events (e.g. being assaulted, and much worse). There are others too but these are the main ones. And they are compounded by having complex and chronic PTSD, that makes some of the triggers more intense.
Especially bad if more than one at the same time. E.g. sleep deprived and having a panic attack or getting alarmed by something. It's possible for me to either go down in a major depression (more chronic for me) or escalate and accelerate into hypomania or full mania (more acute and harder to work through because sometimes I can lose insight into what's happening and have deluded ideas, illusions of grandeur etc). Maintaining insight into where I'm at is one of the main priorities in self-managing. It's when I've lost insight extremely that I've landed in acute mental health hospital involuntarily. Being able to have insight into what's going on is one of the criteria for staying out of hospital.
When depressed I spend a lot of time on my bed, have no motivation to do anything or go anywhere, and find it hard to even talk to my closest people. I lose interest in the things that usually I enjoy, neglect household chores and grooming, self-care etc. I cry easily and have clouded thinking, poor concentration etc. Difficulty making decisions. And I isolate myself for long periods of time.
When I become hypomanic (that's not quite full blown mania but still acceleration from my base line of balance) or fully manic I have rapid speech and thought, agitation and increased energy and restlessness, impulsive behaviour including spending, hypersexuality, going on unplanned and unsafe trips (went to the other side of the world alone one time, another to the wilds of PNG), obsessions with certain activities (get OCD at these times often too) and there's more but I think you would be getting the picture by now. Also used to have terrible angry rages when elevated. The anger isn't such a problem the last few years. Several times I've escalated all the way into psychosis, where things that seemed very real to me were actually not that way at all. E.g. I went on a trip going to mine tailings ponds and putting homoeopathic medicine into them believing I could bring the ecosystems back to life, or another time believed the police were setting up road blocks to protect me from someone who did dv on me. And it's now on my record that ALL ad meds for depression actually trigger mania in me.
I can have higher anxiety in either down or up mood swings.
Hope I haven't bombarded you with too much information, but you did ask! There was no short answer to your question. Exact triggers and the way swings happen can vary a lot from person to person. What I have written is just my experience.
Feel free to ask more if you want to, but I'd recommend some research of your own as well as asking your psychologist for more info. And to be honest I think seeing a psychiatrist too is a really good idea. They are more likely to actually give you a diagnosis. Some of what I've described is also true for borderline personality disorder and some similar for people with schizoaffective disorder. I would caution strongly against self-diagnosing.
Take care and stay kind.
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