Medication Is Not a Fix, It's a Foundation

Finding the right medication combination took me years. Here's what I've learned about what meds can and can't do, and why tracking through changes matters.

I take medication every day for bipolar disorder. I have for years. And for most of those years, I had the wrong combination.

Not dangerously wrong — I wasn’t on medications that harmed me. But I was on combinations that didn’t quite work. That left gaps. That managed some symptoms while creating others. And I stayed on them for too long because changing medication when you have a mood disorder is terrifying.

I want to talk about that. Not the specific drugs — everyone’s chemistry is different and I’m not a doctor. But the experience of being on medication, adjusting medication, and what I wish I’d understood from the beginning.

The experiment you’re running on yourself

Every medication change is an experiment with a sample size of one. Your doctor has clinical guidelines and experience, but they can’t predict exactly how you’ll respond. So they prescribe something, you take it for a few weeks, and you report back on how it felt.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because “how it felt” is a genuinely hard question when your mental state is the thing being altered. Was that irritability a side effect of the new medication? Or was it just a normal bad day? Is this flat feeling the drug stabilizing your mood, or is it the drug dulling your emotions? Is the improved energy real recovery, or the early stage of hypomania that the medication was supposed to prevent?

You’re trying to observe your own brain while your brain is being changed. The observer and the subject are the same thing. It’s like trying to read a thermometer while someone’s shaking it.

Why I stopped a medication I shouldn’t have

I made a medication decision on my own once. It was one of the dumber things I’ve done, and I did it for understandable reasons.

The medication was working, kind of. It kept the worst episodes at bay. But it also made me feel flat. Not depressed exactly, just… muted. Like someone had turned down the volume on everything. The highs weren’t as high, the lows weren’t as low, and the in-between was this grey nothing that I couldn’t stand.

So I stopped taking it. Not with my doctor’s guidance — on my own. I told myself I’d monitor closely and restart if things went sideways.

Things went sideways. Not immediately — that’s the trap. For the first couple of weeks I felt great. More alive, more creative, more energy. I interpreted that as “this is who I really am without the medication dampening me.” What it actually was, I think, was the early phase of destabilization. The medication was still washing out and the buffer was shrinking, but it hadn’t collapsed yet.

When it collapsed, it collapsed fast. Sleep went first. Then mood. Then everything else.

What data would have shown me

Here’s the thing that frustrates me in hindsight. If I’d been tracking properly through that medication change — daily mood, sleep, energy, stability — I probably would have caught the destabilization earlier.

Not the first week, when everything felt “better.” But by week two or three, the data would have shown the pattern. Sleep starting to fragment. Energy spiking beyond normal range. Mood variability increasing even though the average mood looked fine.

These are subtle signals that your subjective experience smooths over. You feel “pretty good” for a few days and your brain goes “see, this is working.” Meanwhile the data would show that “pretty good” is actually oscillating — high one day, dipping the next, higher the day after. That’s not stability. That’s a wave building.

I know this because later, when I did start tracking through a medication adjustment, that’s exactly what the data showed. The numbers caught a trend that I couldn’t feel from inside it.

Finding the combination that works

After going through several combinations over a few years — different mood stabilizers, antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics — I eventually landed on something that works.

I don’t want to name the specific drugs because I don’t want anyone reading this to think “he takes X, maybe I should try X.” That’s not how this works. What works for me is specific to my brain chemistry, my condition subtype, my lifestyle, my other health factors. Your combination will be different.

But I do want to describe what “works” actually feels like, because I think a lot of people on medication don’t know what to aim for. And I didn’t either, for a long time.

Working medication doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t make you feel “normal” in the sense that you forget you have a condition. What it does — at least for me — is create a floor and a ceiling. The lows don’t go as deep. The highs don’t go as dangerously high. And in between, there’s a stable band where you can actually function, think clearly, make decisions you trust.

The first time I found a combination that did this, I remember the feeling. It wasn’t “wow, this is amazing.” It was more like… quiet. My brain was quiet. Not empty, not flat, just not generating noise all the time. I could think about something without it spiraling into five other things. I could feel sad about something without it becoming a catastrophe.

That’s what “works” feels like. Not excitement. Just… enough room to live.

Track through every change

If there’s one practical thing I’d tell someone with a mood disorder, it’s this: track your data through every medication change. Every dose adjustment. Every new drug. Every stop.

Not because you’re going to interpret the data yourself — let your doctor do that. But because you’ll have an actual record of what happened. “I started the new dose on March 3rd, and here’s what my mood, sleep, and energy did over the following three weeks.” That’s gold for a psychiatrist. That’s the kind of information they’re usually guessing at based on your vague recollection.

And it protects you from your own subjective bias. If a new medication is making you subtly hypomanic, you’re going to feel great. You’ll tell your doctor it’s working. But the data might show your sleep dropping and your mood variability increasing, which tells a different story.

I designed Steadyline with medication tracking built in for exactly this reason. Not just “did you take your meds?” but a log that sits alongside your mood data so you can see the relationship between changes in one and changes in the other.

Medication is the foundation. Data is how you make sure the foundation is solid.

I’m a healthcare software engineer living with bipolar disorder. I’ve been through enough medication changes to know that memory alone can’t track them. That’s part of why I built Steadyline.