When I am Hypomanic / Manic
Skip the Official Diagnosis, THIS is How It Feels...

1 Aug 05

I get very tense. All my muscles tense up, so much so that my shoulder muscles and my jaw muscles can begin to ache. I usually notice this when I am busy, but I'm busy doing exactly the same daily things that are not normally stressful. My shoulder muscles used to be so tense so often that I never realised that they were tense until I started taking medication and they relaxed.

My heartbeat feels as if it speeds up (but the one time that I used a heart rate monitor to check, my heart rate was the same as normal). The apparent increase in heart rate can be mistaken for excitement or enthusiasm or urgency. My level of excitement / urgency is out of proportion with what is happening to me or around me.

My hands and skin feel warmer and I seem to radiate more body heat. I don't know if this is because my body temperature (or metabolism) increases, or if circulation in my skin increases. But the rise in skin temperature is so consistent with hypomania that C. and my brother use it to determine if I am hypomanic. C. likes it because it makes me more cuddly in bed.

Physical activities requiring full muscle movements (cycling, running, swimming, lifting weights) becomes effortless. When I am manic I have lifted weights weighing nearly one and a half as much as I usually can, swam twenty lengths more than normal, and ran a circuit 15% faster than my standard best time. And done all this with less apparent effort.

Activities requiring fine motor control become difficult. Tying shoelaces requires utmost concentration. Shaving becomes difficult. Picking up or putting down stuff requires effort. Handwriting gets erratic and I have difficulty signing my name. I tend to feel jittery, as if my hands are shaking, but they never are.

I get twitchy. My hands and feet may rhythmically shake on their own accord. I may get spasms in my shoulders for no reason. I also get verbally twitchy. I talk to myself, repeating the words to myself. The twitchiness is not intense and I can damp them down when I recognise it is happening.

I get the intense urge to do things, even if I know that they are stupid and even if I know they will irritate people. It could be in saying things to people, poking / tickling people, interrupting people when they are talking, butting into conversations, or ignoring people.

I have difficulty being in a crowd. There are too many things to catch my attention and I get so confused trying to see and listen to everything simultaneously that I can't focus on the conversation with the person in front of me. If the crowd is in good spirits, I pick up the mood and magnify it so that I may become to the most boisterous, funny, witty, daring, person present. I can be either the life of the party or the clown. A family gathering is sufficient of a crowd for all the problems to appear.

I react to things way out of proportion to what is needed, either by becoming excited, or angry, or happy, or anxious.

I react to t

I get irritated about the smallest things. I argue with waiters. I get annoyed with store clerks. I quarrel with the telephone operators. I get short tempered with my friends and my family.

Driving becomes difficult and hazardous. I overreact to oncoming or overtaking vehicles. My memory failure makes it difficult keep a mental picture of traffic around me. At intersections, if I look for cars in one direction, by the time I check the other direction I have forgotten if there are oncoming cars from the first direction.

I may get very expansive and generous to all people. I happily say hello to strangers in the street. I smile at the things people do. I go out of my way to be helpful, even involving myself in conversations that I am no part of. It's a bit like the bonhomie one gets when one is drunk.

I get vivid realistic full colour dreams. I feel as I am actually living these dreams as if they are real life. Sometimes I am not sure if my memories are from real life or from one of these dreams. (I can never remember these or any of my dreams in detail).

It appears that I become more resistant to becoming ill (anecdotal only as it is difficult to document).

I get major carbohydrate (not sugar) cravings. Bread, rice, and pasta are wonderful. Or, I don't feel like eating at all.

Speech speeds up and may be a bit unintelligible to others (as noticed usually by people asking "what?").

There is a tendency when speaking to just have sentences trail off without finishing them. More frequently, I would be in the midst of a sentence and forget the next word I wanted to say. Indeed I forget all the words I need to use to show the point I was trying to make. I would be able to visualise what I want to say, but not be able to think how to say it.

Memory about facts or items fail. I can't remember dates, names of things, or when I met people, or telephone numbers. I often can't remember activities that I have done unless strongly reminded. I forget things I have to do, appointments, etc. I am famous among my friends for this.

I get easily confused if I have more than one thing to do. Everything become equally urgent and I find myself swapping between doing 5 things at once (and getting none done adequately). I cannot concentrate enough to do one thing because I feel other things need to get done "now!". One of most obvious ways I notice this is I start walking back and forth between two locations to get two things done simultaneously (for example - trying to change on a morning and trying to get breakfast organised).

Productivity soars as I feel better, move faster, get things done. Even though I find this a good thing, it is an indicator because it degenerates to...

I get ideas on all the things I want to do. Good ideas. I think this is what the standard texts mean by grandiose ideas, but it doesn't manifest as "grandiose." Just good ideas and lots and lots of them. The number of things I am thinking of can get so numerous and intense that they can halt any functionality I have as I sit down and think on them instead of getting ahead with what I have to do.

Many projects may be started in a day or two as the desire to put all these good ideas in action kick in, but few are followed through or finished. There is a strong tendency to volunteer to be in action groups, committees, or to be take a key role in some project.

At work I can get focused on one project almost to the exclusion of everything else. I visualise with crystal clarity what needs to be done and I can't wait to get back to working on the project. I take time off other tasks, even important ones, to finish the project. Other work suffers and paperwork from them pile up on my desk. Activities outside work may suffer.

I stay at work until very late hours of the night, often past midnight to finish a project even though everyone else has left the office since six o'clock in the evening. I may then come in early to start working on it. Everything on the project has to be just right. It's almost an obsession.

If there are other persons working on the project, I become impatient with their slowness or inability to understand how the project needs to go. I quarrel with others. Given half a chance I take over even though this might not be the most diplomatic thing to do.

and

My poetry exists when I'm hypomanic. Language becomes a toy to play with rather than a workman's tool of communication. I can churn out limericks within minutes on anything that is happening around me. My poetry comes out fully formed in a burst lasting from two to less than twenty minutes and needs no fine tuning or rewriting.

A Point of Note.
I thought a lot of these things were my normal behaviour until I went on medication. After all, none are really so far out of the ordinary. But they all stop when I am stable.

These days I monitor myself on an ongoing basis. Once I notice that am getting one or two of the symptoms (and it may take me a while to notice), I actively try to calm myself down with deep breathing or taking a 5 minutes off from what I am doing, etc. I have found this to be useful in staving off the onset of the hypomania and sometimes the intensity of the hypomania. And it keeps me functional longer if the it starts happening at work, enough to finish work for the day sometimes.

The nice thing about mania is that once you learn what you have to do to keep it under control, you can. Mania gives you all of this excess energy to do things, and it is possible to channel some of that excess energy into monitoring yourself and doing the things that calm you down. The important thing is learning the early signs that you are becoming manic and keeping a look out for them, so that you can take action to calm yourself. If you let the mania and manic energy build, at some point you become too excited / happy / energetic to be able to calm yourself, or to even want to calm yourself.