Recently, I find myself stuck in between two emotional states of being. I am definitely “up”. that is to say that I am experiencing elevated moods, a decreased need for sleep and a heightened sense of creativity. However, this state isn’t a permanent one leading to me questioning the validity of calling this hypomania.
For the last 10 or so days I have been noticing a reduced need for sleep, and a lack of ability to sleep beyond 5-6 hours even if I try. In myself I’ve felt in high spirits, and feel a desire to create and design which I had been avoiding doing for some time. I’ve also experienced pressured speech, and find myself talking a lot, but I haven’t felt out of control of this. This lasts for a couple of days, most of the day.
Then there’s the mini-crash. I start to feel bored, tired, fed-up and unsatisfied. The shorter nights sleep leads me to feeling tired or going to bed early. This feeling leads to frustration, and can last form a couple hours up to a day and then I go back to being a bit “up”.
Crashing from any kind of high is not easy, but this can be a difficult one to recognise as without reaching a hypomanic state I’m not always aware that this is even happening, and just left with the thought that my life is leaving me unsatisfied, frustrated and tired.
I can feel that there’s some kind of mania there, mostly because I crave it more and more. That hypomanic on top of the world feeling is like a drug to me, and as soon as I get a taste for it I don’t want to stop. I’ve definitely been experiencing that lately.
I feel like there’s one of two things going on here, either I am on the verge of going into a mixed episode (Dysphoric Mania in this case) or that I am walking the lines of mania. Whilst it is entirely possible with Bipolar to wake up in a new mood state this is by no means how it is always experienced, and there are definitely transitions into and out of mood episodes which I feel the black and white diagnostic criteria for the episodes doesn’t account for this.
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