Life has been okay lately. I recently moved into a new apartment near the graduate school I will be attending, and to be honest, I do not really know how to feel about it. Instead of letting me enjoy it, my mind has found every possible reason why I should not. Why was I not able to obtain a PhD position instead of a master’s? Why am I paying so much money when I could have received a small stipend in a PhD program? Why am I not further along in my career?

Regardless, none of that changes where I am now. It is important for me to be grateful and recognize when the internal noise is turning something I should be proud of into another reason to criticize myself. There is not really a way to completely shut that noise up, but journaling and writing this blog seem to keep it at bay.

I think the biggest adjustment is that I used to have a job, and that gave my weekdays a purpose. Now I find myself sitting around my apartment wondering what exactly I am supposed to be doing. Of course, I leave to go see a movie, exercise, or do other things, but lately there just does not seem to be much purpose to my days. I find myself resorting to TV and Reels for entertainment, and then I hear my mind telling me, “That fragments your focus,” so even that becomes difficult to enjoy.

It surprises me how little time we actually have during our lives. I do not know whether this is existential dread creeping in, but I constantly feel like if I am not productive with my time, I am failing myself. Of course, that is not true. But when your mind has unrealistic expectations for where your career should be, especially while also managing bipolar disorder, almost nothing seems capable of meeting those expectations.

We have all heard a therapist tell us that parts of our present reality can reflect what we experienced during childhood. I have started recognizing this within myself. Growing up, I was constantly yelled at and expected to complete even menial tasks under duress. Today, I struggle with confidence and have a tendency to people-please. As a child, I often felt responsible for soothing my parents’ anxiety, and now that tendency sometimes follows me into adulthood. The difference is that today I am not trying to soothe my parents’ anxieties. Instead, I am working toward unrealistic expectations I have placed on myself.

I know there are people who experienced far worse childhoods than mine, but bringing these experiences to light in therapy has at least opened the door toward understanding some of the problems I still face today. There is no guarantee that understanding where something came from will immediately solve it, but at least you are taking a step toward becoming your authentic self.

Something I often say to myself when I am ruminating or depressed is, “You are not becoming who you were destined to be.” Most of the time, that thought helps turn the tide. It gives me enough momentum to clean my apartment, work out, go for a walk, journal, or simply do something that interrupts the vicious cycle.

I did not choose to live with bipolar disorder, but I believe I can choose whether I learn how to live with it. I have chosen to learn. Does bipolar disorder stall me sometimes? Absolutely. But does it prevent me from taking action on something simply because it scares me? No. I am a firm believer that even through failure we learn something valuable about ourselves and what we need to do differently next time.

That is also why I am strangely thankful for some of the anxiety I am experiencing right now. I am anxious about starting classes. I wonder whether I will be able to keep up with the work, whether I will make the grades I expect of myself, and whether I will find the right mentors within the program. But I also know that whenever I experience this kind of anxiety, it usually means I am doing something that challenges me and forces me to grow.

Life does not stop regardless of how I am feeling whether I am depressed, anxious, or experiencing a mild form of mania. In some ways, I think that is for the best because it forces me to continue showing up for the things that matter. Trust me, I hate the cycles, but you will still find me actively working through them and taking things one day at a time. I try to fight them intelligently, with my therapist and psychiatrist informed about what is happening. Asking for their help is not me failing to handle things myself. It is another way of showing up for myself and taking the best action I can toward getting better.

I cannot always choose what my mind gives me, but I can choose what I do with it.

Last month everything was going great. I was conquering all the work expected of me, gave a difficult presentation, went to therapy every week, exercised every day, and routinely met with my therapist. Then my life flipped into depression. I was still doing many of these things. Still, my rumination and anxiety stalled my ability to take action in crucial parts of my life, making me feel like a less confident person and a less competent employee.

Living with bipolar disorder is always a slippery slope, so it is important to remain vigilant. There are times when everything seems to be working. You take your medication, go to therapy, journal, see your psychiatrist, and your energy levels feel great. Your anxiety and rumination become comparatively quiet. Then something changes. Maybe it is a stressful day at work, a major life transition, or missing a couple of therapy sessions. Individually, these things seem small, but they slowly begin to pile up.

For me, I always take my medication and make it to therapy regardless of how I am feeling. However, depression changes the way I approach those habits. I stop preparing for therapy sessions. Then I stop scheduling them consistently, so now I am no longer receiving therapy every week. Around the same time, the laundry begins piling up, and my bathroom becomes covered in prescription bottles. It sounds like a small thing, but waking up every morning to immediate chaos makes it harder to function. When I am doing well, all of my medication is organized in a pill container. I open it, take my medication, and move on with my day. When depression creeps in, even that simple routine begins to fall apart.

I always tell myself that I will clean my bathroom floor or organize my office, but I never do. I start breaking promises to myself, and each broken promise only deepens the depression. It bleeds into other parts of my life. I stop showing up to work on time and instead arrive whenever I wake up, sometimes as late as 11:00 a.m. My energy is at an all-time low, so I rely on caffeine to make it through the day. It feels like so much of my energy is being consumed by rumination that there is very little left for anything else. When you spend most of the day fighting your own mind, there is not much left in the tank. I used to have my sleep under control, but recently I have been falling asleep around midnight and waking up around 11:00 a.m. Even with my doctor-approved sleep routine, I cannot seem to get back on solid footing.

What confuses me the most is wondering what I did to bring something like this on. The answer is often nothing. Sometimes life transitions or even changing seasons are enough to trigger a depressive episode in someone with bipolar disorder. I used to feel completely in control, and then one day it seemed to disappear. Even during conversations with other people, I cannot control the rumination in my head. I mentally check out of the present moment and go on a fishing expedition through the past. Unfortunately, I am never searching for good memories. Instead, I replay moments that fuel my depression, whether it was interviewing for a PhD program and not receiving an offer or replaying something that upset me earlier that day. In some ways, I think it is harder to be aware of what is happening. You recognize the signs, you discuss them with your therapist, and yet the rumination continues anyway.

I am not saying any of this to make people feel sorry for me. This is simply what the changing tides of bipolar disorder look like in my life. Depression can arrive quickly and sometimes without an obvious reason. Mania brings its own challenges, but depression has always been more common for me. Even then, I refuse to take it lying down. I continue preparing for therapy, meditating, journaling, running, talking with my psychiatrist, cleaning when I can, and trying to be kind to myself. That last one is often the hardest. It is incredibly easy to criticize yourself when you feel like you are working with broken machinery. Bipolar disorder is not something where you take medication and become cured. Managing it requires constant work, and therapy has helped me recognize when the tide is beginning to shift because I know these behaviors are not who I normally am.

Part of me is frustrated that it was depression rather than mania that showed up during my last two weeks at work before starting graduate school. It would have been easy to wish for the extra energy that mania can create, but I also know the consequences that come with it. Instead, I found myself leaving work consumed by rumination, wondering whether I had forgotten important files or left projects unfinished. Depression makes me question every decision I make. I overthink everything, struggle to take action, and lose confidence in myself. It is unsettling how I can feel like two completely different people while still being the same person. I am not glorifying mania. The depression is simply brutal. Waking up late, going to bed late, living in a messy house, missing therapy appointments, making excuses for being late to work because I am depressed, which almost became an entire job on its own.

Right now I am also transitioning from a job that I did not enjoy into graduate school. Transitions have always been difficult for me, and bipolar disorder seems to amplify them. I cannot control when depression decides to show up, but I can control how I respond. All I can do is continue showing up for the habits that have helped me before: therapy, exercise, sleep hygiene, and taking my medication every single day.

From the outside, my life looks completely ordinary: calm, composed, and collected. But underneath is all the work it takes to function with bipolar disorder in a world that rarely sees the struggle.

Most people with bipolar disorder will tell you it is not easy. They are right. What many people do not realize, however, is that functioning bipolar disorder often looks completely ordinary from the outside. People see you going to work, meeting deadlines, maintaining relationships, paying bills, and fulfilling your responsibilities. They assume that because you are functioning, the bipolar disorder no longer affects your life. What they do not see is the amount of maintenance happening beneath the surface. They do not see therapy appointments, psychiatrist visits, medication adjustments, sleep schedules, journals, boundaries, and constant self-monitoring. Functioning bipolar disorder is not a lack of struggle. It is the presence of systems that prevents the fight from taking over.

One of the biggest challenges for me was learning how to function in a work environment that was heavily focused on feedback and deadlines. Before I got my mood under better control, I never really took criticism very well. Whenever someone gave me feedback, I viewed it as an attack on my intelligence or competence. It also stalled a lot of the projects I was working on because when the central driving force behind a project cannot take feedback, it shows immaturity and an inability to be a team player.

I think part of the problem was how much effort I put into everything. I would spend hours preparing for meetings, making graphs, figures, PowerPoint slides, and making sure everything looked perfect. Then I arrived at the meeting, and it felt like they were demolishing everything I had worked on. It felt like I could not get anything right. Instead of hearing the constructive feedback that would improve the project, I focused entirely on what was wrong. I would leave feeling defeated and depressed, almost like all the work I had put in was for no purpose at all.

The worst part was that the meeting never really stayed at the office. I took it home with me. I used to replay the worst moments over and over in my head. I would sit with my girlfriend and not be fully present because I was still mentally in that conference room thinking about what I should have said differently. I started to form assumptions about how my mentor and boss viewed me. I convinced myself that they thought I was immature, incapable of handling pressure, or simply not good enough. Looking back, I realize that a lot of that was my inability to tolerate the unknown. My mind filled the blanks with the worst possible explanations.

Eventually, I had to learn to stop taking myself so seriously and focus on getting the job done instead of chasing recognition. The recognition often did not come. The praise often did not come. What did come was a calm confidence that developed over time. I learned how to receive criticism without viewing it as a personal attack. There were still times when I would argue and defend my work, insisting that I had already made the suggested changes and that my version was the best version. Looking back, much of that was ego. I had to learn that accepting feedback does not make you weak. In many ways, it requires more confidence than defending every decision you make.

A large part of that growth came from therapy. At first, therapy felt like another obligation. Weekly sessions, monthly psychiatrist appointments, medication management, and co-pays are not exactly exciting things to put on your calendar. But over time, I realized that therapy was helping me identify patterns I consistently missed on my own. Without therapy, I tend to isolate. I spend too much time inside my own head. I replay situations endlessly and convince myself my interpretation is the correct one.

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was showing up to therapy unprepared. My therapist would ask what I wanted to discuss, and I would give some shallow answer like work when the real issues involved my relationships, insecurities, fears, or recurring thought patterns. I was missing opportunities to improve my life because I was only discussing the symptoms rather than the deeper problems beneath them. Eventually, I admitted to my therapist that I felt like I was wasting our sessions. I told him I was not giving therapy my full effort and that I was not bringing the right material into the room. That conversation changed everything. From that point forward, I started paying attention to situations throughout the week that bothered me. If something made me anxious, frustrated, embarrassed, angry, or confused, I wrote it down. Therapy became far more productive because I was finally bringing real problems into the room instead of generic summaries of my week.

Work also showed me the importance of boundaries. I struggled to say no when I already had too much on my plate. If someone needed help, I wanted to help them. If another project came up, I wanted to prove I could handle it. Eventually, I realized that constantly saying yes created unnecessary stress. I started keeping track of everything I had already committed. When people came asking for additional assistance, I could show them exactly what was already on my plate. Sometimes the correct answer was simply “no’‘.

Also, I learned that not everything requires a complicated explanation. When people invade your personal space, look over your shoulder while you’re working, or constantly interrupt you, the solution is often much simpler than we think it to be. I spent countless hours talking through situations like this with my therapist before noticing that sometimes a simple “do you mind?” solves the problem. I was teaching people how to treat me while learning how to advocate professionally for myself.

Sleep became another critical part of functioning with bipolar disorder. It is incredibly easy to sleep ten or twelve hours when you are taking a sedating antipsychotic. What surprised me was that those extra hours did not make me feel better. When I slept twelve hours, I felt like I had two fifty-pound weights strapped to my feet. Everything felt slow. I ruminated more. I second-guessed everything. I would forget my keys, drive somewhere, realize I forgot my wallet, and spend the entire morning correcting mistakes that should never have happened in the first place.

What I eventually discovered was that seven to eight hours worked much better for me. I woke up with more energy, more motivation, and less rumination. I showed up to work ready to work instead of dreading the day before it even started. By the end of the day, I felt accomplished instead of feeling like I had wasted another twenty-four hours.

Exercise became just as important. Running consistently improves my mood, helps me sleep, reduces stress, and gives me an outlet when my mind becomes crowded. There are plenty of days when I do not feel like exercising, but I almost never regret doing it afterward. Journaling has become equally important. At the end of the day, I try to review what happened, where I performed well, where I struggled, and what situations deserve further reflection. It improves my memory, helps me identify patterns, and gives me material to discuss in therapy. Many of the improvements I have made in my life came from recognizing patterns that only became visible after I started writing them down.

When people hear the phrase functioning bipolar disorder, they often imagine someone who no longer struggles. My experience has been the opposite. The struggle is still there. The difference is that I have learned how to respond to it. Therapy, exercise, sleep, journaling, medication, boundaries, and self-awareness are not things I do because life is easy. They are the reason life remains manageable. Functioning bipolar disorder does not mean the disorder has disappeared. It means learning how to maintain yourself well enough that it does not dictate every aspect of your life.

People say they’d do anything for boundless energy and unstoppable creativity. What they don’t tell you is how quickly that gift can turn into a curse. And how internally empty it feels when the high is gone.

When you are manic, it can feel like you are tapping into some limitless, untapped potential. Like you suddenly have the energy you once did when you were 18, and you actually have the mental bandwidth to carry out every idea racing through your mind. These grandiose thoughts make you feel like you are tapping into your inner Einstein. This precipitates deeper focus, increased retention, and the overall feeling that you are finally operating at the level you were always supposed to be at. So, of course, you try to capitalize on it on this manic energy.

The problem is that the line between creativity and insanity becomes terrifyingly thin when you have bipolar disorder. You may think you are taking care of yourself while simultaneously being one decision away from a manic episode with an already impaired mind. From the inside, it does not feel dangerous. It actually feels very good and liberating. That is what makes the manic state so deceptive.

Mania can feel incredible while you are inside it. But the silence that comes afterward is one of the most depressing things I have ever experienced. People say mania is destructive, and it is, but nobody really talks about the psychological emptiness that comes after you are medicated and stabilized. Psychiatrists will say they are proud of your progress because you are finally euthymic, stable, or balanced. But what that looked like for me was being heavily medicated on antipsychotics and mood stabilizers to the point that I barely recognized my own mind anymore.

The running inner narrative that had existed my entire life was gone. Simply watching the television became difficult to follow. Music lost the buzz it had while manic. I couldn’t easily enter into a flow zone anymore. So everything just felt like it was meant with constant resistance. I would get on the treadmill, run for five minutes, stop, then try again because my brain felt weak and fragile, like it had been defeated before even starting. Before all of this, my mind was excessive. I overanalyzed everything. But there was still movement inside of me. There was intensity. There was emotion. When that suddenly disappears, it can feel like your sense of purpose and who you are just disappeared off the face of the earth.

The strange thing is that I was still anxious, just anxious in a completely different way. I had never experienced that level of silence before. I had spent most of my life inside my own head, constantly thinking, constantly analyzing, constantly narrating reality to myself. Then suddenly there was nothing there. People love to glorify silence and stillness. They usually describe it as peaceful or grounding. But whatever this was, it did not feel peaceful. It felt eerie. It felt like I was trapped in the present moment, unable to retreat into my own mind as I used to. For most of my life, my brain had constantly generated thoughts, ideas, worries, plans, and internal conversations. Then suddenly everything was quiet, and I did not know how to function in that quiet.

I remember trying to work out because exercise had always helped me mentally. Normally, I would put music on and completely disappear into it. Running used to feel immersive. My thoughts and emotions would synchronize with the music, and I could enter this deep flow state where I felt fully alive. After the manic episode and medication, that feeling completely disappeared. I would get on the treadmill and feel nothing. Five minutes would pass like an hour, and I would completely give up efforts before even pushing myself that hard. It felt like my brain lost its ability to gain momentum on menial tasks. Everything felt flat. Even things I loved had lost their flavor.

What made it worse was that I could still remember exactly how good it felt before the medication. I knew what my mind used to sound like. I knew what it felt like to think rapidly, feel intensely, and become consumed in ideas. I am not saying all of that was healthy because it clearly was not, but going from one extreme to the other felt psychologically brutal. It was not that I wanted the 50 different racing thoughts back. I just wanted the ability to hold one or two. Instead, it felt like there was a giant zero where my personality, hobbies, and interests used to be. And all I was was the passing present moment I could not seem to escape.

Some days, I would stay in bed all day because things just felt completely pointless. Get up, try to do something, get bored, and give up. Not necessarily depressed. Just mentally exhausted and completely disconnected from myself. It felt like hibernation. Like I would follow the schedule of wake up, eat, sleep, and repeat. My life at the moment had no real substance. The days dragged on because I could not disappear into thought anymore. I could not retreat into imagination, flow, or deep work. I was just there with myself all the time, and it felt unbearable at times. To be fair, chaos made me feel more productive than I usually am, even when I was actually mediocre or below average. But now the silence made me feel useless even when I was trying my best to recover.

The hardest part is that people assume stability automatically feels good. Sometimes it does. But sometimes stability after mania feels like grieving the loss of a version of yourself that was destroying you while simultaneously making you feel more alive than you had ever felt before. That contradiction is difficult to explain unless you have lived through it. Even now, the first thing I think about when I notice my energy rising is not euphoria. It is the silence that came afterward. The pharmacologically engineered silence made me feel trapped inside my own body with no ability to fully express myself. I wanted to cry during recovery, but it felt like even my emotions had been chemically flattened, and I couldn’t share that experience. That was the eerie part of the silence after a manic episode. Not sadness. Not despair. Just the absence of any train of thought, locked into the present moment, confused.

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The thoughts that feel the most convincing are the ones I trust the least.

It never starts as something obvious. It feels like I am finally becoming disciplined, productive, and locked in. My thoughts are either ruthlessly trying to improve myself or pushing me to do more than I ever have. Over time, I learned to slow them down and recognize that I am not my thoughts, but with bipolar disorder, they almost have a signature. And sometimes they are not helpful at all; they just pull you into this constant inner pressure that never shuts off.

When I become manic, I feel like a well-oiled machine. Ready for anything. Like, I could take on a way bigger role than my actual job and actually pull it off. I start thinking I am more optimized than other people for no real reason. I compare myself to people in completely different stages of life. It does not matter; my mind just wants to make the comparison. And the dangerous part is that it all feels justified.

It starts small. Emails that should take five minutes turn into forty-five because I am trying to say it perfectly. I overthink everything. I start assuming people are misunderstanding me, so I try to correct it before it even happens. Even ordering food becomes something I overanalyze. I create these versions of myself in my head and try to live up to them in real time.

If my boss sends out an email calling someone out, I immediately think it is about me. I will spend nearly an hour writing a response just to realize it had nothing to do with me. My thoughts start moving faster than I can even speak. I cannot keep up with them. They bleed into everything. Dreams turn into arguments. I replay conversations that never even happened. I fill journals with pages of thoughts just to try to get them out of my head.

I know for a fact I cannot trust my thinking when I cannot say it out loud to my therapist or psychiatrist. That is always the line for me. When I start thinking they are trying to keep me overmedicated or hold me back, that is when I know something is off. I start predicting what people are going to do before they do it. My ego becomes visible, even when I do not want it to. I convince myself of ideas that sound incredible but have no real foundation.

The shift is so subtle. It is not just that my thinking changes, it is that my mind becomes vulnerable to ideas it would normally reject. That is why therapy and journaling matter so much. Having something outside of your own head that can reflect things back to you without bias. I used to think a therapist was just someone who agreed with you. That is not how it works. When you walk in one week talking about stability and the next week about leaving your entire career behind, that is where things get examined, and the conversation turns to when this spiral started.

There are moments when I feel like I am one piece of work away from completely changing everything and becoming famous. Like I am on the edge of something big. And instead of shutting that down, I entertain it. I argue with myself about whether it is actually crazy. Deep down, I know the answer, but I keep going anyway.

It shows up in everything. I will go for a run and feel like I did it effortlessly, as if I were operating at a higher level. I stay late at work and think it means I am more committed than everyone else. I finish something small and convince myself it was brilliant. It feels like self-love at first, like I am finally showing up for myself. But it is not balanced. It is forced, and it builds on itself.

I begin preparing for conversations I am going to have in real life in my head. Those conversations almost always go south, and I end up debating that co-worker in my head, only to lose. Then I carry that energy into real life, and it changes how I see people. It got to the point where even my dreams turned into arguments. It felt like I had this constant pressure that was never being released.

I have also noticed this pattern of overcorrecting. If I feel behind in something, I will attack it until it is “fixed,” even if it never mattered in the first place. I did this with typing. I felt like my thoughts were moving faster than my typing, so I spent months forcing myself to improve. Now I type over 100 WPM, but that was never the real problem. It was just something my mind latched onto and pushed to an extreme.

It happens across everything. When I am in that state, I want to push everything to the limit. And there is a line where discipline stops and becomes way too much. People around you do not even see it the same way you do. What feels like effort to you looks unnecessary to everyone else.

I also set standards in my head that are impossible to meet. If I complete one thing, it should have been three. So even when I do something well, I still feel like I fail in my own mind. That carries into how I see other people, too. I become hyper-aware of what people are eating, how they are sleeping, how they are living. I start judging things that do not matter. That is when I know I am losing perspective.

The biggest shift for me came from realizing that my thoughts are not me. Even when I cannot trust them, I still have control over what I do next. That does not make it any easier, but it gives me space. Space to pause. Space to examine. Space to not act immediately.

Now, when I feel that level of certainty, I do the opposite of what I want to do. I slow down. I wait. I give it time before making any decision that could change something important.

The more convinced I feel, the more time I give it before acting.

The hardest part about stability is how boring it feels. I have been stable for about four years now, and if I am being honest, there are times when it feels like I am living at half capacity. There is a version of me that is twice as motivated, twice as driven, and feels almost limitless, and I have to medicate him. I have to shut him down on purpose. I know that is the right decision, because that same version of me believed ghosts were talking to him, thought God was sending messages through the weather, and was taking cold plunges in a trash can, like it all made perfect sense. That is not who I want to be. It is not fair to me or to the people around me. But it felt better.

Medication keeps me stable and grounded, but on its own, it makes me feel like I am disappearing. I started isolating without even realizing it. I would go to work, come home, and mentally check out for the rest of the day. Conversations felt like too much effort. Everything felt dulled, like a part of me had been turned down permanently. It was the closest thing I could describe to falling asleep while still being awake. I was physically there, but mentally somewhere else, just waiting for the day to end so I could get back into bed. I became anxious over things that did not matter, and I could not hold a normal conversation without feeling drained. That became my life for a while, not because I chose it, but because that is what it turned into.

Things only started to shift when I began psychotherapy. Medication slowed everything down enough for me to finally sit with myself, but therapy is what allowed me to actually understand what was happening. Bipolar disorder really is like a coin. One side is medication, the other is therapy, and without both, you do not get stability. Medication gave me the ability to pause. Therapy gave me the ability to look at what I was pausing from. Over time, I stopped telling myself that I was broken. I started realizing that I just experience things differently, and that difference forces you to either learn yourself or lose yourself.

I began picking up things that anchored me. Meditation was one of the first. At the beginning, I could barely sit still for ten minutes. Now I can sit for thirty or forty-five minutes and actually check into the present moment. It gave me something I could fall back on when my mind started pulling me in different directions. Running became another anchor. When I am running hard, there is no room for overthinking. It pulls me into the present whether I want it to or not. By the time I get home, I am too exhausted to sit there and spiral, and for the first time all day, I feel genuinely present. Even something as simple as eating enough started to matter more than I thought. When I was not eating enough, my mood would shift. I used to ignore it, but I cannot anymore. Stability is built on things that seem small but add up over time.

But even with all of that, there are still moments when I miss it. There are times when I am so stable that I catch myself hoping I would get slightly manic again. Not a full episode, just enough to feel it one more time. Enough to lock in, get a ton of work done, and feel limitless again. It is not because I want another manic episode, it is because I want to feel something. When I am manic, everything feels amplified. I notice things I never knew were even there. I connect ideas faster, I learn at a pace that doesn’t feel real, and I can read over 100 pages in one sitting without slowing down. It feels like I am finally operating at the level I am supposed to be at. And then I go back to being stable, and it feels like I am just trying to keep up with basic things. That is the part that is hard to admit.

Because I know exactly where that version leads.

I know what it costs. I have woken up on couches and in random places with no recollection of how I got there. I have gone out drinking with people I did not know and made decisions I would never make when I am stable. I have strained relationships and put people in situations they should never have been in. I have sent money to people online because something in my head told me it made sense. I lost over $1,800 in Bitcoin trying to turn my mom’s art into NFTs because I was convinced it was a good idea at the time. I have gone days without sleeping and felt that constant buzzing in my body where you cannot sit still, cannot relax, and cannot escape it.

I have ended up in the emergency room needing sedatives that barely worked because I was so wired. I have been back in the psych ward, sitting there thinking, “ This happened again. The worst part is that from the outside, it can look fine. People will tell you that you are doing well, that you seem sharp, that you had a good idea, and inside everything is falling apart until it finally does not hold together anymore. I remember being so far gone that I thought I had found the cure to ADHD and wanted to write a scientific paper about it while I was in the psych ward. That felt completely real at the time. That is what makes it dangerous.

So now I choose stability. Not because it feels better, but because it keeps me in control. I take the medication. I go to therapy. I do the things that keep me grounded, even when they feel repetitive, even when they feel boring, and even when it feels like I am not reaching my full potential. Because I know where the other path goes.

And even with all of that, there are still moments when I catch myself wanting it back.

The version of me I miss the most is the one I can’t trust.

The problem with mania is that it doesn’t feel like anything is wrong. It feels like you are becoming a better version of yourself.

Mania does not start with chaos. It starts with small habits that feel completely normal.

The first one is not taking days off. This can precipitate a spiral over time, which could have been avoided by just taking a few days off to begin with. Another one is becoming obsessed with work. This can show up in small ways, like drinking coffee too late or using energy drinks when you’re not tired. Just because I want to feel good instead of realizing that I need to go to sleep in the next couple of hours. In reality, the smallest amount of caffeine works wonders for me. However, when I take more than necessary, I am stuck with anxiety for hours following the initial intake of caffeine. I stop thinking long-term and start prioritizing the short-term gains that will make me feel happy in the moment.

Sleep is a big one for anybody with bipolar disorder. Yet, for me, a habit is getting under 6 hours of sleep, which usually triggers some level of mania. At first, everything feels effortless and so much easier. It feels like a huge weight has just been lifted. You can finally accomplish work that you have been postponing for months in just a couple of days. Goals seem reachable just by the “small” change to sleep, but this amount of sleep for me can be dangerous over the span of a couple of days. Those hours start to add up, and my mood keeps getting progressively worse. It is so important that I get at least 8 hours of sleep per night to maintain a sufficient mood. Of course, others are different, but sleep should never take the back seat with bipolar disorder.

Something else that I have started noticing is how ritualistic I am. I eat the same thing every day, do the same hobbies, leave for work at the same time, finish work at the same time, and go on a run at the same time. One of my tells is when I break that pattern for no reason. I will go try some random food place and completely divert from my normal routine. It sounds small, but I have noticed a pattern. When that happens, I am almost always already shifting into a manic state. That same night, my legs are restless in bed, I am reaching for antipsychotics, and I have a tough time falling asleep and showing up to work on time for the next couple of days. There are certain cues individuals give off, even unconsciously, that can be readily analyzed and used to predict whether I am undergoing a mood state shift.

I start wanting to revolt against my old life, which I sometimes label as depressive or even lazy in my mind. I convince myself that everything needs to be changed. Sometimes I even think that my current career path is garbage and that I need to completely shift directions. The tough thing about these realizations is that you do not know whether they are complete trash insights or the most legendary insight you have ever uncovered. That is why journaling is always important.

I find myself changing a lot of things that never needed to be changed. Instead of taking the usual caffeine that works for me, I will stop at a gas station, buy a random energy drink, and try it. I will print off new productivity calendars or time-blocking formats and show up to meetings with them in my hand, telling people I have this blocked off and it does not work for me. This may look good in hindsight, but it’s confusing because people are used to seeing me work normally, and then suddenly introducing something erratic when there were no prior problems. My attention becomes fragmented.

Even if I time-block, whatever I feel like doing gets done. Staying organized still feels like disorganized chaos. Work starts slipping. I isolate more. I convince myself I am being productive, but I am just journaling, reading, and chasing ideas that feel profound in the moment. Even simple ideas sound like they were written by the most brilliant person alive.

I start to think that people at work are noticing the change. Maybe they are, but never to the magnitude that I build up in my own mind. I cut corners. Showering feels like a waste of time, so I roll out of bed and just put on deodorant. I think it is a life hack: brushing my teeth and hair in the car on the way to work saves me a ton of time. The car starts filling up with water bottles and different workout drinks. The workouts begin to feel next level, like I can push myself endlessly without needing recovery.

I stop caring about how I come across to society. I start showing up to work and doctors’ appointments as if it does not matter. And it is the truth, because I would rather be working on something else that feels one hundred percent more interesting. And if you are anything like me, alcohol starts sounding like a really good idea. When your whole day is filled with fragmented focus, it feels like you just need something to calm it down.

You cannot stay in a conversation. Your brain is pulling you in a hundred different directions at the same time. It feels like you are wearing a helmet, like everything is slightly off, but you cannot fully explain it.

The scary part is that none of it feels like a problem while it is happening.

I have sat in front of a psychiatrist looking completely stable, while knowing I was not. What they were watching for had nothing to do with what I said.

One thing is just showing up to the meetings I have every month and not missing them for any reason. Being well-groomed, showered, and not looking like I just tore through a stack of textbooks in the middle of the night. Then comes the cognitive coherence and reality testing. Determining whether I can accurately explain what day of the week it is and successfully orient myself to reality. They have all types of ways of picking up on this, but one I noticed is timelines. I started a new antipsychotic a week ago, and my psychiatrist said we started it a month ago. Most of these are easy to catch, but the point is whether you can recognize what is off and correct it. Of course, there are also the routine suicide questions that come up.

I feel like trust is built by doing the right thing, even when the psychiatrist isn’t looking. It is mainly through the unseen that I have gained that trust. I used to love focusing and studying for hours. Stocks, neuroscience, finances, you name it. To get to that level of focus, I sacrificed my health. A lot of coffee, supplements, anything to push longer sessions. In the moment, it felt great, but when I came down from being manic, my body would ache. The sleep deprivation made my insomnia worse, and my mood symptoms would start to spike. I realized I had to stop running these marathons of knowledge and instead commit to consistency every day to stay ahead.

I also started to see how selfish it was. My girlfriend and my dog would just get someone sleeping all day. There is very little that actually needs to be studied all night long. If you are doing that, something probably went wrong with your time management, as it did with me. None of it was even urgent. It just felt good to sit in my “cave” at night, feeling brilliant, smoking cigarettes, not realizing what was happening. That has a lot of ego behind it. You cannot jeopardize your health and longevity for a feeling of being limitless, no matter how good it feels.

Another thing psychiatrists value above all is honesty. Owning up and recognizing that you may have played a role in becoming manic. I was always trying to optimize everything, even when my focus was fragmented. That led me to amphetamines because I had ADHD, and they helped me focus. But I started abusing them to push further with studying and to chase that feeling where everything feels incredible. I would stack that with 5-hour energy shots, especially when my first manic episode started.

When I came out of that episode, about two to three months later, I told my psychiatrist everything. The amphetamines, the coffee, the energy shots, the constant chasing of an optimized version of myself. You would think that is like yelling something you should not say on a plane and getting put on a list. But he was understanding. He told me to talk it through with my therapist and make sure I did not fall back into those habits. Now he checks in on me. “We are not using coffee and energy shots like that anymore, correct?” Looking in the mirror is hard, but when you hit rock bottom, it becomes clear that the only way forward is real change.

You would think psychiatrists are trained in psychoanalysis to instantly detect whether someone is sick. But people with bipolar disorder can be very good at masking their symptoms. That is why I made it a rule to be completely honest about what I was experiencing. If it was anxiety, I said it. If it was depression, I said it. If it was mania, I said it with no shame.

The truth is, no one can help you if you do not help yourself first. That means showing up, being honest, and making the necessary changes. Saying I had symptoms opened a line of communication and kept me from lying to myself. Most people will not admit these things unless they have gone through it.

I also use statistics to keep myself grounded:

40–50% of individuals with bipolar disorder struggle with medication adherence. That reminds me how easy it is to slip if I am not careful.

Even with treatment, relapse rates can reach around 40% within 1–2 years. That keeps me aware of how quickly things can change.

Around 70–85% of people with bipolar disorder experience multiple episodes over time. That shows me what this disorder can become if I am not honest and consistent.

I have not relapsed, but I have had close calls that were managed. That is enough to keep me aware that the feeling of being limitless can turn into something much worse if I am not careful.

I think with honesty, awareness, and transparency with your psychiatrist, a lot becomes possible. These are serious situations, but even smaller things matter. If you are dealing with side effects like weight gain, being honest about how you feel is still the right move. Bipolar disorder is often said to be managed half by the psychiatrist and half by the therapist, and that feels true. Therapy teaches you to be open, to be vulnerable, and to look in the mirror before things start to slip again.

I recently came across an exercise that was particularly interesting about how to lead your life. This exercise stressed the importance of always starting with the end in mind. At first, I thought this was just an office quote: before I begin work, I imagine giving my boss the work and feeling accomplished, which motivates my work style. However, upon further investigation, this is way deeper than I personally believed it to be. It means starting with your funeral in mind, being aware that you will die, and what you will be remembered for at this funeral. What will the individuals say about what type of person you were, and to go out and lead that life with the characteristics that you actually want?

This was difficult for me because I began imagining what people would currently say about me at my funeral. Probably, he dedicated his life to working, not much else. This truly made me realize that this is not what I want to be remembered for, just a job that my ego had. I want to be remembered for being a great husband, for having a strong relationship with my kids, for spiritual development through meditation, and for philosophical writing that helped individuals. None of this has anything to do with work, yet for me it is twice as fulfilling as any job I could ever have. I just felt like, with my work, it was primarily the ego I was satisfying, which, to be honest, is a bottomless pit that keeps taking. It makes things feel urgent when they really are not, and leaves me walking around anxious and complaining about what a bad day I had. When I step outside of that and visualize my funeral, I can clearly see that work is just a means to get paid and not what fulfills me as a human being.

The funeral service left me with a lot of existential dread. It is strange because your mind keeps trying to solve it, but it always comes back to the same conclusion: you will die. It thinks it figured something out, then loops back again to the same point. Some people go through life like they have unlimited time, when in reality, that is not true at all. Life is fragile, and I think this exercise does best at forcing you to recognize that you cannot keep wasting time. The ego has a way of making everything about yourself, but at the end of the road, it is not about you. It is about your relationships, the experiences you had, and whether you actually became a better person. I also realized how much of my thinking was just feeding that ego, and no matter how good it felt in the moment, it was still selfish.

I also saw what was actually valuable to me, and it was not my job. It was my relationship with my girlfriend, my hobbies, my dog, and meditation. It pushes you to go out and actually become the type of person you would want people to describe at your funeral. I found myself doing work without any real end in mind, just going through the motions. That is what led to feeling burnt out while still showing up every day.

The biggest change I have experienced from this is that I am more present in daily life. I started taking my paid time off because I realized a few days with my dog and my girlfriend are more valuable than just staying stuck in work. I have also become less inwardly focused and more outwardly oriented. Call family instead of ignoring calls. Showing up to weddings even though I am naturally introverted. Sometimes depression and bipolar disorder push me toward isolation, but this made me realize I do not have time to keep doing that. I have to actively push myself outside of that.

The part that caught me off guard is that even after realizing all of this, it is still very easy to fall back into the same patterns. You can have a moment where everything feels clear, where you understand exactly what matters. The next day, you wake up and get pulled right back into stress, work, and whatever feels urgent in the moment. It almost feels like two different versions of yourself are competing. One that understands what actually matters, and one that just reacts to whatever is in front of it. That is what made me realize that this is not something you think about once and move on from. It is something you have to keep coming back to.

I also started noticing how much of my day I was not actually present for. Just going through routines, reacting to things, and letting time pass without really paying attention to it. It is strange because you can feel busy all day and still feel like you did not actually live any of it. That to me is more concerning than the idea that life is short. It is not just that time is limited; it is that so much of it can be spent unconsciously if you are not careful. You look back and realize that entire stretches of time were just gone, and you were not really there for them.

This exercise forced me to take some level of responsibility for that. It is easy to say you value relationships or being present. Still, it is different when you actually have to live that out. That means doing things that are uncomfortable in the moment. Calling people when it would be easier not to. Showing up to things when you would rather stay in your own space. Actually listening when someone is talking instead of being halfway distracted. Small things, but they add up to the type of person you are.

If I think about that funeral again now, I still do not think I am fully there. I do not think people would say all the things I want them to say yet. But at least now I know what direction I am trying to move in. Before, I was just working and assuming everything else would somehow fall into place later. It does not work like that. The way you live right now is exactly what people would talk about, and that is either something you are okay with or something you need to change.

I do not think you ever fully figure this out either. It is more of a constant check. A way to step back and ask if what you are doing actually matters in the long run. Because at the end of all of it, none of the small things you stress about every day are going to define you. What will define you is how you showed up for people, what you gave your time to, and whether you actually became the person you said you wanted to be.

That is really what starting with the end in mind comes down to. Not just thinking about the end, but using it to shape what you do right now.

When I was undiagnosed and drinking a lot, my relationships were not good. I was focused on myself, my mood, and what I was going through. Everything felt intense, and I treated that intensity as justification for my behavior. Now that I am diagnosed and treated, things are more stable, and I find myself giving more attention to my partner. It is not perfect, but it is a completely different situation than before.

One of the biggest shifts I had to make was realizing the world does not stop for me. I used to replay episodes in my head and make them the center of everything. It was something I talked about constantly. At some point, I had to accept that I still needed to be a good partner regardless of what diagnosis I had. It did not need to be the main topic of every conversation, and no amount of overanalyzing would change what had already happened.

Another issue was how much I talked. I would answer calls and go into every detail about my day without even asking about hers. If she shared something, I would connect it back to myself and keep going. Writing that out makes it obvious how bad that is, but at the time, it felt normal. I did not want to be that person. I had to learn to shut up and actually make space for her to talk.

I also had a habit of bringing my bad days home. If work went poorly, like waking up late or everything just going wrong, I would come back irritated or completely checked out. Even if I had been quiet, it still would have affected her. It took me a while to understand that being withdrawn is still a form of taking it out on someone else. Just because I was not saying anything did not mean I was not creating tension. I had to stop replaying work in my head and actually be present when I got home.

Medication was another area I had to take seriously. We go to a lot of movies, sometimes late ones that end around midnight. After the movie, we usually talk for a while about what we liked and what we did not. There were a few times when I did not bring my pills, and I could feel the difference. Small comments would start to bother me, and I would get irritated over things that normally would not matter. It would turn into tension for no real reason. Once I started bringing my medication with me when I knew we would be out late, that problem mostly went away. It sounds small, but it changed a lot.

There were also times when I simply was not listening. One example was when a friend invited me to a big wedding. I had known him for over five years, and we had gone on trips together, so in my head it was obvious that I should go. The problem was that I was not guaranteed a plus one. When I told my partner, she said there was no way I should go without her because it would look like I was single. My first instinct was to argue it and justify why I should still go. But when I actually stepped back and listened, I realized she was right. I was only thinking about my side and not how it would come across or affect the relationship.

Another important thing I had to learn was when to step away. We had just gotten back from a trip to Paris, and I was already frustrated. I could not get my medication on time, and a lot of things were not going as I expected. When we got back, I started going off about how bad the trip was and how I would never travel with her parents again. The conversation started getting heated, and I could feel myself getting more worked up. Instead of continuing, I said I would come back to the conversation and stepped away. I took about 20 minutes to calm down. When I came back, I realized I was putting pressure on her for something that was not her fault. She already knew the situation was frustrating. The best thing I could have done was just let it go.

There are also smaller things that matter more than you think. Sleep is one of them. If I know I am restless or having trouble settling down, I will go to the couch so she can sleep. She does the same if needed. It is not a big deal, but it shows awareness. It shows that I understand how my state of mind can affect others.

Another thing I had to accept is that my partner is not my therapist. There was a time when everything I experienced became something I needed to talk through in detail. That gets exhausting for the other person. Her life, her stress, and her experiences matter just as much as mine. If everything becomes one-sided, it does not last.

Managing bipolar disorder in a relationship is not about being perfect. It is about being aware of your patterns and taking action. Awareness without change does nothing. You can recognize everything you are doing wrong, but if you do not adjust, nothing improves.

The relationship is already difficult on its own. Adding bipolar disorder makes it more complex, but not impossible. It just requires more responsibility. You have to be aware of how you show up and how your mood affects others.

At the end of the day, it comes down to something simple. You either take responsibility for how you show up, or you slowly damage the relationship without realizing it.

With a hyperactive mind, I never set out to learn how to control dreams or become lucid. It just started happening over time. What I realized is that sleep is not just rest; it is a completely different state where your brain is still active, still processing, and in some cases, still trainable.

This is my experience with sleep, how I have improved it, and some of the more interesting aspects like dream control and lucidity that most people never really tap into.

On the basic side, I keep things simple. Magnesium glycinate has worked well for me, especially in liposomal form, because it feels like my body actually absorbs it better. If I am having trouble falling asleep, I will take a low dose of melatonin to help me fall asleep. I do not stack a bunch of supplements or overcomplicate it because that usually makes things worse.

The more interesting part begins when you are actually falling asleep. There is a phase right before sleep called the hypnagogic state. Most people pass through it without realizing it because they are already drifting off, but if you stay aware, you start to notice patterns forming in your mind. Colors shift, shapes appear, and it feels like small fragments of dreams are starting to build.

It almost feels like the darkness behind your eyes expands. You start seeing random scenes, almost like memories, except they are things that never actually happened. Some people associate this with past lives or something deeper, but it is more likely just your brain pulling from random stored information and trying to make sense of it.

If you can stay aware during this phase, you can transition into dreaming without completely losing consciousness. That is where lucid dreaming begins.

I do not typically build dreams from scratch, as some people describe, by imagining doors or entering a dream world. What usually happens to me is that I realize I am already in a dream and catch it while it is happening.

Once that awareness kicks in, I take control.

When you take control, you can change all types of things. Such as changing the settings from a city to the desert in seconds, making objects appear out of midair, flying, changing the weather, or opening portals to go somewhere else when something stresses you out. There are no real limits once you are aware of what is happening.

But something interesting happens when you try to take over. The dream does not always cooperate. It feels like your subconscious wants to keep things running on autopilot. Characters in the dream can turn on you, say things that are negative, or try to disrupt what you are doing. It is almost like the system resists being controlled.

There is also a middle ground where you are not fully lucid but still influencing what is happening. I have had dreams where something was about to go wrong, like a car crash, and instead of the normal outcome, i was able to change the car into rubber, and we just bounced down the highway instead of crashing.

So the question becomes, why does this even matter?

During the day, you are constantly distracted. You are reacting to things, thinking about multiple problems, and rarely sitting with anything long enough to fully process it. When you sleep, your brain is still working, but without all the noise.

Dreams start connecting ideas in ways that would not normally happen when you are awake. Problems get worked through in strange ways. Things you were thinking about during the day show up in different forms and sometimes lead to solutions when you wake up.

I have even used dreams as a form of practice. Recently, I had to learn how to use a new microscope in the lab. I understood it during the day, but at night I kept dreaming about using it, running into issues, figuring them out, and repeating the process. When I went back to actually use it, everything felt more familiar.

It is not that different from athletes visualizing performance. Basketball players imagine themselves shooting, going through drills, repeating movements. The brain does not fully separate imagined repetition from actual repetition.

Now think about that for a second. You spend one-third of your life sleeping, and most people treat it like dead time when it could actually be useful.

If you want to start improving this, the first thing that matters is remembering your dreams. If you cannot recall them, nothing else matters. When you wake up, stay still for a minute and replay everything. The second you move, most of it disappears. After that, write it down or put it in your notes. You will begin to realize that you are having multiple dreams every night, but you just are not remembering them.

Meditation helps more than people think. Even ten minutes of just sitting and watching your thoughts builds awareness of your internal state, and that carries over into sleep. Alcohol has a negative impact on dreams and makes them more fragmented and harder to remember.

Something else that helps is building small habits during the day that carry into your dreams. For example, reality checks such as your watch ringing at the top of every hour, and you looking at it. Over time, that habit will show up in dreams, and when something feels off, it can trigger awareness that you are dreaming.

You might also find yourself waking up in the middle of the night, remembering a dream, writing it down, and going back to sleep. That is called the wake back to bed method, which actually increases your chances of entering a lucid state , since your mind is already closer to it.

None of this is required, but it shows what is possible.

Sleep is not just rest. It is one of the most underused tools you have, and most people never realize it.

I started reading these books because I felt behind in life. What I learned changed the way I live my life and how I feel compassion towards others.

I read them because I thought they would fix something. My thinking, my habits, my discipline, the way I saw the world. I thought if I just kept reading, eventually something would click and everything would fall into place.

That never really happened.

Most of the books blurred together. But a few ideas actually stayed with me, and those are the only ones that mattered.

How I started thinking differently

If you want to get into philosophy without getting lost immediately, Ryan Holiday is the easiest place to start. His books take Stoic philosophy and make it practical. Ego is the Enemy forces you to examine how much of your problems stem from yourself. The Obstacle is the Way reframes struggle as something useful rather than something to avoid. Stillness is the Key is about controlling your internal state amid chaos. None of it is groundbreaking, but it is simple enough that you actually apply it.

Oliver Burkeman hits differently. His work is not about control; it is about accepting that you do not have it. Four Thousand Weeks basically destroys the idea that you can optimize your life into perfection. You are not going to get everything done. You are not going to reach some perfect state where everything is handled. Once you accept that, you stop wasting time trying to control everything and start focusing on what actually matters.

These kinds of books make it easier to approach the original philosophers. Without that foundation, people like Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, or Emerson can feel dry and disconnected. With it, you start to see what they were actually trying to say instead of just reading words on a page.

Robert Greene is a completely different category. His books are not about peace of mind. They are about understanding people. The 48 Laws of Power is uncomfortable because it exposes how manipulation and strategy show up everywhere. The Laws of Human Nature breaks down the patterns people repeat, whether they realize it or not. You may not agree with everything, but after reading him, you start seeing behavior differently. You notice motives, patterns, and intentions that most people miss.

How I started understanding people

If you want psychology that actually holds your attention, Adam Grant, Malcolm Gladwell, David Epstein, and Charles Duhigg are some of the best at it. They do not just throw theory at you. They use real stories and examples to show how ideas play out in real life. Outliers changes how you think about success. Blink shows how fast decisions actually happen. Range pushes against the idea that you need to specialize early and instead shows the value of broader thinking.

Cal Newport’s work also stood out. Deep Work is simple but hard to follow. It argues that focus is becoming rare and, as a result, more valuable. Most people never train it, which is why they stay distracted.

One book that genuinely shifted my perspective was The Courage to Be Disliked. It is based on Alfred Adler’s psychology and forces you to take responsibility for your life in an uncomfortable way. It basically argues that most people are held back by the need for approval, and once you let go of that, your life changes. It sounds simple, but actually putting it into practice is difficult. Another strong one is Influence. It shows how easily people are affected by small psychological triggers without realizing it. After reading it, you start noticing how often decisions are not really your own.

How I started to understand my own mind

When it comes to meditation and deeper thinking, Alan Watts stands out. He does not focus on techniques. He focuses on perspective. He makes you question how seriously you take everything and why. On the other hand, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza is more about actively changing your thinking patterns through repetition and awareness. One is philosophical, the other is more structured.

The harder ideas that took time to understand

Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung all sit in a category that is harder to get through. Their work is more dense and less immediately rewarding. Nietzsche is probably the most engaging of the three, but all of them require effort to actually understand.

Some books were more specialized but still useful. Flow breaks down what it actually feels like to be fully engaged in something and why that state matters. Why We Sleep makes you realize how much performance is tied to recovery. Limitless focuses on learning and memory, and Remember explains how memory actually works on a psychological level. Out of these, Limitless was the most practical for actually improving how I study and retain information. Why We Remember by Charan Rangnath provides an overview of memory and the mechanisms that underlie it.

What felt the most real

On the memoir side, An Unquiet Mind was one of the most impactful. It is written by a psychiatrist who also has bipolar disorder, so it gives both the clinical and personal perspectives at the same time. It is one of the few books that actually felt real instead of theoretical. The Art of Learning also stuck with me. It follows a chess prodigy who built systems for learning and then applied them to completely different fields, such as martial arts. It reinforced the idea that learning itself is a skill.

For finance, the most useful books for me were The Simple Path to Wealth and Think and Grow Rich. One is straightforward and practical. The other is more about mindset and how you approach money.

What actually made me more creative

The War of Art, Big Magic, and The Artist’s Way all stood out. The biggest takeaway for me was morning pages, just writing without thinking, which ended up being one of the few habits I actually kept. Another book is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. It will definitely make you think differently about life. An honorable mention here is how to think like Leonardo da Vinci. This taught me so much about one of the most prolific minds and how I can implement daily activities to produce creativity.

What changed how I took care of my mind

This includes books like Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, This Is Your Brain on Food, and Genius Foods, all of which push similar ideas about how diet affects how you think and feel.

The ones I actually live by

The first is the Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz. These are fundamental things that I use in my life: be impeccable with my word, never compare, never judge, and always try my best. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is my next because the self-evaluation he made in those journals is similar to how I want to lead an examined life. Man’s Search For Meaning is probably the one that hit the hardest. It showed me that, even in the worst possible conditions, meaning is still something you choose. Not happiness, not comfort, but meaning. And once you have that, you can endure more than you think.

Books that did not stick with me

There were also books I did not get much from. Not because they are bad, but because they did not stick. The Richest Man in Babylon, Six Thinking Hats, Indistractable, Tiny Habits, and The Let Them Theory. They all have value, but nothing in them changed how I actually operated.

These are just my opinions from what actually stuck. I would be interested in hearing which books or ideas stayed with you.

To start with, society does not take mental illness seriously enough. In work culture, it is often viewed as someone just trying to get a day off with a “mental health” excuse. I also think some earlier generations genuinely do not believe in it at all. They think you just need an attitude change or that it comes down to poor time management. And that is fine. Where there are serious issues, there will always be naivety.

There is also the problem that psychiatrists and therapists, even after years of school, will never truly understand what people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depression actually go through. And how could they? They understand the terminology but do not experience the side effects. The vision issues, the sexual dysfunction, the weight gain, the constant shifts. It gets brushed off as something else when, in reality, it is often the result of a heavy stack of medications.

So I keep my mouth shut.

I know what my psychiatrist and therapist need to hear, and the rest I keep between me and my journal. My significant other is studying to become a clinical psychologist, and it is similar there. There are things she understands, but there are things she never truly could. In her case, it is good. She lives with someone who deals with this, so she sees more than most ever will. But still, there are parts of this that I cannot put into words. And even if I tried, I know how it would sound. Like, I am unstable. Like I have been off my medication. Like, I am a loose cannon.

Just the other day, I met with my psychiatrist after a rough week. I was behind on deadlines, late to work, and everything was stacking up. I looked like shit. Hair messed up, tired, just off. And that is fine. But it was not seen as someone having a bad few days. It became something to interpret. A pattern. A possible issue.

So I adjust.

I do the routine monthly dance. Clean up before I go in. Look put together. Say what needs to be said. No alarm bells. Session moves on.

Same thing with therapy.

I open up about deeper things. Ego dissolution, work-life balance, and my adolescence. And even then, it gets matched back to something from a textbook. Of course, it helps to some degree. But when someone has never experienced those kinds of internal states, there is a limit to what they can give.

So again, it becomes a weekly one-hour dance.

I leave feeling better, but it is clear they do not fully understand me. No one really does.

My girlfriend probably comes the closest. She has seen me break down. She has seen the reality of it. But even then, there are questions I have that no one can answer. Things that keep me up at night. Existential thoughts, awareness of how temporary everything is.

It reminds me of what Dostoevsky talked about, being too aware of the passing nature of life.

And the strange part is, I know stressing about it does nothing. You just release pressure until the next wave hits.

People try to help. And I do not think they are incapable or unintelligent. But there is a limit. At some point, learning more CBT frameworks or switching medications starts to feel like overkill. Like people are managing something they do not fully understand.

Like prison guards watching over a prison inside your own mind.

And that is not to say the prison is all bad. There are moments of clarity, creativity, and ideas that actually feel meaningful. But it also means people do not understand your humor, your analogies, or where you are coming from.

And that is fine.

I do not need to live like everyone else. I do not need to follow the same patterns, think the same way, or fit into the same mold just to be understood.

There is something powerful in knowing that even if people do not understand you, you understand yourself.

That is enough.

The biggest realization for me is that it is not for other people to understand. My job is to show up every day as myself, exactly how I was made, and not change that to make others comfortable.

Even if I am misunderstood, that is a sign that I am sane in a society that confuses conformity for sanity.

I had to give a presentation for forty five minutes last Friday. One quote by Seneca is, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” This is incredibly true. I already had the slides prepared. If you are in research, these are called journal clubs. You pick a research article and present it for discussion. The preparation and making of the slides is not the hard part. It is the waiting beforehand and trying to stay calm before everything begins. The audience is usually around fifteen to twenty people, which is just enough to make you nervous.

The thoughts start to build long before you ever stand up. What if I shake while I am up there. What if they notice I am nervous. What if I blank out. How will I respond to a question I did not prepare for. I even find myself trying to predict how certain people in the room, especially my boss, will react to what I am saying. I try to imagine their expressions and what they might be thinking. That part is not good for me. I can master the material and know the slides inside and out, but sitting with the uncertainty is what I struggle with the most. It gets to the point where I feel like I cannot even focus on other work because the presentation is sitting there on my calendar, waiting.

The strange thing is that the presentation itself is never the worst part. It is always the anticipation. It is the time leading up to it where your mind starts to spiral and create problems that are not even real. Once it begins, something shifts. I fall into it. But getting to that point is where all the resistance lives.

I have developed a few things that help me perform better when it is time to present. The first is going through the talk with someone I trust, like a colleague or my girlfriend. This helps me make sure everything flows well and lets me catch anything that I do not fully understand. Saying things out loud exposes gaps that you do not notice when you are just reading silently.

I also go to the actual room the day before and put my slides on the screen. I run through the entire presentation alone. Being in the room ahead of time makes everything feel more familiar. It removes some of the unknowns. I know where I will stand, where the screen is, how the slides look, and how the room feels. That familiarity matters more than people think.

Another thing I do, which I would not recommend to everyone, is that I use beta blockers. This is something I have already discussed with my doctor. It helps take the edge off and prevents the physical symptoms of anxiety from taking over. My hands do not shake as much, and my voice stays more stable. It does slow you down slightly, but it makes you come across as more calm and controlled, which is the goal.

I also have a routine leading up to the presentation. For the three days before, I use sauna and cold plunge. It helps me regulate my stress and keeps me grounded. Once my slides are done, I do not sit there and reread them over and over. Instead, I go on walks for thirty to forty minutes and think through each slide in my head. I picture what I want to say and how I want to say it. This builds a mental map so I am not dependent on memorization.

I also run. The day before this presentation, I went on a seven mile run just to get the stress out of my system. Running has always been one of the most reliable ways for me to clear my head. I also spend time meditating in the days leading up to it. That helps me stay present and not get carried away by all the thoughts that come up.

The day of the presentation is very structured. I go on a run first thing in the morning. I do not drink coffee or anything stimulating. I shower, get ready, and take my medication, including the beta blocker about sixty to ninety minutes before the presentation. Timing matters for that.

I go to the library and meditate for about thirty minutes. That is one of the most important parts for me. It slows everything down and helps me focus on what is actually happening instead of what might happen. It puts me back in control.

I then go to the room about thirty minutes early and set everything up. I make sure the slides look right and that nothing is wrong. I check transitions, formatting, and anything that could distract me later. After that, I leave it alone. I do not rehearse or change anything at that point. Over-preparing right before can sometimes make things worse.

The last thing I do is wait for the first person to walk into the room. This is one of the most important things I have learned. I start a conversation with them if they are willing. It helps me find my voice before I begin. It also shifts my mindset from speaking to a room full of people to simply talking to one person. That small change makes a big difference. It makes everything feel more natural.

Once the presentation starts, I do not focus on time too much. I focus on communicating the information clearly. The goal is not to look like a great presenter. The goal is to make sure the audience understands what I am saying. If someone interrupts with a question, I acknowledge it and respond, but I try to stay in the flow of the presentation as much as possible.

One area I still struggle with is handling questions. When I present, I tend to enter a flow state. It almost feels like I am watching myself speak from above. When someone interrupts that flow and asks me to elaborate, it can throw me off. That is something I still need to improve.

The presentation itself went well. But I am always hard on myself. After it ended, my boss came up to me and said, “Hey, good talk this morning.” He mentioned that I could have spent more time in the supplementary files, and then he walked off. That stuck with me. Not necessarily what he said, but how I reacted to it.

Instead of accepting the compliment, I focused on what I could have done better. It is like I expect perfection from myself even when I know that is not realistic. I need to get better at not taking myself so seriously. I am here to learn, to make mistakes, and to improve. That is the whole point.

Looking back, the quote by Seneca makes even more sense. The suffering was never the presentation. It was everything I built up in my head beforehand. Once I was actually up there, it was manageable. It always is.

Lately I have felt lost, sluggish, and slow, and it is not depression. I honestly think this might be burnout. I try to push through the days with caffeine, but drip by drip it loses its potency. I have even started to question why I am in the profession that I am in and whether I would feel happier starting over in something new. It is not that my current situation is bad. It just does not draw me in like it once did, and I do not know whether that is me evolving or part of the condition. I used to show up excited to work, and I felt like the work had real meaning, which made it feel effortless. Now it feels forced.

I also know that part of this is on me. I complain about interruptions, but I could come in earlier and create space for deep work. Instead, I walk into the same environment and expect a different outcome. That is on me. Still, the feeling remains. Something feels off, and I cannot ignore it anymore.

I find myself being a complete slob at home, and it carries into my work. My desktop is unorganized with files floating everywhere. These things bother me, and I do make attempts to fix them, but I only half do it. I will run a load of laundry, finish it, and then throw it on the floor to hang later. There are three loads sitting on the ground right now from the past two weeks. That same lack of follow through shows up in how I manage things at work. It feels like everything is slightly out of place.

I also share my apartment with my girlfriend, and it is embarrassing to have laundry all over the floor while she picks up the slack. It is not just affecting me anymore. It spills over into the person I care about the most. That is when it starts to bother me more. It is one thing to neglect yourself, it is another to bring someone else into it.

For the most part I am just burnt out. I am running on tires that have no tread left. I am tired. I woke up late today, and even though it is the weekend, I still felt the need to go in. I do not understand how I keep ignoring the fact that working without proper rest will not bring me success. It only builds anxiety and burnout. My emotional regulation also wears thin in these moments, and I become more reactive than I should be.

The strange part is that I actually sleep well. Sometimes I even get too much sleep, close to ten hours, and I still wake up feeling drained. That is what makes this confusing. It is not lack of sleep, it is something deeper. Maybe I am pushing too hard toward goals that no longer feel aligned. Maybe I am chasing something that does not actually give me energy anymore. Or maybe none of that matters, and I just need to focus on being content with where I am.

My focus has been dragging. I get caught up in things that are not worth my time. I spend too much time on small tasks that do not contribute to the bigger picture. Even sitting down to write this while I have a pile of work waiting feels strange. But at the same time, writing this feels necessary.

I am not writing this to complain. This is part of life. Everyone struggles, bipolar or not. What matters is how we respond when it shows up. One thing that has helped is time blocking and actually sticking to it. No exceptions. Although there is always a phone call or interruption, sometimes saying no is worth it. That is something I need to get better at.

At one point I started wearing headphones almost all day. I was tired of constant noise, people talking, random distractions. I just wanted some control over my environment. It actually worked. Even something as small as blocking out background noise helped me stay focused. It made me realize how sensitive I am to distractions and how quickly they pull me out of the zone.

I have also lost the sense of direction that tells me whether I am doing this for the right reasons. In a few months I leave to pursue a master’s in psychiatry. That should be something I am proud of. But instead of focusing on that, I keep thinking about the PhD programs I did not get into. I always see the glass half empty.

I know this is something I need to work through in therapy so I can manage these thoughts better. At the same time, I am grateful that I was accepted into a master’s program. I know how competitive that can be. But my mind does not stay there for long. It always drifts back to what did not happen instead of what did.

Part of me keeps telling myself that once the master’s starts, everything will be different. I will not have to deal with this type of work anymore. But I know that is not true. It will just be a different version of the same thing. More assignments, more pressure, more expectations. Still chasing outcomes, just in a different environment. And that grade will be an A.

I even question how I will respond to that system. Will I just go along with everything that is taught, or will I push back when something does not make sense to me. There is always some kind of structure or narrative that gets pushed, and I do not know how much of that I will accept versus challenge.

I have started to realize that life can feel like a game. If you learn how to play it, it rewards you. If you push against it, it pushes back. Keeping up appearances can sometimes matter more than the actual work. Some people seem successful without doing much, while others put in effort and get overlooked. That is just how it works.

Most people submit to the system rather than staying fully authentic, and I am not different. I do it too. But I do question it. I question how much of myself I am trading away just to fit into a structure that may not even align with who I actually am.

At the same time, I know that completely rejecting the system is not realistic either. There has to be some balance. Some level of playing the game while still holding onto parts of yourself. I just have not figured out exactly where that line is yet.

Right now it just feels like I am stuck in between. Not fully engaged, not fully detached. Just moving forward out of habit more than intention.

And maybe that is what burnout actually feels like. Not complete collapse, not depression, just a slow disconnect from things that used to matter.

One of the first things I fixed was medication consistency. At the beginning, it felt chaotic. Multiple bottles, different times, always second guessing if I took something or missed it. It made the process more stressful than it needed to be. Using a pill wheel simplified everything. All my medication in one place, organized and predictable. It removed friction from something that already requires discipline.

When my energy starts to rise, I do not sit still. I move. Running became one of the most important tools for me. I run marathons and half marathons, and I started this during recovery. What I noticed is that when my mind starts to speed up, running slows it down. It feels like I am burning off excess energy that would otherwise turn into impulsivity or restlessness. Lifting weights does the same thing. It gives that energy somewhere to go.

I usually work out early, around 7 in the morning. That sets the tone for the entire day. If I skip it, I notice the difference immediately. More tension. More noise in my head. When I stay consistent, I feel more controlled and more grounded throughout the day.

Meditation is another anchor for me. I use the Waking Up app, and even when I cannot sleep, guided sessions help calm my mind enough to rest. I have put in around 100 hours so far, and I am still learning. But what it has given me is space between thoughts. When frustration builds, I can step back instead of reacting immediately.

There have been moments at work where I felt overwhelmed, took twenty minutes to meditate, and came back in a completely different state. More patient. More receptive. Less reactive. That shift matters more than anything.

Therapy has also been a major part of this. I go once a week, sometimes twice. At first, I did not open up much. It felt uncomfortable. But the more honest I became, the more effective it became. Talking through what I am holding onto helps release it. Things that feel overwhelming in my head become manageable when spoken out loud.

I have also noticed that when therapy goes well, everything else improves. Conversations with my spouse are better. Interactions at work feel smoother. It carries over into everything. That relationship is something I know I will keep long term.

I spend a lot of time reading Stoic philosophy. Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. Their writing connects directly to how I experience bipolar disorder. The idea of focusing on what you can control and letting go of what you cannot is simple, but powerful. Reading Meditations feels like watching someone manage their mind in real time. That perspective has helped me stay grounded when my mood starts to shift.

Sleep is one of the biggest indicators for me. I track it using an Oura ring and have even shared the data with my doctor. Before tracking, I relied on how I felt, which is not always reliable. Now I can see patterns. If my sleep starts to drop, I know something is changing. That is my signal to slow down, adjust my routine, and be more intentional.

Meditation does not replace sleep, but even twenty minutes can help stabilize things when I am running low.

At least once a week, I go to a place called Sweatscape for sauna and cold plunge. I usually do this at the end of the day. The sauna relaxes me, and the cold forces me into the present moment. When I am in freezing water, there is no room for rumination. It cuts through everything.

That reset helps more than anything when stress builds or when I have something important coming up. It keeps my mind from spiraling.

None of these things are perfect. None of them fix everything.

But together, they create structure.

And structure is what keeps things from falling apart.

There were two moments that made this clear. I run a lot to manage bipolar disorder. Whether I am low or more elevated, it helps stabilize my mood and gives me some level of control over how I feel. But that was not enough. I turned it into something bigger. Half marathons, full marathons, constant training. It became structured, rigid, almost like a second job layered on top of everything else in my life. What started as something that helped me began to feel like something I had to live up to.

I had to ask myself what I was actually training for. These races were supposed to reduce stress, to give me space away from everything else. Instead, they became another source of pressure. Every run had to be faster. Every session had to be productive. Rest days felt like I was falling behind. It stopped being something I enjoyed and started becoming something I judged myself through.

I was training for a half marathon with a goal of 1:40, around 7:38 per mile. I stayed disciplined and consistent. I showed up every day and did what I was supposed to do. When race day came, I went all out. I stayed with the 7:30 pace group through most of the race and everything felt locked in. My breathing was controlled, my legs felt strong, and it seemed like all the work had paid off.

Then around mile 8, everything shifted. I crashed. No energy, legs weak, the pace suddenly felt impossible to hold. I tried to push through it, but my body was not responding the same way. I could feel myself falling off the group, watching them slowly move ahead while I struggled to keep up. In that moment, everything I had built the race up to be started to collapse.

At the time, I was furious. Not disappointed, but genuinely angry. All that training, all that effort, and I saw it as failure in real time. Every step after that felt like I was just finishing something that no longer mattered. Instead of adjusting and finishing strong, I was stuck in my head thinking about what went wrong.

I finished in 1:47, about 7:55 per mile. Looking at it now, it is a strong time. But in that moment, it felt like I completely missed the mark. After the race, people came up to my girlfriend and told her I could run. They meant it as a compliment, something positive. But it did not register with me at all.

I told her we might as well leave. There was nothing left to do. I did not want to stay, did not want to reflect, did not want to appreciate what I had just done. I just wanted to get out of there. That moment says a lot. I removed myself from something I worked hard for because it did not meet the exact standard I set.

The next day, I got an email saying I placed second in my age group. Instead of feeling proud, I thought about how I could have taken first if I ran faster. That was the only thing I focused on. Not the placement, not the effort, not the progress. Just the gap between what I did and what I wanted.

That is when I realized something was off. Competition is fine. Goals are fine. But not when they take over your mind and turn achievement into failure. I had accomplished something meaningful, and I still could not celebrate it. Perfectionism took that from me.

The second time I saw this clearly was with a Bitcoin mining rig. I read about it online and convinced myself it was a good idea, a way to build something and generate passive income. It seemed like something productive, something I could control and improve over time. I jumped in without thinking it through enough, ordered all the parts, and started building.

It was not simple. Getting everything set up correctly takes precision. If something is plugged in wrong, the motherboard is gone. That happened. I had to order another and start again. The whole process took about three months while working during the day and trying to figure it out at night. It became something I thought about constantly. Every time something did not work, I would try to fix it, order another part, adjust something else.

It was frustrating, but I kept going. Eventually, I got it working. I connected it to the software and everything finally ran. After three months of trial and error, I should have felt accomplished. I built something from nothing and got it operational.

But that feeling did not last. Almost immediately, my focus shifted to whether it was perfect. Whether it was efficient. Whether it was worth it.

Then the electricity bill came. Three hundred dollars higher than normal, while the rig was only bringing in four to six dollars per day. The numbers did not make sense. Instead of trying to improve it or adjust the setup, I shut down mentally.

At that point, I was done. The next day, I started selling everything. I spent around five thousand building it and sold it for about three thousand. I did not try to fix it or optimize it. I did not step back and think it through. I just wanted it gone.

It frustrated me for months, and once I saw it was not perfect, I walked away. Even though I made it work. Even though I learned a lot. Even though it was something I built from nothing. I still felt like I failed. I looked at the loss and the frustration, not the process or the outcome I managed to achieve.

That is the problem. When you chase perfection, nothing is ever enough. Effort does not matter. Progress does not matter. Only the gap between where you are and where you think you should be. And that gap never closes.

I am still working on this, trying to see things for what they are, not what they could have been. Trying to recognize effort, not just outcomes. Because if everything has to be perfect, nothing will ever feel like a win.

Most of the stress I feel at work is not mine. It comes from other people.

I can be in a conversation and suddenly feel awkward, hyper aware of body language, and start thinking about how I am being perceived. It feels like something is off, like I am the one creating the tension. But a lot of the time, it is not coming from me. It is coming from the other person. They are anxious, unaware, and it spreads quickly if I am not careful.

I had to learn to separate the two.
Observe it. Do not absorb it.

When someone is anxious, talking fast, hovering, or crossing boundaries, I try not to react the way I used to. Instead, I step back and look at what is actually happening in front of me. Once I recognize the pattern, it loses its effect. Emotional contagion only works if I participate in it.

This becomes very obvious depending on my state. When I am slightly elevated, I notice these patterns immediately and can sidestep them without much effort. When I am depressed, it is much harder. That is when people tend to push work onto me, take credit, or waste my time. It makes me angry because those are the moments when I have the least capacity to deal with it.

Because of that, I had to learn something simple.
No is enough.

If someone asks me to take on work that is not mine, I do not explain myself anymore. Explaining only gives them an opportunity to push harder. I have heard every excuse, from accusations about time management to claims that no one else can help. None of that changes the situation.

A calm, direct no ends the conversation.

I have also noticed that when I stop reacting, people lose momentum. The same individuals will test boundaries again and again, but if I stay consistent and unemotional, it takes the energy out of it. Staying grounded in facts instead of getting pulled into emotion makes it clear that the conversation is over.

I saw this clearly in meetings. Someone would run the meeting with tension, raise their voice, pause awkwardly, and create an uncomfortable atmosphere. I used to think I was the problem, like I was the one being awkward. Later, it became obvious that the meeting itself was not being run correctly. Other people noticed it as well.

Another thing that made this difficult was how much my mood affected my perception. When I am stable, I can see these patterns clearly. When I am depressed, it becomes harder to recognize what is actually happening. It feels like everything is directed at me, even when it is not.

Self talk matters here. I remind myself to stay grounded and not get pulled into thoughts that only make things worse. I can go to work, do what needs to be done, and keep my focus where it belongs. I do not need to carry other people with me mentally after I leave.

The main point is simple. People will invade your space. They will bring stress, anxiety, and pressure. That part is unavoidable.

How I respond is not.

I can set boundaries. I can say what needs to be said. After that, I leave it alone. Spending time thinking about people who drain me only takes away from things that actually matter. Those thoughts never improve my mood, but they can easily make it worse.

These are things I have learned while managing bipolar disorder at work. It is difficult, but I get better at it over time.

Eventually the doctor started to titrate down the dose, but the anxiety that followed those titrations was scary. I walked around telling my girlfriend I feel like I am dead right now. I felt like an empty shell casing with nothing inside. Everything I did was met with constant resistance because my dopamine receptors were being shut down as soon as I woke up with 3 mg and again as soon as I fell asleep with 4 mg. I still cannot get over that feeling. It felt like death. When I walked around like that, I realized my life had no purpose. I would wake up, eat myself into a coma, then go to the couch and play games on my phone for hours.

As a 24 year old at the time, I felt defeated. Things would go good in my life, like I published a peer reviewed scientific article as first author, and I did not care. I was checked out and depressed. My father would ask me to go golf. I sucked at golf and was forced to drink non alcoholic beers, because if I had a mood disorder the last thing you do is hand me alcohol before I end up back in the hospital. I had a public manic episode before that, so at the place I worked out people would reach out to me, and I wished they would not. All I could think was that they were being nice to me so they could feel good, not because they actually cared.

Around that time my mom wrote a list for me called “My goal for my child.”
It had things like sleep, take medication, eat properly, stay away from alcohol and drugs, exercise, go to therapy, call your dad, and try to stay on a routine.
Looking back at that list now, I realize how bad that year actually was.

Back to the medication, you have no clue how many symptoms came with it. Weight gain, tremors that people noticed at my new job, sexual dysfunction, vision problems, cognitive impairment where I could not follow conversations, depression, and many more. I did not understand how doctors expected me to recover when they cut the legs out from under me like this. When people break a bone they prescribe rehab, but the rehab for a manic episode felt like develop depression and take your meds. Family members acted like I could just snap out of this funk, like it was my fault, and not something the medication was causing.

So I spent the whole year coming off 7 mg of antipsychotics, and it was terrible. I would try to sleep and get restless legs. I would wake up covered in sweat like I was in the desert. The withdrawals were awful, like brain fog and the flu at the exact same time. Every titration made the anxiety worse, to the point where I had a borderline panic attack at the zoo. I had to leave and go home, thinking not only am I broken, now I cannot even be in public either.

I could not lose the weight at all while on antipsychotics. My ankles hurt when I walked up stairs. I had always been healthy before this, so when I looked in the mirror it felt like I was looking at someone else. No matter how hard I tried, the weight stayed, and it completely pissed me off. But I was on antipsychotics, so I could not even express the anger the way I normally would.

I remember my dad bought me brand new golf clubs. I never liked golf to begin with, but looking back he probably thought he was helping. I know they mean well, but I was completely lost in my life, and instead of having a real conversation we would just buy something and pretend things were fine.

I vaped and smoked cigarettes constantly during that time. It was one of the only things that made me feel anything. I would sit on the porch and smoke a whole pack, then go inside and hit the vape over and over. At that point I felt so far gone that I did not even care what it was doing to me. When you push people that far down, they shut off.

That year was one of the hardest years of my life, but looking back now I understand why it had to happen the way it did. I learned how serious this disorder actually is. I learned that recovery is not just feeling good again, sometimes it means going through a long period where you feel nothing at all. I learned that stability takes work, medication takes patience, and coming back to yourself can take a lot longer than anyone expects.

Things are better now, not perfect, but better. I can work, I can think clearly again, I can feel motivation again, and I can actually see a future for myself. That year did not end my life, even though it felt like it would at the time. If anything, it forced me to slow down, take the illness seriously, and build my life back in a way that is actually sustainable.

Mania doesn’t have a precise start date. Although some believe it peaks during spring and summer, and depression in fall and winter, it is crucial to recognize warning signs early. This awareness is essential to staying balanced.

For me, the biggest signal is sleep.

Tracking sleep has become incredibly helpful. Devices like the Oura Ring, Apple Watch, or Garmin watches let you see your sleep patterns over time. I have even shared this data with my psychiatrist during appointments. It gives both of us a clearer picture of what is happening.

As my sleep decreases, my impulsivity increases. I become more reactive and less grounded compared to my normal routine. Another sign for me is waking up very early, sometimes around 5 a.m. I feel unusually energized and ready to start the day. At first, it can feel like motivation. But I’ve learned to monitor it carefully.

Recently, I experienced something sometimes called the “headband” or “helmet” sensation. It feels like pressure or stimulation around the head. For me, it was a signal that my brain was becoming overstimulated. Reaching out to my doctor during moments like this is crucial. It helps establish a plan before things escalate.

Therapy can also be an important early warning system. When a therapist sees you regularly, they may notice subtle shifts in mood or behavior that you might miss yourself.

Another strategy is to avoid things that stimulate you when you feel yourself entering a more energized state. For me, this means being careful with things like loud, stimulating music, alcohol, or large amounts of caffeine. These can act like gasoline on a fire when your brain is already accelerating.

Often, the hardest part is recognizing the moment when intervention is necessary. Many of us tell ourselves that we will deal with it later. We think we can wait until next weekend. We think we don’t need to slow down yet. That hesitation can allow an episode to build momentum.

Reaching out to a doctor early can feel uncomfortable. I used to worry that contacting my psychiatrist would make me look unstable or change my medication unnecessarily. In reality, early outreach shows responsibility, even if symptoms resolve before the appointment.

When mania is caught early, it can sometimes be stopped before it grows into something much larger. Instead of a destructive episode, it may simply mean slowing down for a couple of days. Resting and stabilizing can help. In my experience, two quiet days on the couch watching television is a much better tradeoff than spending over a year trying to rebuild my life after a full episode.

I have also learned that certain substances can trigger manic symptoms for me. Creatine monohydrate, prednisone, and high amounts of caffeine have all produced noticeable manic-like effects in my case. Once I recognized this pattern, I removed them from my routine. I found other ways to address the problems I was trying to solve.

One statistic that has stayed with me is that roughly 10 percent of people with bipolar disorder experience only a single manic episode. People who experience repeated episodes over many years may develop cognitive problems. Persistent brain inflammation and long-term changes in mood regulation can also result. Even when people recover, they may not fully return to their previous baseline.

That statistic alone has been enough motivation for me to take warning signs seriously.

Deviating from my routine is another clear warning sign. My daily schedule usually follows a predictable pattern: work, exercise, then a regular meal. When my mood shifts, I may suddenly change plans, such as eating somewhere new after a workout—an early indicator of expansive or impulsive thinking.

Journaling has helped me recognize these changes as well. I often practice what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages.” This involves writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts to clear my mind. This helps me assess the general state of my thinking and emotional balance. Sometimes doing this at night helps even more. It lets me reflect on the day and notice patterns in my thoughts.

Meditation has also become a powerful tool. When the mental chatter becomes louder or more aggressive, meditation can help create distance from those thoughts. Focusing on the breath anchors attention in the present moment. This weakens the power of the internal voice that often drives manic thinking.

An interesting realization during meditation is recognizing that the voice in our head is still just us. Observing it, rather than reacting to it, can dramatically reduce its influence. Apps like Waking Up have helped me explore this in a structured way.

Even in everyday moments, meditation can reset the mind. I have had situations where I was angry at work, stepped away for a short meditation session, and returned feeling completely different, as if the anger had dissolved.

Preventing manic episodes requires self-awareness and consistency. Recognizing early warning signs simply signals a time to slow down, reach out, and make small adjustments.

With practice, many episodes can be stopped before they gain momentum.

Even when mistakes happen, there is another chance to learn and improve. Stabilizing your life is not about perfection, but about building a better relationship with your mind

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