What does mania feel like?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition describes a manic episode as the following: "a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased goal-directed activity or energy, lasting at least 1 week and present most of the day, nearly every day". Symptoms of mania include inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, being more talkative than usual or feeling pressure to keep talking, flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing, distractibility, increase in goal-directed activity, and excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences. But what does this actually feel like? Please keep in mind that what follows is an account of what my personal experience with mania is like. These experiences vary greatly from person to person, and an episode for you may not be like one for me.

Looking back, my first experience with mania was really hypomania, a less pervasive version of mania but with similar symptoms. I was twenty years old, and I was making arrangements to care for my mom after she had just suffered a stroke. Over the course of a few weeks, I was routinely driving to visit her a couple hours away from me about four to five times per week, I was staying active in all of my clubs and activities, I was working, and I was studying for and taking midterms in my classes. All of this was balancing on the two to three hours of sleep I was getting each night. I also moved houses during this time and was conveniently awake and active during late night hours to move large furniture across town by myself. I was left with many bruises. I explained my erratic emotional state with the fact that I had just experienced a lot of loss after my mom's stroke, which was partially true, but I didn't question my behavior enough.

Over the next few years, I welcomed what I now know was hypomania every few months because it was an unexplainable light at the end of my depressive tunnels. I would become more productive and work more hours. Overall, I loved being hypomanic, while I thought it was just a part of the normal ups and downs of life. I even partially accredit the beginning of my current relationship to the episode I had during the summer of 2017, the summer I turned twenty-one and started drinking a little more, the summer I decided I was a hook-up kind of girl, and the summer I felt motivated to make a move on one of my good friends, now my partner of three years. All of this seemed positive until my symptoms escalated to full blown mania two years later.

During my first manic episode, I felt invincible to the elements, powerful, and limitless. I wanted to run and drive fast and talk to anyone who would listen to me about all of the ideas that were racing through my head. I wanted to swim in the ocean and become one with the waves. I felt like I was on top of the world until I was four or five days in without any sleep, and my body begged me to come down. I started hearing a crowd of people constantly chattering loudly around me, and I became overwhelmed by my thoughts. I was frustrated trying to do any task because I couldn't focus on just one thing at a time, my thoughts were moving by too quickly for me to grab onto any one of them. I even had to be picked up from a shift at work after I broke down in a state of confusion, hardly knowing where I was. The highs I'd experienced before were sublime, but I longed for the end of this one.

This episode brought me into my general practitioner, who was the first to inform me that I was manic. To some extent, I knew what mania was, but I couldn't recognize it in myself, and I felt really silly for this. It took a few more days before I finally began to calm down, and I met with a psychiatric nurse practitioner soon after to be started on medication that would hopefully prevent another experience like this one. I've since had a couple more run-ins with mania, and I can officially say it is not for me. Other people may feel differently, even liking the feeling of being out of control, and that's okay. I, however, now put quite a bit of energy into keeping that feeling away.