Something that helps me a lot is thinking about the difference between responding and reacting. I am terrified of the effect my mania can have on other people. When I was first diagnosed I would literally just walk away from a situation that looked like it could turn into a trigger.

Now I can just stop for a split second, look at what's happening outside of me, look at what's happening inside me and decide whether I need to be by myself or not. It initially difficult getting the people around me to respect my weird boundary of hitting the pause button while I figured out how to deal. But saying "hang on, give me a minute" is a lot better than some of the other stuff that could potentially come out of my mouth.

I operate on a traffic light system. Red light=stop, yellow light=think/take inventory, green=now it's okay to proceed. At first I could only see the red light in retrospect but now I can usually see it in time to stop.