I have breakdowns everyday, but I know that's not from bipolar since I recover from them once the trigger is removed. When I'm manic I tend to stay up for hours researching things that don't apply to me. For instance I'm notorious for buying pets when I'm manic. I will research for countless hours on their care until I become an expert on the animal itself. After I buy the animal and my mania is gone I realize that I actually can't and shouldn't have the pet. I had to surrender quite a few pets in my years of being bipolar. When I'm having an episode I'm stuck with the feeling over being extremely fragile and break down from everything until I become aggressive and ruin things. It's a lot different than my normal break downs because the normal ones happen when I don't like something such as not having a piece of cake, but it goes away after I find something else to eat. Being manic is the feeling that everything is wrong regardless if it gets solved and that I need to make immediate decisions which generally are wrong.

I can usually tell when I'm manic and work is my biggest trigger. I'm decent at understanding what my triggers are, but for the bpd almost everything is a trigger, but that's okay since the melt down only happens for a little while (at most an hour).