I can relate. I am a 45 almost 46 year old man and I am just learning I am bipolar. Well, they tried telling me this 6 years ago but I blew it off. I rarely ever sleep more than 3-4 hours. I am a manager of a company and we start at 6 a.m. It is nothing, absolutely nothing for me to sleep from 9-1, waking up every hour, and going into work at midnight or 1 or 2 a.m. and working. When my employees catch wind of what time I came in they all say I am crazy, which I am well aware of. I have thought for years and years this is normal for me, absolutely normal activity for me. I am now learning that while it may be normal for me it is far from normal.

I have been up 19 hours right now and for the past 3 hours have been thinking about getting dressed and going back to work. I have nothing I can do here at home, but atleast at work I can be productive and accomplish things.

I feel really good right now, I mean, I typically start feeling mania at around 3 in the afternoon and sometimes I lay in bed so awake and hyped up I will pound three or four beers just to get to sleep, and still then if I get three of four hours of steady sleep I am lucky. But I am reading I shouldn't do that, but I don't know what else to do.

As long as I can remember, I mean, since I was an adolescent I have not slept much. Don't get me wrong, I WILL crash and burn but never know when that is. When that happens I may sleep for 8 or 10 hours, and hard sleep at that. So it isn't like this everyday, at some point I have some hell to pay.