Someone I love seems to be experiencing frequent hypomania. This person is extremely intelligent and creative, and I get the impression that their hypomania symptoms are a bit of a boon for them. What worries me is that they are only getting a few hours of sleep per night most of the time. However they haven't mentioned any problems from the lack of sleep. Is that possible?

When I start slipping into an episode, that is often how it starts. I will only get sparse sleep here and there, but it quickly exacerbates all of my other symptoms. The sleep deprivation alone can start to cause trouble with thinking, mild psychosis and irritability which I channel inwards in an attempt to hold myself together and not cause trouble for others.

So when this person tells me that they are only getting a few hours of sleep per night, and they recently missed work because of it, but they don't seem to be experiencing any other issues, it makes me very skeptical. But I can't tell if I'm just projecting my own experiences onto the situation. Because I sure as hell would be rapidly heading for a bad episode after weeks of only a few hours of sleep per night.

They also described that it happens randomly and doesn't seem to be caused by anything, such as stress. They also described that their mind gets a lot of white noise, lots of thoughts at the same time that they can't really focus on. This sounds so similar to the beginning of an episode to me.

This is a person who is very close to me and whom I love dearly. I'm not sure if I should be worried and try to gently push them to get help, or if I am projecting and/or overreacting and need to step back and let it be.

Is it possible to only get a few hours of sleep per night for weeks on end without any issues? Again this person is very intelligent and so creative, and I can already relate to not wanting to give up certain hypomania effects because of how it can affect creativity and ideas and getting stuff done. If this person really isn't suffering from it at all, I wouldn't want to encourage them to medicate it away.