Force myself into Hypomania

This depression and anxiety is weighing very heavy on me, as I'm sure it is for so many others here. The impact and consequences financially and emotionally could be devastating. Feeling desperate, don't want to lose my job due to BP.

I believe I have TRD - treatment resistant depression. So I'm wondering if I could some how make myself hypomanic, I've been hypo before, latest bout lasted 6 months. Dec 2016 - May 2017 but it just happened without my intervention. I was very up and productive/ Made a few errors in judgement, none serious.

Anyone else done this? Is there a "safe" way to do it? What are the downsides?

I'm thinking of using SAM-e even though it says not for use if you're BP.

I'm currently trying the Fisher Wallace CES - Cranial Electro Stimulation device, and a recommended large - 11 x 17 inch light therapy lamp. But no results so far with CES after 2.5 weeks. Therapy lamp only a few days so have to give that time.

Chasing hypo/mania never ends well

Welcome to PC

I agree—hypo fallout:

I bought an extra piano (!!)
I bought a massage chair (expensive!!)
I redecorated my house (it is full of stuff I wish I had never bought)
I bought half-dozen blankets I don’t need
I sprained my back planting all kinds of trees and bushes in hard, rocky clay
I bought patio furniture I didn’t need and haven’t used
Piles of unneeded stuff everywhere in the house
I bought my daughter probably 20 pairs of shoes

Crazy stuff I said showed up on my job review

Thank God I didn’t buy cars.

For me, natural is euphoric about 90% of the time. Triggered by AD (when I was in denial and just treating depression, this happened a lot), irritable about 70% of the time.

EDIT to add - Often I am the only one enjoying euphoric if it is more than slight. Turns out people don't like smug condescension...

Chasing mania never ends well

Welcome to PC!
I'm with Christina. Speaking from experience it really never ends well. There is no 'safe' way to do it and there is no way to predict what mood you will be in after doing it.
Also being hypomanic/manic cost me my job and career.

I forget to add I crashed down into depression and anxiety after the hypomanic event, which I am still trying to recover from (it has been months of this)

No, that was me. And to think I only went out to buy milk...

Personally, I would never chase my hypo episodes...I turn into a raging, irritable, violent beast...

Hi, welcome to the boards. I tend to have hypo states that, when sustained, can start off being very productive (not always though). Since my life is basically a burned-out wasteland from the last 4-5 years and I have a mountain of tasks to accomplish in order to fix it, this typically feels great, even though I'd say maybe 3 out of 4 end up causing some kind of problem that makes them not worth it.

Until the last 12 months or so, I almost never had hypo last for more than a couple days, ever in my life, save for one very long (~8 months) sustained low-grade hypo caused by very high doses of kratom. And yes I bought a car. Though it was with a whole 3 days of planning (lol) and because I'd decided on the drop of a hat to go back to school. And once back in school I had truly the best and most productive period of my life in the last 25 years with hardly any negative side effects beyond the drug-related ones.

I'm still recovering. It's been over 5 years now.

Now granted a LOT of life circumstances happened and the final crash was triggered by an event, and then I quit the kratom due to side effects, even though tbh it was the best antidepressant I've ever used, though I didn't understand that at the time. So who the hell knows.

That being said, I think I can contribute a bit of a fresh viewpoint because during the last 12 months due to medication changes, I've had a number of sustained hypomanic states that lasted on the order of days to weeks. So I've had several incidents where I was able to see in the very short term what had happened.

I've learned how to reliably induce hypomania by altering the timing of my medication and sleep, so yeah, until I learned my lesson, I chased when I was really down or really needed to get something done. And it is still unbelievably tempting.

For me an induced hypomania will typically start off highly productive without many problems other than episodes of high irritability. After a while I've been up so long that I start to get frazzled and even more distractable than normal (I have raging ADHD) and my behavior starts to get disorganized and self care takes a hit. So there is a crossover point where I stop getting much done and my health starts to degrade. And/or, it will tip from hypomania into a mixed state, so basically agitated depression with the possibility to shift rapidly back to euphoria which then takes a few hours to a couple days to fade. During my most intense mixed episode I was walking 2-5 miles almost every day just to burn off excess energy and anxiety, but in the end even that did not keep me stable enough.

The biggest fallout for me really is the fact that I start to get REALLY intense with people and stop perceiving boundaries, or if I perceive them, kind of just ignore them because I'm so pressed to connect with people. So I trample boundaries and cause problems in my relationships. I don't have many people so this is a major issue.

Recently, I contributed to a new friend I made in DBT quitting the program. Neither of us have had much social contact for a long time and we were very compatible, so both of us got really enthusiastic and quickly hit a "flashover" which unfortunately destabilized both of us for days, me euphoric, her dysphoric. After the euphoria faded and things were stabilizing, I tipped into a mixed state and focused the lazers to a degree that made her very uncomfortable. She was the type of potential friend who in terms of interests and attitudes is so compatible they only come along every few years. (Really. I've thought about it when not hypo/mixed.) So I f'd that up, hurt her, and we don't talk now. I needed that friend and if I'd been able to behave more calmly I would probably still have her around.

I also f'd things badly with the only family member I have left, who I love SO much. There are others alive but they are dead to me. So she's unbelievably precious to me and I really changed the nature of our relationship in a way that is still recovering.

A really important part about hypo and mixed states, which I've verified because this has come up multiple times in my DBSA support group: it is VERY hard to tell when you reach that inflection point where the hypo stops being a bonus and starts being a problem, or when it tips into a mixed state and you're likely to behave badly. Usually what happens in my case is something bad happens and I suddenly become aware, holy crap, I've gotten very irrational and caused problems and I'm sleeping 4 hours a night and I haven't showered and my room is trashed not because I'm depressed but because everything was so intense that there was no time to shower and keep my place clean, and this is a lot worse than I realized.

Sustained, low-grade hypomania is probably the holy grail of mood states for bipolar people. And just like in the Indiana Jones film, it is both very very difficult to attain, and very very difficult to control. I suspect that for people who are not naturally biased to being hypo, there could theoretically be a medication combo (zyprexa+prozac might be a a candidate, and for me it was kratom + whatever med I was on at the time) ... but I suspect this rare, and at any rate, it would not be a goal of medication until one has been stable for a very long time.

The only way I would do it now is either as a system shock if I got stuck in a very bad crippling low, or if my life fell apart to the point where I just do not care any more. If you get good at inducing hypomania, chasing it is essentially the same as substance abuse, and the substance is very powerful. I would compare it to a meth or cocaine addiction.

Oh, also, I've been doing a ton of reading of recent bipolar research, and elevated states appear to induce very heavy inflammatory and oxidative states. They've done blood tests on people in mania (true to form, most research is still being done on bipolar I) and found some values for inflammation and oxidative stress that are literally comparable to septic shock - blood poisoning.

An emerging theory for why bipolar gets harder to treat the longer you have it, is that these episodes damage your brain. (There are other types of inflammatory issues in depressive episodes which probably also cause damage, but highly elevated mood might do it a lot faster.)

So yeah, progressive brain damage, making your illness harder to treat, permanently. This hasn't been backed up by large studies yet, but the fact that research is even starting to converge in that direction is really a good reason to NOT chase hypo.

Don't do it. It seldom ends well. Good chance you could end up mixed or the irritable kind of hypo.

Yes I have done this many times and it didn't go well. I think I have talked about it in my past posts but I have tried forcing my self to drink coffee and not sleep and stuff like that but it ended really bad. I may have gotten hypo/manic at a certain point but it wasn't a good manic.