Does anxiety make bipolar symptoms worse or does bipolar make anxiety worse?

Kind of like a chicken and the egg type of question. Most likely the answer can be either depending of the person. Like stress makes my anxiety worse and then I start to get bipolar symptoms start to rise.

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It's definitely an interesting question and it has some layers to it as well. Brain chemistry and imbalances is understood to be underlying reasons for a lot of "out of the ordinary" or unfavorable symptoms/behaviors in both anxiety and bipolar. Keeping that in mind, it makes a lot of sense why they would play off each other, how one could exacerbate the other, and vice versa. Nothing ever works in isolation or in a vaccuum. Everything interconnects. It's a lot easier for me to see that when I think about it on a chemical level, and how things like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, GABA, glutamate etc. interact and what they do in the brain. Anxiety, while we think of it in terms of a disorder -- is in fact that, it's really better described at times as a symptom of something else. Of chemical imbalances, or stress, or this, or that... Point being -- anxiety can happen solely for one reason, or multiple -- be isolated to just be "anxiety" or anxious behaviors related to other disorders. Anxiety, depending on how you look and categorize it, is only a symptom, or could be a disorder.


I hope I'm making sense here. My point was just that your question is very interesting, and you hit the nail on the head I think with how it can vary for each person, each scenario. The layers I am referring to include ways we view the "system", the intermeshment makes a lot more sense when we realize how things interconnect and we look beyond "symptoms" for root causes.

It also makes me wonder how certain drugs take so long before cognitive/behavioral changes can be experienced. To the best of my knowledge, most antidepressants, for example, take up to a month for full therapeutic effect. But, the medicine is metabolized and active on doing its function within hours of taking it. Despite some logistical things, like build up in your system to therapeutic doses etc -- why exactly DOES it take so long, if the action is not "delayed'? -- It's weird how we know so little about the inner workings of why some drugs work, but we know they have benefit. That was just one that came to mind.


I hope I made some sense. lol

Whenever I ask myself a question like this, I usually end up coming to the conclusion that one doesn't necessarily cause the other, but rather the two reinforce and feed off each other in a sort of cycle.

I agree with FluffyD. It's a back-and-forth thing. At least it seems to be for me. And especially with regard to anxiety and depression.

So the first symptom I actually developed was anxiety attacks and that was at the age of 10. I am sure I felt anxious before that point because that’s just a normal feeling but that I’m gonna die I’m gonna die I’m gonna die anxiety feeling started then. With that said I find that when I am hypo I can more easily switch over to anxiety and I can get anxious about absolutely nothing at all. So I feel like when I have that heightened energy, it feeds anxiety. But with that said, when I just feel anxious and not hyper I don’t feel like the anxiety produces hypomania in me. So for me I think they have a mini it does bring on the anxiety, but the anxiety does not necessarily bring on the hypomania.

I know the two are related, and I think a large number of people with bipolar also have some sort of anxiety disorder. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I am much better, but in the back of my head, I keep worrying about the side effects of the drugs I've taken, such as tardive dyskinesia, and a looming episode of mania or depression.