This may be a bad idea that acted upon may do more harm than good, but I propose that we should find a way to induce a controlled and stable state of hypomania in people who are willing to enhance their functional capabilities.

Hypomania is a state that frequently occurs in people with bipolar disorder, which in various variants affects up to 3% of the population. In contrast to full-blown mania, characterized by delusions, mind racing and intense euphoria and/or dysphoria, hypomania does not incapacitate a person on the individual or social level. Instead, creative thinking and cognition as well as overall energy level are considerably enhanced, while the need for sleep and rest is reduced significantly. Mood is well above the baseline of the given individual. Often, hypomania is not even recognized as such, as the person sometimes appears perfectly healthy to the outsider who isn‘t familiar with the „normal“ state of the affected person. The major drawbacks are a tendency towards absent-mindedness and a certain loss of social inhibitions. Increased risk-taking can also pose a problem.

I have experienced hypomania myself some years ago. During that time, I experienced a motivation doing everyday chores, learning and sports like never before. I had never been as productive, creative and enthusiastic as during that few months. I had to pay a price for this: Severe psychosis followed by long depression and rehabilitation.

Now what if we could find a way to experience the benefits of hypomania without the negative consequences? Surely, this could improve the intellectual and artistic output of many people struggling, for example, with motivational issues or procrastination.

It is still a pressing and unsolved problem to find a lasting remedy against depression. I have not yet met a psychiatrist (or patient) who is satisfied with the state of the art. But from the point of view of utility, even the mentally healthy usually experience subjective shortcomings in their capabilities on an everyday basis, and improving upon what are now supposedly healthy states seems to be a worthwhile undertaking. In my opinion, it would useful to examine the mechanisms of hypomania for exploitation of this mental state.

Lacking a background in neurology and psychopharmacology, I cannot outline a research program leading into this direction. What I know is, from my subjective experience, that neuroleptics of the third generation like aripiprazol can, in many cases, inhibit the onset of hypomania and stabilize the mind toward „normalcy“ - for me, without noticable side-effects. Shouldn‘t there be a way of stabilizing the hypomanic state by fine-tuned adjustment of a person’s neurochemistry as a new default while inhibiting the descent into mania and preventing a reversal into depression?

Obviously, I don‘t know about the prevalence of bipolar disorder in the LW community, but maybe there are some among you with similar experiences and opposing attitudes toward this admittedly ambiguous state.

More questions: Is hypomania a good model for a person’s peak performance? Or is it more a distortion of the person‘s psyche?

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Not sure if there is an "objective" definition of hypomania, or if it just means: slightly more manic than your usual state. Like, whether my hypomania could be someone else's normal. So I'm going to ignore this part and assume that your question meant: "How to increase your energy levels?"

(The following are just my guesses; I didn't do any research.)

First, check whether you have some known problem that causes low energy, such as depression, anemia, sleep apnea, etc. Get diagnosed, use the standard solutions.

(People will recommend experimenting with drugs. I suggest caution, because of selection effect: those who survive are more likely to talk about how perfectly safe it is.)

Get fit: exercise regularly, lose weight. Get enough sleep. Eat healthy food.

Spend more time outside. Install stronger lights at home.

Remove trivial inconveniences at your home and workplace. Clean up your room. Buy things that can help you be more productive. (Buy cheap things if you merely suspect that they could make you more productive. If you think that writing things using pens of three different colors can help you, you may be right or you may be wrong, but the time you would spend thinking about it is definitely more expensive than those pens.)

Having a support group can help a lot. Try pair programming. Socialize with people who share your goals. Find an accountability buddy. Discuss your dreams with friends.

...sometimes: Do a different thing. Sometimes the problem is not you, but the thing you wanted to achieve, or the environment where you wanted to achieve it.

I would be exceedingly cautious about this line of reasoning. Hypomania tends to not be sustainable, with a tendency to either spiral into a full blown manic episode, or to exhaust itself out and lead to an eventual depressive episode. This seems to have something to do with the characteristics of the thoughts/feelings/beliefs that develop while hypomanic, the cognitive dynamics if you will. You'll tend to become increasingly overconfident and positive to the point that you will either start to lose contact with reality by ignoring evidence to the contrary of what you think is happening (because you feel like everything is awesome so it must be), or reality will hit you hard when the good things that you expect to happen, don't, and you update accordingly (often overcompensating in the process).

In that sense, it's very hard to stay "just" hypomanic. And honestly, to my knowledge, most psychiatrists are more worried about potential manic episodes than anything else in bipolar disorder, and will put you on enough antipsychotics to make you a depressed zombie to prevent them, because generally speaking the full on psychosis level manic episodes are just more dangerous for everyone involved.

Ideally, I think your mood should fit your circumstances. Hypomania often shows up as inappropriately high positive mood even in situations where it makes little sense to be so euphoric, and that should be a clear indicator of why it can be problematic.

It can be tempting to want to stay in some kind of controlled hypomania, but in reality, this isn't something that to my knowledge is doable with our current science and technology, at least for people with actual bipolar disorder. It's arguable that for individuals with normally stable mood, putting them on stimulants could have a similar effect as making them a bit hypomanic (not very confident about this though). Giving people with bipolar disorder stimulants that they don't otherwise need on the other hand is a great way to straight up induce mania, so I definitely wouldn't recommend that.

One reason I'm skeptical is the fact that people whose mood is neutral / normal are already too optimistic, a fact that significantly handicaps their rationality IMO (especially when thinking about the risks of continuing research on AI) and hypomania will make that handicap worse.

I would be more interested in making people more perfectionistic because a large fraction of our scientific inheritance was created by people high in that trait, Newton and Darwin included.

Can't check currently but IIRC there is a marked neurotoxicity cause by too much cholinergic activity during mania, leading to quicker than average dementia onset and proportional to time spent in mania. Might be controversial among specialist. Might not apply to hypomania but be a useful prior none the less. I recommend the website elicit to quickly reduce uncertainty on this question.

Edit: also related to wether putting everyone on at least a low adderall dose might be a good thing

Just as almost any "is it?" headline can be answered with "no", almost any "could it" headline can be answered with "yeah probably under some circumstances".

Mental health is especially complicated in that pathologies are defined by their impairment of "normal" function and performance, for a relatively nebulous and subjective definition of "normal". Specific behaviors that might be unusual to the point of adding up to hypomania for one individual might be entirely normal for another.

IMO, you are likely to get farther by quantifying the exact symptoms you want and inquiring what induces those symptoms than by trying to redefine a relatively well-known pathology as "like that but better".

I prefer to not examine this issue in a frame of pathologies. In the individual case, concrete symptoms and behaviours of course depend on the unique personality of the affected individual. Yet, when you know a person good enough, it is not that hard to recognize the changes taking place under hypomania, and from what I can tell they seem to generalize well. It is exactly not the possible impairments that interest me, but what I subjectively experienced as an improvement to my default condition.

I should have added that I have tried several proposed methods... (read more)

1nim4d
The point I'm attempting to make is that psychiatric diagnoses, such as "hypomania", are framed through a lens of pathology. A change in behavior or experience which causes no problems for the affected person and those around them would not be defined and studied in the same way that changes associated with problems are. Working from general research focused on pathologized changes of experience (ie clinical hypomania) is likely to yield resources that include negative states you'd rather not learn from while disregarding positive states that you'd prefer to emulate. Toward the goal of tailoring subjective experience, I think you're on the right track for breaking down the desired change into component parts and contemplating the parts separately at first. Whatever you end up doing, try to avoid discounting hedonic treadmill effects when assessing the sustainable effectiveness of various interventions, and try to include ambient factors such as location, sleep quality, valence of recent news exposure, etc.

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