Disclaimer: I have spent time looking at academic journal articles but a majority of this is going to simply be anecdotal and I am not going to source or cite anything. If you choose to try what I have tried, I do not personally believe it will bring any harm to you, but every one has their own differences and sensitivities, so please use your own body as a guideline and exercise sensibility. Enter at your own risk.

I was diagnosed with Type-1 Bipolar Disorder when I was 16. Type-1 simply means I have had 1 or more full blown manic episodes in my life.

Type-1's will know if they have this because they will most likely have been hospitalized or institutionalized at some point in their lives for an extreme homicidal/suicidal outburst.

Type-2's experience all the same bullshit associated with Bipolar Disorder but have not gone crazy enough to put themselves in a hospital. (yet) This is actually a scarier form in my opinion, although it is sometimes described as being more 'mild'. It would be harder to ever understand why you deal with what you deal with and you may go through a large majority of life without getting any actual help, simply because you never knew you needed any.

After my first manic episode I was diagnosed and was prescribed SSRI's and later on a common mood stabilizer. They essentially made me suck shit. To go from feeling intense emotions nearly all the time, that in fact do control you and fuck up your life, to taking medication and feeling no emotion at all was a horrible thing. I suggest you do try to take medication if prescribed and work with your psychiatrist for at least half a year. Although I also believe it will suck shit, and coming off / switching SSRI's will suck even more shit. At least try to see if it does suck for you though, it might be great for you, no one knows.

After realizing that I do not like being stuck in such an apathy that someone could literally slap me and I not give a damn, I abruptly discontinued medication, and my parents never pestered me one or the other about it.

So fast forward to being 22 years old and having ignored this whole bipolar debacle the entire time - I entered a state of depression for a couple of weeks and started screwing up in school. Again. And it felt exactly how it felt when I screwed up my job the year before, and how I screwed up a ton of other things before. The complete and utter lack of will from an intense depressive episode is ridiculous, but during that one I had an epiphany. "This is a pattern. I am actually fucking Bipolar. It is actually fucking me over. I can't just pretend there is nothing wrong this time. There is literally no good reason for me to feel like this right now, my life is great."

So I went and got someone to talk to. They suggested medicine. I said no, not even if medicine has gotten better, I do not want to go through that kind of fuckery again.

After talking with them for a good two months I was able to actually accept I had an issue. This was a very important thing. And although I did not want to take more medicine I did want to learn more about what I was dealing with and how I could learn to live with it. I decided that if anyone was going to fuck around with controlling my disorder it was going to be me and not a psych running me through the gauntlet of medications again. I was going to control this shit and I was going to feel everything that was involved in doing so.

At 22, I jumped into it. First I started attempting to become completely self aware. I charted my own moods throughout the day, every hour at first. Through doing this, I realized more and more I was a slave to what I felt. I noticed no real pattern in my moods except that there was no pattern. It was erratic. Between weeks, days and even hours, I could be extremely happy then flipping to some emotionally void person that could have choked a puppy to death and walked away.

Okay - so at that point, bipolar disorder confirmed, externally and internally. The knowledge gained from this allowed me to see sort of objectively, exactly how much it was affecting me in my daily life. It was pretty ridiculous. I still have a notebook of a week lying around somewhere and it's pretty funny to me because within a day I went from "Suicidal thoughts." to "Highly motivated."

At this point I did a little self diagnosing and learned about a thing called manic switches and hypomania and it was all very familiar. And it was also very eerie reading about what is know of people of with Bipolar Disorder. You see, hypomania is great. It means (literally) a sub manic state. In a manic state a Bipolar Person is apt to start hurting things and go full blackout mode and probably pass out from exhaustion and/or blood loss. In a sub-manic state a bipolar person is conscious to the world but also has the same amount of enthusiasm and energy as they would while they were tripping shit in a manic state. Therefore, they are able to know better than to not break things and hurt others or themselves until they pass out, but they have the same amount of energy and enthusiasm that would entail doing something of the sort. Because of this crack-like hypomanic state Bipolar people often think they are very special and different than other people. While we are different, we are not that damn special - but we can often feel that way after experiencing hypomania. So reading about every little weird nuance I had on wikipedia was quite strange. I realized how not atypical I was. I was well documented and accounted for. I had always felt different, because I am somewhat, but it was always feeling different in a sort of lonely way. Seeing that the psychologists and psychiatrists probably knew all of what I was reading right there made me feel really comfortable actually. I learned that I was different, but not atypical for a person with bipolar disorder, there were definitely other people just like me running around being bipolar too.

At this point I was well acquainted with all my emotions and I made a sort of quantifiable rating for them based on the sensations my emotions gave me. I would assign the feelings to a place and I had labels for them now. I began meditating on them and letting all the feelings pass through while being conscious to how they affected the decisions I made. This was where things really started to get interesting for me and I began applying techniques to begin manipulating my emotional state and gaining mastery over, what was before, a chaotic enslavement to my own feelings and desires.

To reassess though, this is what I had to learn to begin trying to control myself.

  • I had to accept the fact that I was not in control of myself and that sometimes my depressive states were NOT just due to my situation.

  • I had to seek help, realize and accept that my brain was fuckey, even though it hurt my pride at the time.

  • I had to learn that I was not alone with my fuckey brain and that other people had them too, and it was a well documented and understood fuckey brain.

  • I had to start observing my emotional states and realizing that I had no real regulation over them and accept that.

  • I had to start understanding which emotional states were which and become deeply acquainted with how they made me feel and make decisions for myself independent of the emotional state I had at the time. (i,e; "I am entering a depressive state. That is okay. I still must get up and take a shower though." " I am becoming hypomanic. That is okay. But I should not have that energy drink now." )

So now I realized I did not want control over my emotional states. I wanted, obviously, to be able to make use of my hypomanic states or even just my content states, and mitigate my depressive states as much as possible.

I went through a couple weeks where I tried to understand what triggered a hypomanic state and what threw me into a depressive state. So I was still sort of observing my emotions, but I was more specifically observing what brought upon these emotions.

I found early on that a positive social engagement would help snowball me into a hypomanic state. And that a depressive state was some function of isolation over time. The longer I remain isolated without any social interaction at all the more likely I am to enter a depressive at any time point while isolated.

It sounds obvious, but that was quite the realization at the time. I thought myself as an introvert throughout adolescence because I essentially hated the world and played video games with a few close friends all day. Well turns out, I was only introverted because I wasn't being extroverted. If I allow myself to remain in isolation I will become irritable and depressed which will cause me to remain in isolation and be generally angry.

After realizing this I thought about how I was relatively happier in my life when I worked at a retail store being paid little versus the time in my life when I worked as a security guard on construction sites being paid a good amount. There was a lot of interaction day by day at the retail store and little to none while I was security guard and those times in my life are completely night and day in regards to my general happiness.

So this realization was good not just for understanding how to control Bipolar Disorder but also for me to make a better career decision later in life. I know now that it will be a very, very bad idea for me to get a job in my own office working with numbers all day.

  • To help avoid a depressive state I had to interact with other people. If I was already in a depressive state I had to force myself to interact with people in order to break out of it.

Okay this worked pretty good. But I wanted to mitigate all chances of feeling like I want to die, because I found it's a lot shittier to get out of that mood than it is to just take precautions to prevent it from happening. Forcing interaction in that state of mind is easier to say than to do.

I realized I was not getting enough sleep. I was especially not getting enough sleep if I went hypomanic. At this point I still did not know what really triggered a good hypomanic state, I just knew that a lot of positive social interactions (Reciprocated flirting, Guys asking for my advice, People complimenting my haircut, whatever, etc.) Little things that appealed to my pride helped send me hypo, that's all I knew. Buy being hypo, while great - created a bigger chance for me to feel like dying the next day or so. So I became aware that the hypomanic state could be too much of a good thing, and that I needed to sleep because simply not being depressed was actually better than feeling like I snorted a line.

  • I began to focus on getting adequate sleep. I made time and adjustments to my caffeine intake in order to do so. If I felt I was in an excited mood I would start winding down even EARLIER, just to make my bed time. It sucked shit at first. But it helped a fuck ton.

Well I started getting sleep, and I started feeling better in the day, emotionally and physically. But - and this a big but. Every few days or so I would wake up and still - I'd feel suicidal. It was odd because I did note it was only in the mornings right when I woke up. My mornings sucked shit. Only that first hour or so. After I got up and went to work and started doing my thing and talking to people everything felt absolutely great. But quite often I would legitimately wake up suicidal.

At this point I could only hypothesize it was something chemically fucked in my brain in the morning. That was just a random guess but for whatever reason I went with it. So I said to myself, "Well, how in the hell do I fix brain chemicals?" Food intake. Food intake is a huge, huge thing. I just stopped eating shit. I was broke as hell at the time but because I was so obsessed with nailing this shit down I went and bought about $50 of some Top sirloin, Tilapia, Chicken Breast, random vegetables, and VITAMINS on top of that. I do remember I had literally $6 in my account after that but I STILL made the decision right then and there to stop eating bullshit and ensure my body was operating with as much micronutrients as it needs to function as it would like to.

Guess what? I stopped feeling like absolute dogshit in the morning even if I had a mentally and physically draining day the day before. It was like the biggest epiphany that had went over my head 1000 times. I was always an if it fit your macros sort of guy and just ate whatever at a deficit. While that works for losing weight - if you have a fuckey brain it is absolutely necessary to manage your micros, get some vitamins and get some sort of proper fats and proteins in your body.

  • It was absolutely essential for me to get proper micronutrients within the scope of my diet. This should really be before anything. This was probably the easiest thing that made me feel the best. I literally just ate more actual meat and vegetables and started popping some vitamins at night.

After doing this I was "Normal" for a long, long time. It was so fucking great. I had a moderately physically active and moderately interactive job, I was getting 8-9 hours sleep a night, and I was giving my body all the nutrients it needed to do its thing. This is what you have to do. You must get those things down.

After I got these things nailed down I realized that any problems from now on were surely on another level. You have to make sure you rule out that any of your brain fuckery is coming from your body simply not having optimal time and resources to produce what it needs to produce.

Alright so at this point things were going good. But there was some funky shit going on with this hypomania. And hypomania is great. The world can not move fast enough for you in this state. Literally everything gets better. You as person will become more focused and productive and most likely objectively able to outperform your peers of equal skill in whatever you do. Your perception of yourself will be nothing but great. It is essentially an auto-alpha for your brain. I am describing this moreso for people that do not ever experience this as people that go into this state know what I mean. You can become the most confident, charming person - no fear of confrontation, confrontation is not even a thought. You need something? You fucking get it when you are hypo. It's an amazing experience every time you enter it and it truthfully is something I am blessed to be able to feel, despite the trade off for it being I possibly going into a suicidal/homicidal rage. I am telling you it is that great. People without bipolar disorder can also enter this state by playing with SSRI's but I can not recommend that.

This is where the real meat of what I actually want to talk about comes in. (I told you this would be long) This is also where things get sort of sketchy and I start doing things that may or may not have negative repercussions in the long term. I do not honestly know. So, again, anything you try here is at your own risk. Use your own judgement. I am not responsible for you losing control and beating the ever living shit out of someone for coming up behind you and patting you on the back, or even being responsible if you find yourself in such a place of anxiety that you feel it is in you to do that.

So - the goal of my entire want to control this disorder was to mitigate as much depressive state and to be able to enter a hypomanic state when I wanted and for as long as I wanted. That is probably impossible, but that was the idealized premise I started with.

I had normalized myself but I wanted to break into the 'zone' of hypomania to really be above and beyond.

To do this I started playing around with things. The first thing I did was utilize a combination of positive social interactions and a large amount of caffeine, and a little bit of intermittent fasting. I could go beyond a wired/hyper state into actual hypomania this way. AT THE COST OF FUCKING UP MY SLEEP AND MY NUTRITION.

I took up to around 800-1000mg of caffeine over the course of 12 hours in positive social environment, while having had good sleep and proper nutritional intake the days preceding. This is the simplest way I have found to trigger hypomania. But their are problems with it.

  1. You are wired/hyper/hungry leading up to it. And you have to be consciously aware you are not being too excitable and talking someones ear off like a hyper little kid.

  2. It is going to fuck up your sleep cycle and you'll probably be hungry - along with using up whatever brain chemicals your brain uses while being in a hypomanic state. This is going to lead to a really shitty morning and possibly string of days. Do not kill yourself. You will have to focus on resetting your sleep cycle as soon as possible and I do not recommend having any more caffeine or nicotine for the next day or two.

  3. You will have to pre-load this with positive social interaction. So in a way you already have to be in a normal - good mood to start the snowball off. I have never broken from a depressed state into a hypomanic state all in the same day using this method.

  4. If you are not innately extroverted I do not have any advice for you. I am not sure how this works for introverted people with bipolar disorder as I am not introverted.

Essentially you just want to put yourself in an environment seeded with people you have rapport with and ingest a lot of caffeine. You want to make sure you do not become too excitable doing this because if people become aware that you are too hyper or something and make note of it, that is not going to count as a positive social interaction. When you are doing this, someone saying "Calm down you are being too hyper." or any variation thereof is going to slow the momentum. Ideally you just need to be flirtatious and trim off the top of your own excitability by being aware you are ingesting a huge amount of caffeine. This will really prime your mind to enter the hypomanic state. Ideally you do this on a weekend and you prime yourself like this throughout the day and you hit a party at around 11:00 and you are not just in state, you are in a fucking hypomanic state. You'll be horny as fuck, feel suave as fuck, you'll not give a fuck and step between AMOGS and chat their set if you went to the proper place of being.

I execute this probably every other weekend now and for me it is pretty consistent. I essentially just eat about 3/4 what I usually do the day before - don't really eat all day. Maybe a protein bar. Take in a huge amount caffeine and "open all" at work or wherever I am at with just regular conversations, and some flirting with the girls and even older women because they like it too. By the time it's 10:00 pm or so and I am heading out I'll have no approach anxiety. I'll be a little wide eyed and I'll have racing thoughts and be sort of in my head, and I will feel like I am moving very precisely and purposefully. I kind of trim that off once I get into wherever I am going, open up the first person I see guy or girl as kind of a check. Usually there is no fear no anxiety, no nothing - just a real place of zen, I am kind of inside my head and outside of it at the same time. I'll know I'm in hypo state because I'll see guys doing shit wrong and have no hesitation to step between them and just grab their girls hand, introduce myself, and pull her over to talk to me. The kicker is once you get in there and you reinforce your delusional thoughts by absolutely killing it one good time, you are in it for the rest of the fucking night. You are the fucking king, the God of the venue. Enjoy it because the next few days are going to suck shit. Just say you are hungover and try not to kill yourself. Also be careful of becoming too fucking confrontational. That is the real danger here. You can move past the suicidal shit, but the night you are out beware of getting too in peoples face, especially if you are drinking. (which by the way, don't.) You will probably feel like you can beat the shit out of whoever, maybe you can, but if you are already diagnosed and you get in a fight and really fucking hurt someone or yourself you'll have a lot of money to pay and they will probably put your ass on SSRI's and Lithium and make sure you aren't playing with the hypomanic state anymore. So trim off the top of all those caveman emotions that will be peaking up and don't get belligerent.

Now there is a second method I have found to getting into a hypomanic state that involves more than just not eating, taking a bunch of stimulants, and fucking talking to everyone. But it's a different flavor, I guess is how I would describe it.

This way is not really for going out. I use it when I need to be a physical bad ass. I've done this a good 4 times now and it's painful but the intensity with which you can do shit is like no other. This way get's me into a more primal state I guess you could say. I do not even know if it's a hypomanic state to be honest because it feels different, but it is something.

Essentially you want to deprive yourself of every goddamn worldly pleasure for 3 or 4 days. One of those worldy pleasures is food. I do not eat for 3-4 days, do not fap, cold showers, drink just water, no nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, etc. I go down from full 8-9 hours of sleep to 5-6 hours of sleep.

During each day I do this, I go out and run for a long time. Not HIIT - but you can sprint if you feel the urge, which you probably will. But I am talking about just going out and doing some jogging fora good hour or so. You are really depleting your body during these days. You deprive it of everything, do your regular work activities, regular workout activities, and then you jog for an hour on top of that, while fasted and unrested.

So on the last day, 4th for me, I purge adrenaline. I take a ton of stimulants and I (and this is where we get really sketchy) perform some bit of self mutilation. I usually just make a small cut on one of my fingertips. The idea is not to cry and kill yourself, the idea is to cause enough pain so that your Limbic system jolts and floods your body with all the good stuff that it has ready for you if you were to find yourself in actual deep shit. So on this last day right after you've incited your body to think it's under attack in this really weak state you will immediately find yourself in a very primal place. For a good few hours you have a sensation of being physically invincible. I do not really advocate this for anyone really, I have not applied it to anything beyond getting a more intense workout and just enjoying the sensation for what it is. I have been trying to do this, go workout, and then do something social - but this does not leave you with a social brain. This leaves you with a brain that makes you feel like if Anderson Silva himself were to try to take your food you would not hesitate to take it back and then attempt to beat the shit out of him for it. Very confident, strong, and confrontational feeling - but you won't be very charming.

Also it's not really worth it unless you are a some sort of masochist. But it's definitely a thing to experience. It is definitely an alteration of mood characteristics beyond their usual points. Try at your own risk.

The basic formula for triggering these states I have found is that there is some sleep or nutrient deprivation followed by a surge of stimulants and an adrenal release. I've messed around with some other ways but the two I've just listed work consistently with a predictable fall out.

The next step for myself is experimenting with nootropics and seeing what can be done with those.

Hopefully that didn't leave you with too much of a what the fuck did I just read feeling, although it does leave me with a what the fuck did I just do feeling after I execute it and that's sort of a part of the obsession. Just as people use androgens and hormones to stimulate physiological process to go beyond what they could achieve naturally, I now try to do the same to stimulate my psychological processes to go beyond how they behave naturally.

If you are bipolar I encourage you to at least follow through with steps that involve recognizing your behavioral patterns within the scope of certain emotional states and , eating, sleeping, and interacting optimally. Understand what the hypomanic state is and play around with after you have all the other things nailed down at your own risk and use caution.

Executing a lot of things TRP describes can be hard for someone with bipolar disorder. I looked at and studied myself very seriously for a year in order to understand how my emotions played a role in my decision making, and how badly my chaotic emotional switches interfered with my life and opted to get a handle on them without taking medications.

If you are Bipolar do not think that you do not have control over yourself. You can get a hold of all the turmoil and gain mastery over your emotional states and end up using them to your advantage when situations arise.

Since becoming so acquainted with my emotional states I am able to recognize and understand exactly why I am in whatever mood I am in. Because of this I can calm down a lot more quickly from being irritable or angry, and I can also become confrontational and aggressive from a more easygoing state of mind if I need to be, at my own control.

Study yourself, learn yourself, understand when you feel the way you do, understand how you stop feeling the way you do. There is is an inherent connection between the psychological and the physiological and it can be controlled and manipulated from both ends. Once you understand how to maneuver through your own emotional fog you will be able to to make better decisions and feel more in control of your life.

Unfortunately to say, there is more involved in all this than I have even written here but this post is becoming gigantic. I have seen a lot of questions specifically from people with depression or bipolar people within the last couple months though so I felt I would make a general write-up. There are much more detail specific things I could get into concerning how to operate within states such as depression, or irritability and how to move on with daily life and even game within these states. If people are receptive to this and there is some need for it, I will share more.