What are the symptoms of hypomania and mania?

This list is compiled by members of our eCommunity. In our experience mania and its symptoms can be personal to an individual.

Having insight is important so you can recognise a behaviour or reaction that is slightly out of the ordinary. That said, the border between having insight and losing it can be quite fine.  The change can happen quite quickly. It can be hard to determine its threshold when you are in an episode.

Keeping a mood diary can be a useful tool to be aware of your own triggers and mood patterns. Also having people around you who you trust and who can give you feedback on your mood and behaviour is helpful.

Here are some symptoms we recognise:

Activity

Highly productive
Spinning lots of plates at the same time/multi-tasking
Spending or overspending

Cognitive/ways of thinking

Making connections creatively
Word play and punning
Suspicious thoughts moving to paranoia
Making links with coincidences (a kind of benign paranoia)
Religiosity, sometimes with delusions of being a higher being or saviour
Obsessive thoughts
Planning schemes or projects that are never realised
Overlap with depressive black and white thinking
Secrecy
Audio psychosis
Paranoia/Feeling like being spied on
Racing thoughts
Anxiety about everything and nothing
Being super animated
Short fuse/extreme irritability
Heightened senses/sensory overload - everything is magnified - brighter colours or sharper hearing
Touch can feel tingly. I get goose bump feelings up my arms and on my scalp which can be heightened by music, laughing, other people
Excited feelings like butterflies in tummy, rushes of energy and sensations through body of being connected to everything around you in a spiritual/energy sharing
Can sometimes feel like blending into an object, like you can feel the texture merging with you which although may feel pleasant at first, very quickly becomes unpleasant
Things are too bright, too loud, too close, clothes feel scratchy/weird or too tight

Behaviour

Grandiosity
Sleep loss/no need of sleep
Micro managing projects
Talking faster and/or louder
Needing lot of stimulation...YouTube, TV, conversations
Overbooking spare time, leaving no gaps to do nothing
More active on forums
Overspending - linked to secrecy as mentioned above
Driving with too much confidence/more aggressively
Repeated loss of spectacles
Very high sex drive
Risky behaviour
Extra-productive and creative eg songwriting
Acting out of the ordinary eg being disinhibited
Becoming childlike or a joker/buffoon - doing silly things like being silly with my kids (which they love!)
Becoming arrogant with a sharp tongue
Extreme anxiety as part of hypomania
Going into a catatonic state and becoming unresponsive