"Now, most of the examples we know of these prolonged euphoric states are undesirable. They often come with reckless or harmful behavior, delusions, and cognitive impairment."
I think there's a bit of selection bias here. Often times the only euphoria cases you really hear of are the ones that come along with some sort of detriment, leading the patient or people around them to seek help. I have a gut theory that that chronic elation is just as prominant as chronic depression, but since it rarely effects the person adversely few seek help for it.
Throughout my life I've been for the most part overly happy. It's just something myself, my family, and those close to me have noticed. There are issues with it, but they tend to be minor and things that I wouldn't really seek help for:
-being happy in inappropriate contexts (people tend to not resonate with you when you're happy at a funeral).
-much higher tolerance with ambiguity. I'm OK with being lost somewhere, which tends to annoy those around me as I tend to wander towards a destination rather than taking an optimal route.
-and an exageration of smile wrinkles on my face.
The negative impact to my life is quite low. Since I'd never seek help for it, it would never really be recorded anywhere. I suspect there are plenty of people with a chronic elation that are in the same boat - there's no onus to address it as an issue. I have no idea what makes me tick differently, but I suspect with a larger understanding of human biology we'll eventually be able to isolate these things and find an optimal amount of happy for humans to have as a baseline.
I think what you describe is nowhere near mania or euphoria, it is just generally being content with life.
I've also met people who are generally content.
I've suffered from extreme mood swings, and the next day after I punched myself in the face and hit my head against a wall I would just brush it off as "Me? No way I did that, I'm always happy".
If a large percentage of the population was generally happy, in the fashion you described, we'd know, there are countless scientific studies about happiness and well being.
What jjcm describes is almost definitely a FAAH mutation, likely a double mutation. I believe I have the same, and describing it as a sort of euphoria isn't entirely incorrect. Furthermore, it does correspond somewhat to the effects of various drugs on "normal" people. There's a reason some people with the mutation are described as "slightly baked" [0]. So I think it's extremely relevant to this discussion.
And a large percentage of the population does indeed have the single mutation. I've heard figures of 20 and 30%. I think it's also what you do with the mutation and your life circumstances that play a role in your personal happiness, of course.
I know paracetamol also works to some extent for emotional pain, and perhaps anxiety and physical pain share some neural and developmental pathways.
Do you feel any physical pain?
How about empathy?
I've always had a profound disliking for people without empathy, and for good measure -- those people usually are psychopaths or narcissists, but if they are compassionate but just don't feel empathy, it's ok, I guess... though the nauseating feeling in my stomach that I first got when I was maybe 5 and I saw the reaction of a child I struck and robbed of his sunflower, just as instructed by my older cousin -- that is so fundamental to me, that it seems inconceivable that you can become a decent human being without it.
I caught myself hoping that at some point in the article some professional would point out how the lady is in fact flawed in some major ways.
As in you can't have your cookie and eat it too, while the rest of us are struggling?
I also wish the article elaborated more about why the daughter thought the lady was in fact horrible -- was that feeling ongoing, or just something in her adolescence, or just the same nagging feeling I have -- that there MUST be something terribly bad about someone without empathy.
Take for instance the story of her bipolar husband that died(killed himself?).
Most likely she indeed could not have prevented it.
BUT maybe.... someone feeling empathy and not feeling reciprocated, would over time feel they are interracting with a robot, not with a human being.
I know I feel that way when I talk with my father and I know he's very low on the empathy scale -- the whole interaction feels so very fake and scripted after a while -- I can read his emotional states, I know what he wants, what he wants me to say, what his fears are, what his intentions are, but it is absolutely not the other way around.
Overall my father is a good person -- a very good and hard working doctor, contributes to charities and so on.
I wouldn't get my bad feelings about him if I only knew and spent a couple of days in my life with him as a writer writing an article about him, but I sure do as someone who wants a genuine and deep connection with him, just like the lady's daughter probaby did with her mother.
I should have clarified, I'm no Jo Cameron. I'm no different from your average person in how I feel physical pain and empathy. It's extremely rare to have what she has, I think there are only a handful of people in the world that have that. What's far more common, and what I believe I have (and what a few other people in this thread have) is a double FAAH mutation. (That makes up the relentless positivity and lack of fear parts of her personality.) I can't find any estimates on the frequency of that, but around 20% of people have the single FAAH mutation that is basically a less strong version.
The discussion about empathy is an interesting one. But I think treating it like it's some genetic binary thing is completely the wrong way to see it. Empathy, in some ways, is a cultivated skill. The Nazis were elected. Does this mean that Germans were born with less empathy, unable to empathize with the Jewish, disabled, Roma, queer, etc? No, it just means that society succeeded in turning them into an Other who nobody could empathize with. That is to say, I think that if you gave two identical twins entirely different upbringings they would end up with different kinds of empathy. So I think sure, perhaps Jo Cameron doesn't have some of the genetic material for things we may associate with empathy, but she seems to have taken on many empathy-adjacent values like selflessness and really caring about others.
I think the thing with the daughter is just teenagers being teenagers. Having been a teenager once myself, I wouldn't read too far into it :)
If I had to speculate, I'd say the lady has 90% of the hardware that enables empathy, just that she doesn't feel pain, she cannot empathize with pain and things deriving from pain, just like I can't empathize with bats using ecolocation.
Perhaps she empathizes with other, more positive emotions.
However, psychopats surely do feel pain, but they lack the hardware to feel the pain of others and much more.
And sure, there's the fact that you can learn to voluntarily turn off your empathy.
I am also almost sure I have the same double mutation. Positive all the time, pot never got me high, very even mood, always optimistic. But I am also very empathetic.
I think the difference between a generally content person and what JJCM is describing is this:
- A generally content person responds fluidly and naturally to negative events as expected and usually goes back to being happy after the negative event
- If you fall on the mania/Euphoria spectrum, things that should upset you and that do upset others do not upset you, there is literally a natural resistance to changing mood
I fall somewhere between a generally content person and the euphoric, probably closer to generally content - but my resistance to mood change is definitely abnormal in that no one I interact with at work or in my family is as even and naturally resistant to mood change as I am.
In case of some failure - like not achieving your goal, losing somebody close, miscommunication with other people etc. - do you also stay happy? And what about anger? Or boredom?
Do you keep smile on your face when fighting with package compatibility of packages that you did not mean to upgrade but needed to because you wanted to change some small thing real quick? Legit questions.
From evolutionary standpoint I guess we should see biases on both sides, but back when living in the wild I would assume that more pessimistic worldview would be associated with higher survival rate. Not the case in today's world.
In the same way that someone with chronic depression can still have days when they're happy, I can certainly still have days when I'm sad. I'd say it's much to a lesser degree though and I've almost never had negative emotions carry on to the following day.
Anger is pretty much non-existant for me. I had issues with a previous girlfriend because she felt I didn't care about her since I wouldn't get angry at things (she wanted to feel like I was willing to fight for her).
Boredom is inescapable. I'm as susceptible to that as anyone. I highly suspect that's just because we've tailored our existence around high information density activities in our web-based existence.
Code can be frustrating for sure, but I think I always know that when I am struggling with something, I'm learning from it and it makes me happy. When something REAL dumb happens, then really what can you do but laugh at it?
I agree with you about the evolution of it. I think the optimistic worldview is not advantageous in high risk environments. Along those lines as well I highly suspect that there are genetic components to my happiness. My father has a similar but not as exaggerated disposition. Things just really don't get us down that much. Here's one of my favorite pictures of him after our house burned down in the 2007 California wildfires: https://image.non.io/fire.webp
I am glad I am not the only one. Thank you for posting.
Sometimes when you tell people it is difficult to not be happy and to get angry, they treat you like a skinny person humble bragging about how they can't gain weight no matter how much they eat.
It is just a thing in your genes and I am sure it came from my grandfather who survived the Bataan death march and Odonnel prison camp and was up until his death one of the happiest people I ever knew.
Pessimist may have been a wrong word. Maybe something along the lines of anxiety that can make you miserable in today's safe environment but could make you think more about potential problems and prepare for them ahead of time. Like "I need to have more food for winter" vs "It's going to be fine, it's such a nice day today".
I'm a little different, while I am occasionally happy at inappropriate moments, serious events affecting people really bring me down, like your average person. The death of someone close to me, for example, affected me very deeply and made me sad for a good while. But with the exception of that, I typically feel quite happy. Anything that's "just money" or "just stuff" usually won't shake me, for example I stayed in a pretty upbeat mood during the theft of most of my most valuable possessions in one go.
Personally, I would say whatever it is has had an extremely positive impact on my life. Aside from the huge benefit of just being happy, there's also the benefit of being more trusting (I accept random traveling strangers into my home via Couchsurfing) and doing all kinds of things I think I'd have skipped if I was more risk averse. And I've had some fun with the side effect of (to quote the New Yorker) seeming slightly baked.
Might be fun to make a social network of just those who have it: personally, I find that to a degree, I kind of have to hide my happiness and general contentment at life in order to not seem like an asshole to those around me struggling with various things. It'd be nice to have a place where that's not a concern. Perhaps we should all set up a Mastodon or something?
that does sound very interesting and useful, but also -- as a passerby who admittedly doesn't understand your condition at all :) -- if just one psychopath got in there, they could have a field day from manipulating a self-selected crowd of people who may be systematically easier to abuse with lower potential of negative consequences
I mean, I don't think I'd make it exclusionary and private to only people that pass a test or something. Perhaps anyone could join, just with the request that they have an open mind and be generally happy.
And no worries about not understanding it, some of the writing on it naturally focuses on the more extreme cases. If you met me IRL you'd just think I'm a normal guy, perhaps one that's just mostly upbeat. I don't have any worries about a psychopath infiltrating whatever future group for that reason: most people with it are just normal people, but happier.
The only thing I can think of is that people with it are usually a good bit less risk-averse. So perhaps there'd be someone pushing people into doing risky things. But I already do risky things: just my last trip pre-Corona I hitchhiked on a dump truck through two countries and a conflict zone :) Furthermore, I already evaluate the risk of most things I do and direct my life accordingly. (For example, I avoid excessive driving, and as such I do most of my medium or long distance travel in very safe modes of transportation like the TGV, which has never had a fatal accident in its many years of operation.)
You've given me an idea for a comedy: someone tries to infiltrate the group to get everyone to go on a risky adventure, he succeededs, and then the entire time he tries to hide that he's the only one stressing out at all the danger while everyone else is enjoying it and having a great time :)
> -being happy in inappropriate contexts (people tend to not resonate with you when you're happy at a funeral).
Oh ! I have that. I somehow feel very calm and tranquil at a funeral. I understand it's a breaking point for people and it brings into focus a lot of emotions and tensions and I have that too but not at funeral.
Its really important to understand that mania is not optimism, positivism, or much of anything positive really. Its a state of euphoric destruction for bipolar folks, and chronic mania seems to spread those patterns over the balance of a lifetime. It is a disorder, and it benefits from treatment. Its not fun for anybody except for the manic.
Mania is debilitating, that's one of its diagnostic criteria. The milder hypomania can be both productive and pleasant for some though.
It can be useful to think of bipolar mood and behaviour along two axes: depressed vs. elated mood and low vs. high energy levels. Sometimes people with bipolar can be both depressed and energetic, a so called mixed state. Some manic episodes will be energetic and accompanied by an elevated mood of optimism, joy and even ecstasy.
I agree that full blown mania needs to be treated.
So as someone who is normally hypomanic but had a reaction to antidepressants that put me fully manic for a while, I don't think hypomania really needs to be treated with anything other than talk therapy. If I'm aware of it, I can manage the downsides pretty well through emotional regulation techniques like breathing / meditation and exercise. Hypomania can be overall positive if you learn to control it.
Mania on the other hand is basically like, you can't control the shit that comes out of your mouth. You act on every fucking thing that pops into your head, even when you recognize that it's hurting the people around you. You just can't stop yourself; its compulsive and incredibly distressing. People are uncomfortable around you and you can tell. Your judgment is impaired and you don't understand the grey area between right and wrong. You have like 15 thoughts flying through your head and you can't keep any of them straight for more than a few seconds at a time. It really, really sucks.
Not always, no. In hypomania there is, by definition, no significant functional impairment. However, the underlying bipolar illness usually needs to be treated, and that usually involves reducing the amount of mood cycling. Indirectly that will often reduce the time spent in a hypomanic state.
This is a good educational site with a lot of info about bipolar II and hypomania: https://psycheducation.org/
Thank you for the educational reference. I should have clarified - I'm quite familiar with Bipolar I/II. I was curious of your rational for treating mania but not hypomania.
To what I've personally witnessed, even hypomania needs to be treated too, or at the very least vigilantly managed because even if it's not immediately destructive, the depressive phase inevitably arrives and can be quite destructive.
Hypomania is sometimes called the Entrepreneur's Disease. Let's say Elon Musk has hypomania (it does seem like it). Treatment levels him out and dulls his creativity at same time. Is that a desirable outcome?
I should have clarified in my grandparent question - I'm familiar with Bipolar I/II.
It's easy to idealize a hypomanic phase for the creativity that often comes with it. However, it is important to not confuse creativity with hypomanic behavior.
With proper medication, the creativity is not actually dulled, but rather, the overexertion that comes with the hypomanic phase is reduced, thus minimizing the depressive swing. This enables the patient to be creative in a sustainable way.
What sort of medication? That seems like a very tricky balance. I figure any antipsychotic/DA antagonist would potentially reduce creativity, so is it a different drug class?
> It is a disorder, and it benefits from treatment. Its not fun for anybody except for the manic.
So whom does the “treatment” benefit? ;P
No, real mania is dangerous and the patient surely benefits from treatment. But there is a rather wide gray zone where I sometimes get a feeling it’s not the patient that benefits from the “treatment”, but rather his or her social surroundings. Not entirely unproblematic from an ethical perspective... depending on the reasonableness of those in the social surroundings of course.
The patients benefit from the treatment significantly since a lot of time people who are manic are living recklessly, spending all their money, gambling, being hypersexual, trying drugs, getting into fights, committing crimes, tearing up their relationships, and the list goes on. The percent of people with bipolar disorder who die by suicide is 10-15%.
Patients who are hypomanic by definition aren't having marked impairments in social or occupational functioning and won't need to be hospitalized. There's nothing forcing someone who isn't currently on a psychiatric hold to take medication, so if they're taking it it's likely because they believe they're benefitting from it.
Well as I've said real mania should surely be treated (regardless of cause). But there is an interesting gray zone where I think it's more difficult to say if the problem lays with the patient, or with his/her social surroundings.
For example the Swedish journalist Ola Wong recently shared his story on national radio about going hypomanic and then full on manic during the Swedish "refugee crisis" in 2015. It was quite interesting to hear him describe how he just felt that his social surroundings of journalists and opinion makers had gone mad when they refused to acknowledge there were potential problems associated with accepting 160k refugees in a single year (relative to population that's like if the US accepted 5.2 million refugees in one year). After "banging his head against the social wall" for a few months he became more and more agitated and restless, and finally needed hospitalisation. Just weeks after his hospitalisation the debate climate turned around 180 degrees to agree with Wong. That probably helped his recovery. He seems to have had no psychiatric trouble before then, or after.
Yeah for sure. Just wanted to lay out for other passerby's in the thread that there's nothing forcing people to take medication that they don't think is beneficial for them, or for people who've never seen someone in a frank manic episode that we're unnecessarily medicating all of the next DaVinci's or Einsteins.
Great and thought provoking example. I think you could argue there could be some genetic susceptibility to having a manic episode when placed under stressors like that, meaning potentially there's a relative with bipolar disorder or pretty severe major depressive disorder. I don't think most people would fall into a manic episode when placed in situations like that, but it is impossible to know. In my time rotating in the psych emergency department I saw someone with a similar presentation to Ola. No psychiatric history, stressful event happened, didn't sleep for a few days, came in in frank psychosis, treated with Seroquel, left the next day totally fine. Diagnosis given was brief reactive psychosis. Maybe the same happened for Ola Wong.
It seems to have been more prolonged for Ola Wong. I’m not sure how long the manic state / hospitalization lasted, but the overall recovery seems to have taken a year or two (before he felt confident to write professionally on refugee issues again). Seems to have been treated as a (severe) crisis, with therapy and lifestyle changes.
I agree that most would probably not have had the same reaction to the same circumstances. But after listening to Ola’s story I wonder if you couldn’t produce some instability in most people if you take something they care deeply about (in Wong’s case Sweden’s future and the role of his profession in it) and have their social surroundings deny obvious truths and thereby jeopardize it...
My sister's bipolar. Many people (including her) enjoy her manic behavior. It can go a bit too far at times, but there's a learning process on how to calibrate it. You work with what you have
I've spent a lot of time meditating on mood. I'm highly skeptical of drugs as a tool to produce lasting euphoria. Producing long-lasting euphoric states through meditation eventually creates a state of mind I call 'hollow'. You're happy, but there's an undercurrent of loneliness.
I'm completely not surprised about the patient that sank into hoarding and squalor while remaining euphoric. That's precisely what happens, one's state of mind, if it is disconnected from their environment, removes your attention from said environment. Drug addicts do similarly. Since you're not paying attention, your ability to relate to others plummets and eventually your sense of self is supported by this one thing, and it becomes an addiction all on its own.
Humans are just rats, emotionally. If you live in a cage, providing a lever that makes you happy about it doesn't take you out of the cage.
Unlike rats, humans can make the choice to put themselves into a virtual cage with a virtual morphine lever.
Wireheading will certainly become a thing in the future, and it will undoubtedly raise some people's standard of living. There are people that live worse than caged rats.
This is article is borderline offensive for people that actually experience mania. The author cherry picks symptoms to say that chronic mania always feels good for the manic. This is definitely not the case for bipolar mania, and a quick Google search shows this is not the case for chronic mania. In fact, many chronic mania patients are characterized as dysphoric.
Yes, mania feels good at times, really good, but at other times, it feels extremely uncomfortable. Your euphoric emotions can quickly turn to anger. Being aggressive usually has it's roots in some emotion that is not pleasant. Even just general speeding is not pleasant all of the time. Sure, there may be a few people who experience chronic mania in a way that doesn't ever feel bad for them. But most manic people experience negative subjective feelings from their mania at one point or another.
To say that mania always feels good, and is a state to aspire to, is dangerous for people who actually do experience mania, and extremely tone deaf and out of touch for those who don't experience mania.
Thank you so much for saying this. Bipolar disorder is badly misunderstood by the general population, but one of the most common misconceptions is that mania is the opposite of depression and therefore good. For me, mania was hell on earth. The risk of self-harm is a lot higher in mania than depression and doctors are far more concerned with stopping mania than depression, to the extent they won’t treat depression if the risk of mania is too high.
One source of this misconception is the stereotype of people creating art while manic (probably hypomanic). Another is that bipolar disorder is a big spectrum and many type 2 people having hypomania with some euphoric aspects. But I don’t think I’ve met anyone who isn’t type 1 or knows someone who is that has a good understanding that mania is very often a nightmare. After my last manic episode finished I pretty much laid in bed for 6 months doing nothing but fantasizing about killing myself and I’d much rather relive that then relive the mania that preceded it.
>>(Often in these case studies the euphoria is punctuated by irritability, but not sadness or depressed mood.) Now, most of the examples we know of these prolonged euphoric states are undesirable. They often come with reckless or harmful behavior, delusions, and cognitive impairment.
But I agree, I think most of the manic episodes described should probably be called euphoric hypomania.
Apparently we're all getting burnt out from meditating too much during our lockdown. Instead of trying to work towards a permanent good mood, here's some perspective from a psychotherapist on high mood (or higher consciousness as it is described here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqCOss4hqnE
Perhaps instead of trying to make it permanent, we should gather insights from our temporary high mood when it comes, and learn to embrace our default non-euphoric mood because high mood doesn't sit so well with our important tasks at hand. Now get back to work.
Climbing the mood mountain is highly individual but the basecamp is shared by most - suspend all responsibilities for two weeks, reduce or suspend all media, load up on favorite music, find HIIT You love, disconnect the phone apart from maps, go somewhere sunny, read enjoyable books, hang out with other people who are chilling (Climbers, hikers, mnt bikers, etc).
Two weeks of this will put you way above the clouds, the path up from there will be more individual.
Currently reading Philip K. Dick's "Exegisis," which are his letters and diary entries about his descent (ascent?) into something similar, before he died of a stroke.
I'm reading it because after reading about other great minds chased down a similar theme where they seemed to discover something later in life and retreated from the world to explore it. I wanted to see what a set of reference points might look like.
I am not sure if this is a good state in the long run. What do you live for when everything is always/mostly positive in your head -- but reality is as sad as it ever was. Do you really have an incentive to change something to the better if you are in a constant state of happiness?
I think happiness is a state the brain produces to reward itself for good outcomes in life decisions. The fact that it is only of limited time and intensity has its (evolutionary) reasons -- they are not the worst of all reasons.
Like with depression as chronic sadness and fatigue, chronic happiness is not something we are capable of handling long-term if we want to optimize outcomes for ourselves and others.
> I am not sure if this is a good state in the long run. What do you live for when everything is always/mostly positive in your head -- but reality is as sad as it ever was. Do you really have an incentive to change something to the better if you are in a constant state of happiness?
That's why Morality (Śila) is one of the pillars of Buddhist training. Tibetan monks are taught to cultivate compassion for others at the same time as they are trained in meditation. At least that's the theory, not sure how well it works out in real life.
> Do you really have an incentive to change something to the better if you are in a constant state of happiness?
I'm not sure what a constant state of "happiness" is because I certainly don't consider it en emotion in and of itself, (I consider it contentment, or perhaps euphoria on an occasion, or perhaps lack of suffering), so I'm not sure the concept of "chronic happiness" even makes sense vs the very real physiological effects of chronic stress on the body and mind.
Suffering is only informative as a signal. You have to parse it out and identify the source yourself in order to translate it into effective motivation. This same process is likely necessary to achieve the "happiness" in the first place.
Optimizing outcomes will likely be easier if you're able to focus on the task at hand with a clear mind, or you're able to address background stress, and will let you know if your stress is pushing you in the wrong direction (say, towards a career, but because of social pressure and not your own volition).
Yes, but only for you. The people you live your life with (some of whom you even love) are in the same state of mind as before, and you have no (or at the very least less) reason to change something for the better for them.
I can't understand this position. A positive person often does positive things without a reason or need, especially for their loved ones, as that brings more happiness.
The position is: you are sitting smiling happily and doing nothing, while the nazis come to take your family and you away to the KZ.
(read stories about that actually happened in reality. Basically a form of madness/strategy of the brain to deal with a situation it seems impossible to solve)
I don't think this is how people usually think of positive people. This is resignation, not positivity. IMHO a positive person in this situation would believe in their chance of surviving and fight back.
Totally dependent on the type of training you’re doing. Vipassana tends to focus on letting go, so that you ultimately let god of both good and bad feelings. In a sense to become more neutral — less attachment means less suffering.
They don't train to produce a positive state, they train to produce a peaceful state where no thoughts intrude on the mind. Thought-free states of mind just happen to feel good.
Tibetan monks do practice Bodhicitta, which is a kind of Metta (loving-kindness) practice. This produces positive states of mind, not just peaceful ones. The most famous practitioner is probably Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who has been called "the World's Happiest Man".
> Do thought-free states feel better than good feeling thoughts?
Yes, significantly better. Firstly, the state of just being is much lighter, not dependent on the memory and understanding of the world it takes to be cognitively happy; it is child-like. Secondly, this silent state is aware that it is self-contained, free from external circumstances, and revels in it; it is not wrong to say it is full of energy and power from self-sufficiency. Thirdly, there is awareness that there is no effort involved in being silent and happy, that no work needs to be done, and that brings a 2nd-order joy, too.
I'm new to this state, though; I just entered into silence for the first time around 6 months ago. It immediately makes me a bit excited when all thought subsides and the silence descends onto me, and that just results in the thoughts coming back :-)
That's great, I had a little glimpse of that last year when I was meditating consistently, but I fell out of it. I'm curious what practice you're using, can you recommend a book or something like that? Thanks
The "Who am I?" enquiry as described in "Self Inquiry Practice" [1] (just the first few minutes of the audio will suffice) and some combination of listening to the various Nisargadatta Maharaj audios on YouTube ([2], [3], for example) helped me.
It should be easy and effortless once you get the knack of it; you should be able to suspend all thought and enter silence on-demand. "Observe your breath", etc; are things that naturally occur AFTER one becomes silent (the intensity of the silence causes you to be attentive to each little movement in the here and now with new eyes). It seems to me that common meditation practice has this in the reverse order and unfortunately, I am not sure that mere imitation is going to help. Instead, abandon all postures and practices except one: the question "Who am I?". Please let me know if you have any further questions.
I knew a family most of whose members could qualify as chronically hypomanic. I made the observation because I had just read on bipolar disorder and mania, and the material stated that mania or hypomania could not be sustained and had to be followed by depressive episodes. This was over 20 years ago so the current understanding, if I'm not mistaken, of bipolar as metabolic (specifically mitochondrial) in origin might not have been the consensus then.
I'm not sure about the parents, but the many kids (Catholic) were:
- extremely religious, exalted even you could say. At least two of them joined the Church as nun and priest
- promiscuous (lol) in at least one case (my roommate) or at least very flirtatious
- talked very fast all the time
- always bouncing around
And so on. As far as I know none had had significant depressive episodes.
There's a theory that a "unipolar" variant of Type II bipolar, ie. unipolar hypomania, is the condition most commonly associated with successful entrepreneurship.
I'm not so sure about that, one the typical characteristics of even mild hypomania, impulsivity, is clearly incompatible with long term endeavors. I've seen papers saying that very mild chronic depression might be associated with professional success, not sure how well they'll hold up.
From the five factor point of view, as far as I understand there is some evidence that high openness to new experience (for new ventures), high conscientiousness, below average agreeableness along with high IQ are strongly correlated with success. Not so much for neuroticism and extraversion, though the latter probably helps in some specific jobs (but surprisingly, not necessarily sales).
I'm fairly sure I know someone who's unipolar BP type II, and while sometimes they can be very depressed or fatigued, the vast majority of the time they have absolutely mind boggling stamina for challenge. They constantly read, think, plan, experiment, and just get stuff done. When combined with a work ethic and intelligence, they manage to somehow pull off remarkable feats on a daily basis. It's not at all surprising to consider that they'd be extremely successful at starting a business, if that was what they chose to do.
They're almost like the guy from Limitless, when they put their mind to something it just happens like magic. Of course, they rarely stay focused on anything for too long, so starting a business they'd likely feel too trapped. They're always eyeing the exits, because they're so restless and need freedom like we need air.
This makes sense to me, every change from the average comes with corresponding pros and cons. The same traits in an office that make someone successful in business might not translate to a survival situation, etc.
In their case, I'd say it mostly comes out in the wash. They do decently well at work, but don't commit well to bigger projects, and they don't finish projects well.
What you allude to is not really mania or hypomania. It's just having a lot of energy and focus. Manic people have a lot of energy for sure, but it's defined by its harmful consequences. They drive too fast, they sleep too little, they talk too much and keep interrupting people, they have sexual urges that are as strong as they're inappropriate.
Take this older lady I knew of who, when she was stopped by a traffic cop for speeding, was absolutely convinced he was just hitting on her. Seriously. Or that guy I knew personally who squandered his sizable inheritance within just a couple years on ... escorts. I don't know the exact numbers but it was over a million €.
The family I referenced earlier struck me as subclinically hypomanic not because they had lots of energy, but because they approached the limits of harmful behavior.
i'm a little bit perturbed that the rationalist subculture might be seeing these mental states as desirable.
the big problem, apart from the obvious issues with impulsive and reckless decision making, is delusional and bizarre thinking. full-grade mania can have full-grade psychosis, but even the "desirable" hypomania here can come with lesser forms of something obviously related.
somebody might be a little too prone to see coincidences, to make unjustified inferences about other people's mental states, to perceive "messages from the universe", to perceive patterns and connections between unrelated things, to believe that they have the ability to somehow influence or foretell the future, etc.
like euphoria, these are all pretty much harmless and common things in themselves. it seems to me that hypomania (and drugs, etc.) ramps them up in the same way it does euphoria, and as long as it doesn't go too far, it doesn't outright prevent people from functioning.
i wonder whether it's even possible to separate the two -- i find "predictive processing" explanations of mania to be intuitively convincing, so it seems like euphoria and weird thinking might be connected in some way.
i don't like the idea of the rationalist crowd, many of whom are smart, driven, and capable, and value clear thinking, getting into states of mind like this, especially since they tend to come with anosognosia. it doesn't seem good.
Even if the goal is "wireheading done right" with some future technology such that problems can be avoided, the pattern with this subculture seems to be that some people will try to experiment with whatever closest equivalent is available now seriously underestimating risks.
if you're thinking to yourself "how can I become hypomanic to make myself more productive and creative", please don't.
(also, if rationalist types do start trying to make themselves hypomanic, one result might be that the AI/singularity/simulation stuff will turn into something that really is a religion.)
I think all emotional states can be triggered electrochemichally for arbitrary durations.
The reason all humans aren't like the manic people mentioned in the article is that it's not an evolutionary stable strategy. They hoard, steal, flirt too much and cooperation cannot happen.
Which brings me to a scary question - what stops a future radical extremist from capturing enemies and triggering the most extreme pain that no one has ever felt before with electrodes? Or gene editing millions of babies to be in constant extreme pain for their whole lifetime, without limbs or senses to be able to change anything (inspired by Metallica - One)?
That's horrible food for thought - but I think humans have pretty good sensory adaptation, we don't constantly thinking about how we have clothes on. I imagine after a couple years or so people will adapt or be numb to the pain.
On a lighter note, I heard of an unusual school of ethics which says that we will soon have the technology (and the moral obligation) to modify all sentient life in such a way as to completely eliminate suffering from the universe.
Sidenote: I've just realized why the 4-quadrant graph has a "missing emotion" for the top left (low-confidence optimisim):
1. English does not have a specific word for that feeling of excitement about things accompanied by inability to stick with any particular thing if it doesn't give immediate positive feedback. "Hyperactivity" comes close the half of it that isn't wandering around on Wikipedia, but that describes a behavior, not an internal state.
2. The people who come to see psychiatrists and therapists about their own problems don't tend to complain about that emotion. Seeing a bunch of different exciting possibilities is fun! We tend to want help with resulting difficulty managing their schedules, sleep, relationships, priorities, and yknow... actually following through on finishing things rather than getting distracted...
There is a mental health book written as an allegory to an IT department called The Phoenix Project.
While it mostly seems to deal with anxiety, it is pretty applicable here. This is the same pattern of executive dysfunction that swaps Brent from task to task and leads the protaganist to say to the Chief Executive [Function] Officer "Commitments like the compliance work are made without any regard for what’s already on people’s plates, like Phoenix.”
This sounds a lot like chronic decision fatigue. Without basic human help, we are told to go get the American dream, but never ask for help when you get cancer and it wipes out all future generations wealth accumulation.
Related tangent:
Author Richard Powers (2019 Pulitzer winner for "Overstory", an amazing novel about trees) wrote an under-appreciated novel called "Generosity: An Enhancement", which centers on a young woman with extraordinary resilience and positive affect in the face of difficult circumstances. Highly recommended.
I’m surprised this article makes no mention of hypomania, which is close to mania but doesn’t cross the threshold. People can be hypomanic for years without rousing concern amongst friends, family, coworkers, medical staff.
I think there's a bit of selection bias here. Often times the only euphoria cases you really hear of are the ones that come along with some sort of detriment, leading the patient or people around them to seek help. I have a gut theory that that chronic elation is just as prominant as chronic depression, but since it rarely effects the person adversely few seek help for it.
Throughout my life I've been for the most part overly happy. It's just something myself, my family, and those close to me have noticed. There are issues with it, but they tend to be minor and things that I wouldn't really seek help for:
-being happy in inappropriate contexts (people tend to not resonate with you when you're happy at a funeral).
-much higher tolerance with ambiguity. I'm OK with being lost somewhere, which tends to annoy those around me as I tend to wander towards a destination rather than taking an optimal route.
-and an exageration of smile wrinkles on my face.
The negative impact to my life is quite low. Since I'd never seek help for it, it would never really be recorded anywhere. I suspect there are plenty of people with a chronic elation that are in the same boat - there's no onus to address it as an issue. I have no idea what makes me tick differently, but I suspect with a larger understanding of human biology we'll eventually be able to isolate these things and find an optimal amount of happy for humans to have as a baseline.