Does anyone have Cyclothymia?

[Suppertime]

It's when you experience hypomania - increased confidence, and elevated moods, for a few days and then crash into depression. The confidence part is amazing, I wish I could have hypomania forever but it makes me so giddy sometimes that I can barely sleep. It's totally worth it though... and I wish I could have that forever.

POIS completely spins that around into depression, and hypomania doesn't come until weeks or months after I abstain from masturbating.

Anyone have hypomania and know how to induce it?

[Vincent M]

I've had one full blown manic episode and one episode of hypomania. I don't exactly know how to induce it, but I have an idea about how to regulate emotions in general. That is if you force yourself into a depressed state (purposely occupy your time with activities that are unpleasant as possible for you) you will be able to somewhat predict when your emotional level will rise based on when you choose to resume pleasurable activities. I choose to use this method because it's easier to make yourself depressed than it is to make yourself happy. In other words since we naturally choose pleasure over pain in order to attempt to control your emotions you will need to interrupt this natural inclination for a short period of time.

Some choices can bring more displeasure than others and for a greater or shorter duration of time. For example one small step I've taken is to avoid watching movies, television, and playing videogames which normally provides me with a mood increase bordering on ecstasy. This allows me to have more mood energy to direct into other tasks. The tricky part is that when you start down this path your pleasure-pain mechanism will adjust to make other things more pleasurable than they used to be; for example when I stop watching movies I will gain a lot more pleasure from food so if I didn't want to waste that pleasure on food I'd have to eat things that tasted worse to me. There are a lot of small momentary pleasures throughout your day that will add up without you realizing it and these will drain your mood energy.

The way I look at it is that each emotion I experience will eventually have an equal and opposite rebound-emotion and when this rebound-emotion occurs depends on outside forces. For instance for a while I was living a hedonistic lifestyle doing nothing but watching movies and porn and playing videogames and eating whatever I wanted for months and then I had to attend my cousin's wedding and while I was sitting there just the boredom and anxiety from being around people I didn't care to be around pushed me into such an emotional despair that I could barely keep myself from crying. If I had spent the previous months doing nothing but boring stuff like reading old school textbooks for example I would have saved up a lot of mood energy and I probably would have even enjoyed the company of those people at the wedding.

I've never tried to make myself so depressed to the point where after the depression I would spring into a hypomanic state however. I'm not sure if anyone would be able to voluntarily induce such a level of despair or pain in themselves.

[Suppertime]

That makes complete sense!

Whenever I was in the hypomania state, I didn't want to do anything but converse with people and hang out, socialize, and just party. I had no mood for videogames or movies... stuff that didn't involve me interacting.

Now that I'm back in my depressed, moody state, all I want to do is indulge to distract myself from all the self-induced agony. I've had people call me on my cell a couple times this week but I ignored all the calls, because I was not in the mood. If I was in Hypomanic, then I wouldn't mind.

So I'll try your method and restrain myself doing all the things I like, even porn (which I had NO sexual desires while in hypomania... but became a complete horn dog while not in).

 

[Vincent M]

I find it interesting that my logic about this made sense to you. Most people I tell this to don't agree with me at all lol. I suppose it's probably because most haven't given it much thought and also because most get a decent amount of socialization either at their jobs or with their friends and that socialization I think tends to be more effective at balancing emotions than a person could do when isolated.

I guess being so isolated has allowed me to discover other methods of emotion regulation that aren't immediately obvious or practical to the majority of individuals.

I felt similarly to you when I was in my hypomanic state, but I think it was due to a conscious decision on my part not to waste all that emotional energy doing the same stuff that I do all the time and that drove me to be around people and try to actually live in reality instead of fantasy for once.

[Daveman]

You might be surprised to know that it's an ancient technique, thousands of years old. Maybe not by the common people, but ancient priests and sorcerers, meditators and spiritualists.

Energy balance.

Saving and spending energy wisely.

Saving energy is interesting. It's a matter of going deep into pleasurable energy (not necessarily intensifying it but memorizing it), so it can be called upon in more difficult times.

So it's a combination of spending the energy wisely, as you say, not splurging on less important trivials, so that when more common energy comes it looks better, and then memorizing the good when it happens, to reuse it when things are down.

The memorizng focuses on the energy not the event, this way it's more easily used to enhance different (less pleasant) events.

[Vincent M]

That's interesting Daveman. I have read about ancient philosophies that mention one should seek a balance between pain and pleasure and not aim for all out happiness, in fact I think that is one theme of Buddhism, but I haven't read any mention of the idea that you have a limited amount of emotional energy and therefore you would need to spend it wisely - although I do agree with that.

I'm not so sure about the memorization thing however. I think memorization of basic emotions and physical sensations occurs automatically and that it would be impossible to exercise any conscious control over that.

I can sort of see how remembering or not remembering an emotion and the outside forces that caused the emotion might  play a role in the rebound emotion you will subsequently have. For instance if you got really drunk and had an amazing time with friends and were in a very positive mood and you didn't have any memory of it when you woke up the next day due to blacking out would you still have the rebounding negative emotion to equal all of the pleasurable emotion you felt the night before?

I'm not sure, because the way I've thought about it is that the opposing rebound-emotion usually involves the comparison by your psyche of different forces behind the cause of the emotions. In the previous example if you hadn't blacked out and forgotten the good times you had while drunk you would probably unconsciously compare the fun of the night before with the now seeming unpleasantness of being sober even if you were around friends you would miss the relief of anxiety and pain that the alcohol gave you. So through the comparison of those forces you develop the pain of "loss" of the pleasurable effects of the alcohol and that pain is part of the rebound-emotion of the pleasure of the previous night. This example assumes you didn't get any hangover or other lingering physical effects from the alcohol. Later on in the day you might experience some force of misfortune such as realizing you dropped your cellphone in some parking lot without knowing the night before and this might send you into a deeper negative emotion than it otherwise would have had you not partied last night because again you would unconsciously compare it to the fun of the night before and thus this would be another part of the rebound-emotion.

Re-stating the original question would you still feel that rebound-emotion in some other form if you had blacked out and forgotten the night before? To put it another way is there some sort of chemical rebound of emotions similar to the come down and withdrawal after taking recreational drugs to get high? Could pleasure itself be seen as a drug in that fashion?

Just realized that my use of the word "counter" in "counter-emotion" was probably not what I meant. I think rebound-emotion or "opposing emotion" is what I wanted so I changed it accordingly.

[Vincent M]

I think visualizing the pleasure-pain system as a pendulum might be somewhat in sync with the idea I was trying to explain. I'm still thinking about if that model would really accurately represent most fluctuations in emotion. The way I see it your "emotional pendulum" wouldn't swing back and forth from each event right away because there would be a lot of outside forces pushing and pulling your pendulum simultaneously. A lot of these outside forces could affect your pendulum without you realizing it by taking the form of subconscious thoughts or sensations which influence emotion.

[Prancer]

Suppertime and Vincent,

I think I have also experienced this before. There would be some days where I would wake up and experience a big euphoria for no reason, but then after a few minutes I would "crash" and get a mild headache along with brain fog and feel very apathetic. I came to realize that sometimes when I felt very confident and euphoric that I would somehow "use up" that good feeling, and it would turn to feeling bad again. Very strange and an interesting symptom of POIS.