Why Does Mania Feel So Productive?

A dive into productivity, creativity, and what it feels like to be manic.

In 2019, I started writing about mental health. It began in March with an open-ended form where I offered a single question: if you could ask someone with mental illness anything, what would you ask? There was no place to sign your name, no place for contact information, just a blank space to write questions.

I posted it to my Facebook page and encouraged people to share it. I got quite a few questions fairly quickly and set about writing answers to go in a public place for all to see. The resulting document wound up being a 50-page long Google Doc that had about two and a half months of work put into it.

Not long after I started answering questions, I began working on an autobiography. I wrote over 50,000 words in about four weeks, unintentionally finishing a NaNoWriMo in mid-spring. I was absolutely thrilled to have done it.

In June, I started publishing articles here. They began as simple copy-pastes of answers from the Doc, but I soon began writing original articles and publishing them in places like Invisible Illness. I gained a small following thanks to some Facebook networking, and for a while, I felt really successful.

Then, in September, I talked to my nurse practitioner about an antidepressant I was on at the time. It made me feel awful — I would have multiple nights in a row where I would only sleep for a few hours, then would wake up at 3 a.m. and feel the need to do something. Generally, that something was to come downstairs and write.

We decided that it would be for the best if I went off the antidepressant. With her guidance, I tapered off of it and experienced about two weeks of horrific withdrawals. It wound up being an incredibly productive month for me, as I published 21 articles that September.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I was incredibly manic during that whole stretch. All told, I was on the antidepressant for about 10 months, and while it felt like an incredibly productive ten months, it was absolutely not healthy.

Sure I wrote a lot of articles and a book, but I also missed loads of sleep and was absolutely miserable during the day. Sometimes, I would stop doing my actual day job so I could write about some subject that popped into my head. Everyday activities were shoved aside so I could write. It felt like my muse was working overtime.

What was lost in all of this was so much of the stuff that was necessary to have a healthy life. I was often either too fixated on writing or too exhausted to cook, so we ordered a lot of takeout and ate a lot of frozen pizzas. Chores that I’m already bad at doing were dropped, and my poor partner had to pick up even more of my slack around the house.

So, while I was producing a lot of writing on my passion projects, I wasn’t really keeping up the rest of my life. I was slowly destroying my body and my mental health because I was so fixated on writing that I just couldn’t do anything else.

I feel the need to qualify this next part. I am by no means a clinician, and I am only an expert on mental health in the sense that I’ve lived with mental illness for the majority of my life. I’m going to be wrapping my own experiences up with some internet research featuring scholarly studies, news articles, and both firsthand and secondhand experiences with mental illness.

This is by no means a comprehensive look at mental illness as it relates to productivity and creativity. My experience is my experience, and the studies and experiences I describe in the following section are unique to the individuals who experience them. No two people experience mental illness in quite the same way, and I do my best to clarify that, but I’d rather be upfront about that here to be safe.

In short, mental illness is a unique experience for everyone, and, with regards to the following sections, your mileage may vary.

Mania is an addictive feeling. Describing mania to someone who has never experienced it is hard, but in a nutshell, you feel like you can do anything. When I am manic, I have boundless energy and the drive to do anything. Creativity pours from my fingers onto the keyboard, and everything I write is gold.

Unfortunately, this tends to feed the notion that mental illness is always correlated with creativity, art, and scientific breakthroughs. The relationship between mental illness, particularly mood disorders like bipolar disorder, has been studied, and the results are mixed.

Generally, patients that experience mania also tend to experience more creativity than average, but not always. In addition, taking medications to reduce symptoms of mania has been found to reduce creative output, but not always. In short, as with so many things related to mental illness, your mileage may vary.

The studies linked above found that many well-known creatives, such as Van Gough, were highly productive during periods of mania and less productive during periods of depression. However, the trend was not universal.

The most recent example of this is the ever-controversial Kanye West. West came out as bipolar a few years ago and has since commented that he does not take medications because it stifles his creativity. While we can only speculate, it may have also led to his somewhat odd behaviors in the summer of 2020, including announcing a presidential run among other things.

While it is incredibly beneficial that West and his (soon to be ex) wife, Kim Kardashian, are helping confront the stigma against mental illness, I worry that it continues to push the “mentally ill creative” stereotype. As described above, the link between mood disorders and creativity largely comes down to the individual — everyone is different, after all.

In reality, what is most likely happening is a sort of “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” method. I produced quite a few articles and other pieces of writing during my manic period, and while there were some excellent, well-received pieces, there were also some really bad ones.

So, for me and many others, it’s not a matter of creating masterpiece after masterpiece as much as it is producing huge amounts of work with varying quality. I found one article in my research that compared it to recording oneself while high: you feel like you’re saying profound things, but when you listen again when sober, there is a lot of gibberish in there.

So ultimately, while I produce a lot of work while manic, it is not all quality work. To make matters worse, I am creating this mixed bag of writing while shunning many of my other responsibilities, which often means that my total productivity often goes down when I’m manic.

Unfortunately, because I’m wrapped up in the euphoria of my mania, I often have trouble grasping the premise that I am not actually being as productive as I think I am. For me and many like me, mania feels like I can do anything I want to. There is no limit to my creativity and energy, and everything is possible.

For me, medication doesn’t blunt my creativity. I am still able to write quality stuff for both my day job and my other work. What I find is that I write less overall, but what I write is more consistent and high-quality. While I don’t feel the sense of hyper-productivity that comes with the frantic work I do while manic, I also know that I’m not falling down on my regular work and chores.

In that way, I am — somewhat counterintuitively — more productive when I’m stable than when I’m manic. Yes, my mania drives me to write more often and produce more articles, but this often comes at the expense of other important things, like work, sleep, chores, and maintaining my relationships. Yes, I’m producing things, but I’m not productive.

As for creativity, I don’t know. I definitely come up with a lot of ideas for writing projects. Many of them get discarded later for being too unrealistic, too similar to existing work, or just too weird. Again, this is sort of the “throw it all at the wall and see what sticks” method that is common among manic people I’ve talked to. I suspect that it is similar for other artists — Kanye has a team of people to help him put out his work, and I’m sure there were a lot of, shall we say, interesting ideas that got left on the cutting room floor.

The ultimate upshot of all of this is that everyone experiences things differently. While many people who experience mania experience an increase in creative drive and productivity, many others don’t. Even those who get that creative drive don’t necessarily produce quality work, and even an increased drive to produce can lead to foregoing other activities, reducing overall productivity while chasing that productive feeling.

A big part of mania is just the need to move and the lack of inhibition that stops you from pursuing your ideas. For many, that causes them to create art or writing or music. For others, the house gets frantically cleaned for several straight weeks. Others throw themselves into their jobs, or teach themselves a hobby, or chase investment opportunities. Everyone reacts to mania differently.

The level of actual productivity during a manic period varies from person to person, and even between two different periods. I’ve had manic periods where I was incredibly productive, both in quantity and quality. I’ve had manic periods where I accomplished nothing of value except that I was fixated on a video game or some such unimportant thing. It’s a total gamble what’s going to come up each time.

The thing about it is, even if it’s not productive, it often feels productive. All that energy is going into something important, or at least something important at that very moment. Sometimes I write hundreds of thousands of words over a handful of months. Sometimes I hoard nickels. Something is getting accomplished in a big way, but whether or not it’s worthwhile (to me or in general) is questionable.

In my experience and research, many people with bipolar disorder, or other illnesses that cause mania or hypomania, feel the same way. But, as I have said many times, everyone is different, and not everyone has this experience.

However, if you experience this in some way, try to make sure that you don’t overdo whatever it is you’re throwing yourself into. Don’t dump all of your money into a new hobby or investment. Try to get some sleep, do your best to eat something of nutritional value, and get some exercise. Heck, take up the Couch to 5k challenge to burn off some of that energy.

Also, do your best to lean on your network. The people close to you can help you moderate some of your worst impulses. If you have a partner or spouse, work with them to take care of yourself during manic periods. Condition yourself to consider advice from trustworthy people close to you. It can save you some trouble in the long run.

Mania is a fact of life for many of us with mental illness. The energy, the drive, the lack of barriers, all of it drives many of us to work and produce and go go go. For those of you who experience this mania and the sense of productivity I’ve described, I hope I’ve given you some tools to help moderate your mania.

For those who experience this from the outside — maybe you have a loved one with bipolar disorder, or perhaps you know someone who lives with it — I hope I’ve given you some insight into mania. It can be a foreign concept to many people who don’t live with mental illness, but often, firsthand accounts can help build understanding.

And, for those of you who don’t know anything about bipolar disorder, mania, depression, or any of the other various facets of mental illness, I hope I’ve broadened your perspective. Roughly 20% of people experience mental illness at some point each year, and upwards of 3% of the population has bipolar. Millions of people live with bipolar, and odds are decent that you may know one or two of them.

I hope this article has been helpful to some of you who live with bipolar or know someone with bipolar. A large part of living with bipolar is having the coping mechanisms to deal with your mania, and having people in your network that understand and can help you. Ultimately, bipolar disorder is a manageable illness that millions of people live with every day; with the right tools, you can live a happy, healthy, and productive life with bipolar.