bipolar traits?

[dp33]

First do bipolars tend to have many plans and projects during certain times?A friend of mine who I am not sure is bipolar but displays all the symptoms tends to have many plans and projects when she is on a high, that never get done.I called her after one year of not having contact with her.It was hard to say through the phone how she was but we were talking about visiting other countries and she said she applied for a passport "I have some projects in mind".To me this was a bad sign.

Second does outside temperature affect bipolars when on a high?This same person when acting normal would tend to dress accordingly.During the autumn when it would start to get cold she would require a sweater or maybe even a jacket because she felt cold.A few months later when she started acting up, during winter where we were inside a warehouse where it was very cold she was in a t-shirt and acted like it was nothing while a few months earlier, in her normal phase, in the same warehouse where it was warmer she was in jacket and trembling from the cold.

[Xila31]

Yes, flight of ideas is a big deal with bipolar. This is one of my primary symptoms of mania/hypomania. I have such great, wonderful, amazing plans. And then my mania falls out and everything collapses. Worst of all is I always dreamed of being a published author. When my mania is good I can write for hours on end. I can write half a book in a couple of months. Then it ends, and I can't even come up with a single idea and I give up on my project. It is very depressing, really. I've started probably 50 or so books that I never finished. :(

It also goes along with what is called grandios thinking. When I'm in that phase, I think I'm a super genius and all of my books will be #1 New York Times best sellers, I'll win the Nobel Prize for literature, and be one of the most famous authors ever! Then it goes away and suddenly not only am I the worst writer ever born but all my dreams are worth nothing.... >.>

So, as you can imagine it's very frustrating.

[moonpanda]

During manic or hypomanic episodes, it's really not uncommon for a person to have many ideas, plans and projects. Additionally, these plans might be really far beyond the person's abilities or circumstances (sometimes due to grandiosity, like feeling all-powerful and extremely important), and they can end up being a huge drain on time and money. Impulsivity is really common, so the person might take up big projects on a whim, but won't have the concentration span or clarity of thought to follow through. For these reasons, the multitude of projects will for the most part go unfinished. When delusions come into play, these projects, plans, and actions might make very little sense to everyone else around.

I tended to do this sort of stuff during high periods, to varying degrees. For me, there's usually a torrent of thoughts going through my head that I can barely keep track of, and I can hardly write one idea down before it gets shoved out of the way by a dozen others. One thought will spawn all of these offshoots, which at first feels like dazzling creativity, but then it becomes really hard to figure out where to put my high energy, and I can't seem to concentrate on anything long enough to make any real headway.

A personal example from one of my first hypomanias (in retrospect, because I didn't know what it was at the time): applying for 20 jobs and internships for which I wasn't in the least bit qualified for (like working on a cheetah farm in Kenya??), and then buying 200 dollars worth of art materials to start writing and illustrating my own graphic novel that was sure to get published even though I had no experience in any of it and no real story to tell, and then deciding to paint the apartment with murals without asking my roommates first, and then deciding to take up stenciling graffiti and spending the night not sleeping and instead roaming the streets practicing, etc., etc. I didn't feel the need to sleep, and all of these projects were so important that I was glad I could just keep working on it all without stopping to rest. I was pretty intrusive in other people's lives with this stuff, because I wanted everyone to see what cool stuff I was doing (and then of course there was the illegal graffiti that I was sure would be pardoned because it was so artfully done). When I got lucky, this type of manic energy just got channeled into trying to clean and organize the apartment from top to bottom, starting and stopping all over the place until nothing really got cleaned, just a lot more disorganized.

Ultimately, as time goes on, the thoughts become less clear and much harder to understand. Once the high period is over, trying to access those thoughts and plans is almost impossible for me. It seems like what I thought was unparalleled creativity was just completely overblown, and I can't understand my thought process or what I was really trying to do. I wasted a lot of time and money that I didn't have, and my relationships and school performance suffered really, really badly. My actions and behaviors are pretty embarrassing to look back on, because I can't imagine what my friends and poor roommates were thinking at the time when I was ranting and raving about these silly things.

[ILADVOCATE]

Well as to the first question sometimes people who have bipolar have what is called "flight of ideas" and they can'f focus or concentrate and make plans that are unrealistic. Also people with a variety of psychiatric disabilities (including bipolar when manic) will dress inappropriately for the weather and not be aware of the impact of the heat or the cold. Only a psychiatrist could provide a specific diagnosis but if this person is experiencing this and other potential symptoms it might be worthwhile to encourage them to seek help.