Just as almost any “is it?” headline can be answered with “no”, almost any “could it” headline can be answered with “yeah probably under some circumstances”.
Mental health is especially complicated in that pathologies are defined by their impairment of “normal” function and performance, for a relatively nebulous and subjective definition of “normal”. Specific behaviors that might be unusual to the point of adding up to hypomania for one individual might be entirely normal for another.
IMO, you are likely to get farther by quantifying the exact symptoms you want and inquiring what induces those symptoms than by trying to redefine a relatively well-known pathology as “like that but better”.
I prefer to not examine this issue in a frame of pathologies.
In the individual case, concrete symptoms and behaviours of course depend on the unique personality of the affected individual. Yet, when you know a person good enough, it is not that hard to recognize the changes taking place under hypomania, and from what I can tell they seem to generalize well.
It is exactly not the possible impairments that interest me, but what I subjectively experienced as an improvement to my default condition.
I should have added that I have tried several proposed methods of cognitive/mental enhancement, none of them fully delivering the particular mixture of symptoms that hypomania did (for me):
Nootropics, to the extent that I‘ve noticed an effect, came with unwanted side-effects.
Physical exercise obviously does the trick, but only goes so far raising and stabilizing mood and clearing up thinking.
Meditation also regulates emotions and increases self-reflection, but I could not notice any motivational gains.
Achieving flow states usually is very tricky as one has to adjust the difficulty of the task to one‘s competence all the time, something that is not achieved while taking care of routine business or hard problems.
Following your proposal, I would have to try something like perfectly dosing modafinil and nicotine while steadily keeping in a state of flow, which I had to consciously reactivate everytime after perfectly timed short workouts and meditation sessions. I doubt that even this would lead to the desired outcome.
What may sound even less convincing to you, but actually is my point: mild hypomania felt „natural“. I‘m in danger here to glorify this episode, but cannot see how the first few weeks of it were unhealthy in any way—I was simply able to do more mental work in a day than I could normally do, while being happier than I usually was. If that is sustainable in any way is exactly one of the questions I would like to have answered by further research.
Instead of tweaking numerous variables for some individual with unpredictable outcome, why not examine the condition in the population, find out more about its mechanisms and make it accessible in a controlled fashion as a full package?
The point I’m attempting to make is that psychiatric diagnoses, such as “hypomania”, are framed through a lens of pathology. A change in behavior or experience which causes no problems for the affected person and those around them would not be defined and studied in the same way that changes associated with problems are. Working from general research focused on pathologized changes of experience (ie clinical hypomania) is likely to yield resources that include negative states you’d rather not learn from while disregarding positive states that you’d prefer to emulate.
Toward the goal of tailoring subjective experience, I think you’re on the right track for breaking down the desired change into component parts and contemplating the parts separately at first.
Whatever you end up doing, try to avoid discounting hedonic treadmill effects when assessing the sustainable effectiveness of various interventions, and try to include ambient factors such as location, sleep quality, valence of recent news exposure, etc.
Just as almost any “is it?” headline can be answered with “no”, almost any “could it” headline can be answered with “yeah probably under some circumstances”.
Mental health is especially complicated in that pathologies are defined by their impairment of “normal” function and performance, for a relatively nebulous and subjective definition of “normal”. Specific behaviors that might be unusual to the point of adding up to hypomania for one individual might be entirely normal for another.
IMO, you are likely to get farther by quantifying the exact symptoms you want and inquiring what induces those symptoms than by trying to redefine a relatively well-known pathology as “like that but better”.
I prefer to not examine this issue in a frame of pathologies. In the individual case, concrete symptoms and behaviours of course depend on the unique personality of the affected individual. Yet, when you know a person good enough, it is not that hard to recognize the changes taking place under hypomania, and from what I can tell they seem to generalize well. It is exactly not the possible impairments that interest me, but what I subjectively experienced as an improvement to my default condition.
I should have added that I have tried several proposed methods of cognitive/mental enhancement, none of them fully delivering the particular mixture of symptoms that hypomania did (for me):
Nootropics, to the extent that I‘ve noticed an effect, came with unwanted side-effects.
Physical exercise obviously does the trick, but only goes so far raising and stabilizing mood and clearing up thinking.
Meditation also regulates emotions and increases self-reflection, but I could not notice any motivational gains.
Achieving flow states usually is very tricky as one has to adjust the difficulty of the task to one‘s competence all the time, something that is not achieved while taking care of routine business or hard problems.
Following your proposal, I would have to try something like perfectly dosing modafinil and nicotine while steadily keeping in a state of flow, which I had to consciously reactivate everytime after perfectly timed short workouts and meditation sessions. I doubt that even this would lead to the desired outcome. What may sound even less convincing to you, but actually is my point: mild hypomania felt „natural“. I‘m in danger here to glorify this episode, but cannot see how the first few weeks of it were unhealthy in any way—I was simply able to do more mental work in a day than I could normally do, while being happier than I usually was. If that is sustainable in any way is exactly one of the questions I would like to have answered by further research.
Instead of tweaking numerous variables for some individual with unpredictable outcome, why not examine the condition in the population, find out more about its mechanisms and make it accessible in a controlled fashion as a full package?
The point I’m attempting to make is that psychiatric diagnoses, such as “hypomania”, are framed through a lens of pathology. A change in behavior or experience which causes no problems for the affected person and those around them would not be defined and studied in the same way that changes associated with problems are. Working from general research focused on pathologized changes of experience (ie clinical hypomania) is likely to yield resources that include negative states you’d rather not learn from while disregarding positive states that you’d prefer to emulate.
Toward the goal of tailoring subjective experience, I think you’re on the right track for breaking down the desired change into component parts and contemplating the parts separately at first.
Whatever you end up doing, try to avoid discounting hedonic treadmill effects when assessing the sustainable effectiveness of various interventions, and try to include ambient factors such as location, sleep quality, valence of recent news exposure, etc.