“Ha,” you say. That’s an easy one. I know the answer to that. It’s like the difference between walking on pins and needles and walking on eggshells. For me, anxiety is the pins and needles, while mania produces the eggshells. Pins and needles hurt more, but eggshells are easier to break. Anxiety causes me more pain, but mania has me treading carefully on a fragile edge.
I know more about anxiety than mania. My diagnosis is actually bipolar disorder type 2 with an anxiety disorder. As such, I never really experience true mania. Hypomania is about as far as I get. And believe me, that’s enough.
First, let’s start by admitting that anxiety and mania have a lot in common. At least, they do in my life. Both of them make me frantic. Both of them make me obsessed with money. Both disrupt my eating habits. And both of them make me very, very twitchy.
1
Frantic.
Both anxiety and hypomania make me feel frantic, like there is something I need to be doing to alleviate them. I know this isn’t true, that they are out of my control, but it feels that way. I get all revved up inside, a nagging, prickly feeling that jangles my nerves and irritates my brain. I try desperately to think what it might be that would calm the feeling, but there is nothing this side of an anti-anxiety pill, which might or might not help.2
Obsessed with money.
With anxiety, I obsess about the bills and how I am going to pay them. With mania, I obsess about what money I do have and how I can best spend it. Since this is, after all, hypomania, I tend not to go on wild spending sprees, but I have been known to buy myself or my husband presents, telling myself the costs are comparatively reasonable and that at least I have limited myself to a non-extravagant amount. (Which may be the anxiety and the hypomania arguing with each other.) With anxiety, I try to anticipate all possible bills and juggle their amounts, due dates and relative necessity (like power cut off or trash removal cut off). I take on extra work, not because I think I have the wherewithal to do it, but because I want the extra money, no matter what it costs me in terms of physical and emotional energy.3
Eating habits.
Both anxiety and hypomania make me eat more than usual. With anxiety, no doubt I am trying to fill an existential hole or find something to distract me from my worries. With hypomania, I crave the relatively safe sensations of rum raisin ice cream, cinnamon danish, or salted, buttery popcorn.4
Twitchy.
Both anxiety and hypomania can cause the shakes, tremors in my hands and arms and legs. Alas, not for me; I don’t get the euphoria of true mania, but the inherent sensation that I’m doing something wrong at some level. I can’t even enjoy hypomania without guilt.There are differences, however.
Anxiety leaves me immobilized, in a way that hypomania just doesn’t. You’d think with all that nervous energy vibrating around my body and brain, I would hyper myself into a frenzy. Instead, all the jitters cancel each other out, leaving me with no place I can go to escape. My fears leave me frozen. The money worries leave me unable to decide what bill to pay first. I can’t decide whether it’s better to stay awake and try to read (if I have enough ability to concentrate), or take that anti-anxiety pill and try to rest, if not sleep.
Mania can make me productive, in a way that anxiety can’t. When I’m hypomanic, I can write, or at least put words on the screen. (Whether they’re any good or not is anybody’s guess.) But at least I have the illusion of motion, the impetus to create. That extra energy seems more focused, at least in comparison with anxiety. When I hit a hypomanic jag, I sometimes try to get ahead on my blogs, or at least jot down titles and ideas that I hope I can decipher and develop later.
Neither state of mind is preferable. Anxiety is the more painful and hypomania the more fragile. Anxiety is more familiar to me and hypomania more rare and even exciting.
But I can’t choose. I can’t say I like hypomania more than anxiety, although it does seem to have more benefits. But I know it can be destructive and futile, promising things it can’t fulfill.
Given the choice, I’d rather not walk on pins and needles or on eggshells. Level ground is fine with me.
