Hacking Hypomania
My life reached a turning point when right before the closing of an acquisition of my startup, I had just blown up the deal with some very irrational demands and behavior. My mind was swirling with questions about how I could have thought that those actions were logical, or why I impulsively just did them without any thought to the consequences. I was scared to have the realization that somehow my brain had become disconnected from reality.
As I was laying on the couch in my office trying to process the post-mortem of the failed acquisition, my wife sent me a series of texts:
Do you feel like the following traits are descriptive of you?
He is filled with energy
He is flooded with ideas.
He is driven, restless, and unable to keep still.
He channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand ambitions.
He often works on little sleep.
He feels brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world.
He can be euphoric.
He becomes easily irritated by minor obstacles.
He is a risk taker.
He overspends in both his business and personal life.
He sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that can have painful consequences.
He is fast-talking.
He is witty and gregarious.
His confidence can make him charismatic and persuasive.
He is also prone to making enemies and feels he is persecuted by those who do not accept his vision and mission.
Discovering Hypomania
I was floored. The list seemed to describe me perfectly, so I asked her where she got that from and she told me it was from a book called the The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America.
My wife had already purchased the book in our Kindle account, and I immediately started reading. The author, John D. Gartner, a psychologist described how in the late 90s he had been planning to write a book about religious movements started by manic prophets, but that he had become distracted by the messianic movements around him — technology investors as believers in the “New Economy.” He described how he become a paper millionaire for one exhilarating day in March 2000 before his portfolio lost 90% of its value, and how he began to suspect he was writing the wrong book:
My new hypothesis became that American entrepreneurs are largely hypomanic. I decided to undertake what social scientists call a pilot study: a small-scale, inexpensive, informal investigation meant to test the waters. I placed announcements on several Web sites devoted to the technology business, expressing my interest in studying entrepreneurs and requesting volunteers. I interviewed a small sample of ten Internet CEOs. After I read them each a list of hypomanic traits that I had synthesized from the psychiatric literature, I asked them if they agreed that these traits are typical of an entrepreneur:
He is filled with energy. He is flooded with ideas. He is driven, restless, and unable to keep still. He channels his energy into the achievement of wildly grand ambitions. He often works on little sleep. He feels brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world. He can be euphoric.He becomes easily irritated by minor obstacles. He is a risk taker. He overspends in both his business and personal life. He acts out sexually. He sometimes acts impulsively, with poor judgment, in ways that can have painful consequences. He is fast-talking. He is witty and gregarious. His confidence can make him charismatic and persuasive. He is also prone to making enemies and feels he is persecuted by those who do not accept his vision and mission.
I feared they might find the questions insulting. I needn’t have worried. All of the entrepreneurs agreed that the overall description was accurate, and they endorsed all the hypomanic traits, with the exceptions of “paranoia” and “sexual acting out” (these traits in particular are viewed as very negative and thus may be more difficult to admit to). Most expressed their agreement with excitement: “Wow, that’s right on target!” When I asked them to rate their level of agreement for each trait on a standard 5-point scale, many gave ratings that were literally off the chart: 5+s, 6s. One subject repeatedly begged me to let him give a 7. I was startled by the respondents’ enthusiasm, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. As a psychotherapist, I am familiar with the way people become energized when they feel understood, especially when it helps them understand themselves better.
Having learned in our conversation that they were hypomanic, the CEOs wanted to talk about it. One now understood better why he regularly rented palatial office space he could not afford and why his wife hid the checkbook. Another could finally explain what drove him to impulsively send broadcast e-mails at 3 A.M. to all his employees, radically revising the company’s mission. It was as if merely by asking these questions I had held up a mirror in which these men could see themselves. After talking to them for just fifteen minutes, it seemed as if I was the first person to truly understand them.
I was floored. Even his anecdotes of other entrepreneurs hit the spot. I had regularly overspent both company and personal funds. I had sent broadcast emails at 3am radically revising our companies mission. It was like for the first time in my life that things about my own feelings and behavior started to make sense, and so I just kept reading.
One respondent seemed to be in an intense hypomanic state when I interviewed him. He responded to my Web site solicitation by emailing me in huge blue block letters: “CALL ME IMMEDIATELY.” When I did, he talked rapidly and loudly and laughed quite often. At the same time he was charming, witty, and engaging. The interview was a bit chaotic because he was driving and carrying on another phone call at the same time. He was a serial entrepreneur. After founding one successful company, he had felt he needed to quit his own corporation because he couldn’t “make things happen fast enough,” leaving him frustrated and bored. Now he was on to a new venture. He was very enthusiastic about my research and volunteered to send me the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of half a dozen well-known high-tech entrepreneurs (which I never received), who he claimed were his “very close friends.”
Again, I couldn’t believe the similarities … I often talked rapidly and laughed often in conversations. And I had even felt deja vu with the description of the entrepreneur who had carried on multiple simultaneous phone conversations while driving, and the desire to quit my own startups because I couldn’t make things move fast enough.
This was a small pilot study, but nonetheless, I was overwhelmed. I had never seen data like this. Because humans are so complex, most effects in psychology are modest and nearly drowned out by the great variability that exists naturally between people. Not in this case. One hundred percent of the entrepreneurs I interviewed were hypomanic! This couldn’t be chance. The odds of flipping a coin ten times and getting ten heads in a row is less than one in a thousand. It felt as if I had tested the waters with my little pilot study and been hit with a tidal wave. It was then that I knew I had stumbled onto something big that had been hiding in plain sight.
My spine was tingling as I read this — I finally understood that this is an incredible gift, not a curse, and what I needed to do was become aware of how it affected me, those around my, and my decision making ability. I needed to learn how to harness the upside while limiting the downside. I kept reading in awed amazement as Dr. Gartner described the relationship of hypomania to bipolar disorder.
Hypomania is not, in and of itself, an illness. It is a temperament characterized by an elevated mood state that feels “highly intoxicating, powerful, productive and desirable” to the hypomanic, according to Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, authors of the definitive nine-hundred-page Manic-Depressive Illness. Most hypomanics describe it as their happiest and healthiest state; they feel creative, energetic, and alive. A hypomanic only has a bipolar disorder if hypomania alternates, at some point in life, with major depression. This pattern, first identified only in 1976, is called bipolar disorder type II to distinguish it from bipolar disorder type I, the classic manic-depressive illness, which has been well known since the time of the ancient Greeks. If a hypomanic seeks outpatient treatment it is usually for depression, and he will define recovery as a return to his old energetic self. Not all hypomanics cycle down into depression. What goes up can stay up. Thus, we cannot conclude that someone has a psychiatric disorder just because he may be hypomanic. The most we can say is that hypomanics are at much greater risk for depression than the average population. The things most likely to make them depressed are failure, loss, or anything that prevents them from continuing at their preferred breakneck pace.
Wow. Just wow.
I had previously had a business partner who had Type II Bipolar Disorder, and I recalled conversations having conversations with him about how I felt a little “bipolar” myself, but while I absolutely shared similarity with his ups, my downs were never as serious as his. He often cycled into debilitating weeks and months in deep depression where he wasn’t able to function at all in his personal or business life. I would have downs, but I wasn’t the clinical definition of depressed — I would just feel emotionally numb and sleep 10–12 hours a night vs the 2–3 hours when I was hypomanic, but I could still function just fine both professionally and personally.
The contrast was made even more extreme by the fact that after the startup that we cofounded together had failed, I was sad and upset, but while I was working on figuring out what to do next with my life, he had entered a deep depression that ultimately and tragically ended in suicide.
Harnessing the Gift of Hypomania while Limiting the Curse
I realized that the key to my future success in life and business was to become self aware so that I could harness the upside of incredible creativity while managing the downside.
I realized that my hypomania was the source of every successful thing I had ever done. My first hypomanic episode was when I was 15, and over a solid Mountain Dew-filled 24 hour period I wrote my first application in C++ that achieved many awards and wide industry adoption, thrusting me into my first entrepreneurial adventure so that by the time I graduated from high school I already had a profitable self-funded software company with over a dozen employees.
Every successful product and company I had ever created came out of a hypomanic burst of energy, including in one case I happened to be meeting with a CIO who described a big problem that he had, and to the horror of the sales guy I was with, I said, “We have a technology platform that solves for that, let’s meet with you and your team next week and we’ll demonstrate that working in your environment.” At that moment, I had solved the entire problem and built out the solution in my mind, but nothing anything like that had actually existed. But I worked around the clock nights and weekend with my team so that when we met the following week it actually worked, and that CIO gave us a contract that ultimately turned out to be over $5m in revenue with that single customer.
Another time I had a company that was close to going out of business, but I had an idea at 3am and wrote an announcement that we published later in the day on a Tuesday. We called executives at a specific company who we knew desperately needed a solution to this particular problem, but they said BS that isn’t real. We said if you fly out here on Friday to meet us, we’ll demonstrate it working. I personally coded around the clock with no sleep, although my team did sleep on the couches in the office. We had written over 10,000 lines of new code and literally refactored over 500,000 lines of the customer’s legacy system to make it work … and while we didn’t even get it compiling until 5am on Friday morning, it was working well enough by 8am that when we gave the demo, we showed them the debug breakpoints in the code so that they could see that it was truly real and not vaporware — which led to a life changing acquisition by a large public technology company just a few months later.
I wrote a successful book through a mainstream publisher, with quotes and interviews from over 50 C-Level FORTUNE 500 executives that came out of a 3am hypomanic impulse to send hundreds of emails asking those executives about their thoughts to question that I had been inspired to ask.
While every success in my life came out my hypomania, so have almost all of my disastrous failures. I’ve destroyed personal relationships and friendships. I’ve destroyed business relationships with employees, partners, investors, and customers. I wasted so much money and made so many stupid and irrational decisions. Before I was aware of my potential irrationality while I was in that kind of state, over the past years I had impulsively bought two houses and a condo plus at least 3 Porsches with only minutes of thoughtful consideration. I emailed a business partner at 3am that I needed to buy him out, leading to a very painful and expensive series of life lessons. I could go on and on with all of the mistakes that I made through this, and I vowed not to repeat them.
Hacking Hypomania
I came to recognize that my ultimate and consistent success relied on my ability to become self aware and manage my impulses. I needed to learn how to “hack my hypomania” and limit the downside of “errors in judgment” as Dr. Gartner describes:
If there is any one trait that distinguishes highly successful people, it is that they are, by temperament, highly motivated. From our studies of the brain we now know that mood is an intrinsic part of the apparatus that controls motivation. Mood is meant either to facilitate or inhibit action. When someone is depressed, he has no motivation to act. What’s the point? Nothing seems worth doing, he has no energy to do it, and it probably won’t work anyway. Hypomania is the polar opposite. The drives that motivate behavior surge to a screaming pitch, making the urgency of action irresistible. There isn’t a minute to waste — this is going to be huge — just do it!
This pressure to act creates overachievers, but it also leads to impulsive behavior (ready, shoot, aim) and confident leaders who glibly take their followers over a cliff. Depending on how you look at it, the Internet phenomenon was either an exciting breakthrough of human ingenuity or a colossal error in judgment that forces us to ask: What were we thinking? In truth, it was both. The paradox of the hypomanic edge is that it is a double-edged sword.
I challenged myself to figure out how to manage that double-edged sword with an assymetric risk/reward: I needed to maximize the potential reward while simultaneously limiting the risks of potential downsides to my actions. So I read every article, book, blog post, and forum discussion I could find on hypomania, bipolar type II, cyclothymia.
I learned how to trigger hypomania on-demand through a combination of caffeine and adrenaline. I discovered that by forcing at least 4–5 hours of sleep during hypomanic episodes I was able to have more rational stability with less destructive irrationality. I established a support system around me and created “reality tests” to recognize when I was being irrational in a potentially damaging way. I figured out by working with my therapist that I could come down from hypomania with a soft landing through relaxation, meditation, and avoidance of any type of mental or chemical stimulation. I learned how to manage my to-do lists to optimize performance to tasks best suited when I was up or when I was down.
As much as I was able to learn, I knew that I was only scratching the surface. It was obvious to me that most successful entrepreneurs are hypomanics and that many have learned to manage their mental states, but likely due to the stigma of mental health in the business world, there is very little public information about how to harness hypomania to drive entrepreneurial success. I kept looking for this information, and I wished that community of hypomanic entrepreneurs existed, so that we could share knowledge and experience with each other. But since it didn’t exist out there, in typical hypomanic fashion I impulsively decided to create this blog and see if there was anyone else out there like me, looking for this community.
Resources
The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America
Pando: Why many entrepreneurs are privately suffering, and what to do about it
New York Times: ‘The Hypomanic Edge’
Forbes: Blessed are the Hypomanic
D&B: Entrepreneurism Is a Disease
The Cyclothymia Workbook: Learn How to Manage Your Mood Swings and Lead a Balanced Life
Potential Future Blog Topics
- Triggering hypomania on demand
- Scheduling hypomania around meetings and events
- Capturing the “idea flight” to keep and build upon them
- Creating a “reality test” to determine what is and isn’t real or realistic
- Sleep management — the key to staying in touch with reality
- Bio tracking — how heart rate and step count correlate to mental state
- Establishing support structures in your life and business
- Managing the crash — scheduling it for your life and business
- Diet — how eating or not eating certain foods affects hypomania
- Publicly come out or not? The stigma of mental health in business
- Finding a spouse or life partner to complement and support you
- Think and Grow Rich: revisiting the keys to success from Napoleon Hill and Andrew Carnegie through the lens of managing hypomania
Let’s begin a discussion on this critical and important topic to startup success. Comment below or email me at HypomanicEntrepreneur@gmail.com
