Also bipolar. Episodes often start with life-changing events. I highly doubt that food is to point a finger at here. My last episode was really triggered by me leaving my job and going jobless for the first time. I was eating well, fresh and self-cooked. Then during mania I could not eat a single thing. Also could not sleep. For 3 months straight.
Anecdotally the symptoms can already be present - but manageable - then severe trauma(s) trigger an extreme worsening of the cycle between the highs and the lows.
Getting back to a "manageable" state would be ideal however future (and even perhaps far more minor) trauma may prove to be a significant barrier and potentially trigger relapses resulting in quite a vicious cycle.
Certainly a very complex thing to explain to people and carries a lot of stigma.
In my case, looking back, I think I have already lived through a handful of episodes of lower but still damaging intensity. I first really started recognizing this pattern when I had this sort of episode where it became clear to each and every person around you, that there is something off. It was like I was on cocaine 24/7, paired with extreme paranoia (I moved to a rather bad neighborhood in a big city two years before).
Ever since this initial awareness and diagnosis, I have stepped back from a lot of people, and many stepped away from me. I was left in a void where I had basically I social interaction.
While it was extremely depressing I have the feeling, at least in my case, that less communication can help to find a manageable state. Today it’s easier for me to manage, although still not perfect. I declined any medical treatment except for one dose of Haloperidol which I agreed to after I had freaked out and the police had to tie me down and send me to psychiatry. (As it happened I accidentally ran into a drug handover in the midst of my mania, I was afraid to die and started losing it completely)
Nobody really understands the hurricane of feelings one is going through, it doesn’t really make sense to try and explain it to people.
> Nobody really understands the hurricane of feelings one is going through, it doesn’t really make sense to try and explain it to people.
It can be done but it requires finding the points in a person's experience that mirror my own to some degree. Building on that, you can paint a picture they can understand.
I like the example of telling a person they need to keep eight words in their head all day long with no notes. Then they'll be quizzed about those words randomly throughout the day. If they fail, they have to sit quietly in a chair for the next hour.
Then I ask them how pissed off they'd be if they were interrupted in the middle of a task by me asking them to list the words in reverse alphabetical order by the fifth letter. Repeat several times an hour with different sorting and filtering criteria.
The closest thing I could make some people relate to was that it was like being on LSD, just that it comes in waves.
I also happen to have experimented with lots of psychedelics in the prior years and I’m not gonna deny that this may have intensified the symptoms. Mania felt like an acid flashback.
All this sudden energy and creativity, but also the scatteredness (not sure this is a word). It was too much to handle.
At the time I was programming up to 10h per day. I could not remember names of people I met the day before, also I had blackouts. My brain was not able to process. With your experiment I would have failed miserably because sitting still for an hour was not manageable.
The worst thing you can do here is to generalize.