[This post is the twentieth in a multi-part series called Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning is Wrong. To be in touch about it, you can always reach me at [email protected] or visit me at https://ericmaisel.com/. Please enjoy the series!]
Our relationship to meaning affects our mental health.
If you think that meaning is out there, mightn’t you want to race toward it or after it? Isn’t that a complete explanation of what some manias may be?
Or what if you feel that life is meaningless but you don’t want to acknowledge that feeling? Mightn’t you race away from “the scene of the crime” and do something, anything, to keep that knowledge at bay? Isn’t that what some manias may be?
And—big headline—if you were to stop chasing meaning, because you finally understood that there was nothing to chase, and if you were to stop being scared of a lack of meaning, as if that was something too dreadful to be endured, might not your mania dissipate? Might not all that “running from” and “running toward” cease?
The standard view of mania, if there really is one, is quite hard to understand and without any scientific basis. The standard view takes mania to be something that a chemical can fix, making mania analogous to a medical illness or a biological problem. Side-by-side with that view (and contradicting it) is the notion that mania is a psychological issue of some sort or the result of psychological issues. What hasn’t been considered enough is the notion that mania may be the way that a human being under intense pressure expresses that pressure.
If you are dealing with life challenges, if you then enlist your brain to help you meet those challenges, if you then send your brain off racing, and if you then lose some, a lot, or all control of that frantic racing, won’t you experience the state called mania? Isn’t mania the result of a person sending her brain off racing and then losing control of the reins?
The fact that smart people suffer more from mania than do other people should help confirm this point. Wouldn’t a person who uses her brain more often and more intensely than the next person be likely to also send it racing off that much more often? Isn’t she more likely to try to solve life’s challenges—whether it’s a scientific challenge, an artistic challenge, a practical challenge, or an existential challenge—by employing her brain? That smart people are more prone to mania is a statistical certainty, a fact that helps make this case.
Research shows, for example, a clear linkage between achieving top grades and “bipolar disorder,” between scoring high on tests and “bipolar disorder,” and between other, similar measures of mental accomplishment, brainpower and mania. One study (Laurance, 2010)[i] involving 700,000 adults and reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry[ii] indicated that former straight-A students were four times more likely to be “bipolar” (or “manic-depressive”) than those who had achieved lower grades. In another study, individuals who scored the highest on tests for “mathematical reasoning” were at a 12-times greater risk for “contracting bipolar disorder.”
Similar studies underline the linkage between creativity and mania and we have thousands of years of anecdotal evidence to support the contention that smart and creative people often get manic (think: Virginia Woolf). If mania is a racing brain driven extra fast—and ultimately too fast—by added pressures, needs or impulses, then we would of course see what we do see. Anything that gets in the way of this felt forward motion—a physical obstacle, another person’s viewpoint, even a delay in the bus arriving—will be viewed as a tremendous irritation. Hence the irritability so often associated with mania. This irritation makes perfect sense: if you must get on with whatever your dangerously racing brain is proposing—to get every wall painted red, to capture that song you’re trying to compose, to solve that theorem you’ve been working on for six months—then nothing must get in the way.
It is this “must” that is at the heart of mania and that turns an everyday racing brain into one that begins to race out of control. This “must” is the heavy foot on the pedal that is driving a racing brain too fast. There is a sense of emergency here, most often an existential emergency as a person, staring at nothingness, is petrified by the view. She must get away from that horrible feeling and with a kind of strangled laugh that mimics mirth but that isn’t mirth she turns to her brain for help; and, in order to help her, protect her, and save her, it goes into overdrive.
All of the characteristic “symptoms of mania” that we see, including apparently high spirits, heightened sexual appetite, high arousal levels, high energy levels, sweating, pacing, sleeplessness and, at its severest, when the train has run off the rails, hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, suspiciousness, aggressiveness and wild plans and schemes, make perfect sense when viewed from the perspective that a powerful pressure, likely existential in nature, has supercharged a brain already feverishly racing along. That brain races off to handle an acute emergency and all the “symptoms of mania” follow.
Isn’t it possible that, before the train wreck occurs, a smart person—that person at greater risk for “mania” and “bipolar disorder” than the next person—might come to a better understanding of meaning and realize that there is nothing to flee from and nothing to chase? Can’t you feel the deep sigh that would accompany getting meaning right? All of a sudden, all that pressure to make life feel meaningful or to stop life from feeling meaningless would evaporate. Smart people can think: couldn’t they think this through? Couldn’t they conclude that not only can’t this race be won, but that there is no race to run? Wouldn’t that be a fruitful self-conversation?
[i] Laurence, J. (2010, February 3) You don’t have to be bipolar to be a genius; but it helps. Retrieved fromhttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/you-dont-have-to-be-bipolar-to-be-a-genius-ndash-but-it-helps-1887646.html
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READ PART ONE HERE: Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning Is Wrong: The Even Harder Problem
READ PART TWO: On Craving the Feeling of Meaning
READ PART THREE: Why ‘Is Life Meaningful?’ Is the Wrong Question
READ PART FOUR: Meaning Has Its Reasons
READ PART FIVE: The Cost of Meaning
READ PART SIX: Meaning Has Its Rhythms
READ PART SEVEN: Robbed of Purpose
READ PART EIGHT: Meaning as Nature’s Motivational Tool
READ PART NINE: Your Golden Meaning Opportunities
READ PART TEN: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Stewardship
READ PART ELEVEN: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Experimentation
Read Part Twelve: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Self-Actualization
Read Part Thirteen: One Golden Meaning Opportunity: Appreciation
Read Part Fourteen: Two Golden Meaning Opportunities: Achievement and Excellence
Read Part Fifteen: Three Golden Meaning Opportunities: Service, Good Works, and Ethical Action
Read Part Sixteen: Two Golden Meaning Opportunities: Pleasure and Contentment
Read Part Seventeen: Love, Relationships, Creativity and Career
Read Part Eighteen: Marrying Meaning Opportunities: How Creativity and Activism Go Together Beautifully
Read Part Nineteen: How Betrayal Can Destroy Meaning
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