A clear retirement income plan starts with knowing your costs and building a portfolio that can meet them. Fisher Investments' Definitive Guide to Retirement Income helps investors with $1,000,000 or more structure a strategy built to last.

Download your free guide.

We need to talk…

Not the about ADHD…
Been there, done that. (6 articles in counting.)

I’m talking about a sinister villain.
At least for me. A deeper malware.
That I was denial for the longest time about.

This MF can make life feel…
cinematic, 
meaningful, 
divinely chosen. (lmao)

Then…
Without warning…
It can make the same life…
Feel heavy, gray, pointless, and…
damn near impossible to carry. 😭

Yeah.
That one. 
The Bipolar.

lBefore we go any further, let me say this clearly:
This is not me trying to romanticize / glorify mental illness .
Or “Mental illness is a superpower, bro 😎”
(Even though we low key did it for ADHD)🤣

No.

This series is about understanding the system.
Because you cannot manage what you  don’t fully understand.
For a long time, Bipolar 2 felt like the hidden villain in the script.

But not it’s…
Not always loud.
Not always obvious.
Not always dramatic… (lol)
Well the way people imagine when they hear “bipolar.”

Sometimes…
It’s,
Charm.
Momentum.
Grand plans.
Big meaning.
Rapid insight.
Spiritual intensity.
Obsessive clarity.

Or…

A sudden feeling like:
“Ohhhh wait.”
“I get it, I finally cracked the code to life.”

And sometimes…
It looks like…
Ghosting.
Not showering.
Not trusting my own thoughts.
But worse…

Not knowing whether I was tired, depressed, burnt out, detached, ashamed, or just spiritually getting my ass beat by existence.

That’s what makes this one tricky.
Because if ADHD felt like chaotic Wi-Fi with low energy…

Bipolar 2 can feel like the entire weather system.
So this new series is not going to be about reducing Bipolar 2 into a cute little quirk. 

We’re going deeper.
Because that’s the real mission here.

Not perfection.
The mission is learning how to work with reality…
And bending it to our will. Like old Kanye.
All while still keeping our soul.

How do we build a stable life?
How do we trust ourself when sometimes…
Our mind is the narrator, the screenwriter, protagonist and antagonists.

That’s where we’re starting.
Not with judgment.
Not with fear.
But with awareness.

Because if ADHD taught me…
How to hack attention, focus and motivation…

Bipolar is not just “mood swings.”
Not “sometimes sad, sometimes happy.”
Not “they’re just dramatic.”
That’s surface-level NPC commentary.

Bipolar 2 is not just “moodiness.” It’s a state-shifting OS issue.
This is where people oversimplify it and accidentally say nonsense.

Bipolar 2 is not just:
“sometimes I’m sad, sometimes I’m happy.”

Bro. That’s called being alive.
What we’re talking about here is something heavier than ordinary mood changes.

It’s shifts in:

• energy
• motivation
• speed
• self-perception
• meaning-making
• hope
• confidence
• impulsivity
• emotional depth
• and your relationship to reality itself

Sometimes the system speeds up.
Thoughts connect faster.
Ideas feel sacred.
Sleep feels optional.
You start seeing patterns everywhere.
Your confidence gets loud.
Everything feels important.
Charged.
Possible.

Then sometimes the system drops.
Everything slows.
Meaning drains out of things.
Simple tasks feel spiritually expensive.
You don’t feel lazy.
You feel offline.

That’s why this researching matters.
Because if you don’t understand the pattern, you’ll keep moralizing it.

You’ll call yourself lazy in one state.
Revolutionary in another.
Broken in one season.
Chosen in another.

The whole time the system is doing what systems do:
Running bad code.

MANIC

Depressive

From a neuroscience angle, 
Bipolar 2 involve problems in the brain circuits…

These circuits help regulate
Reward
Emotion, 
Self control, 
& Decision making.

Researchers have repeatedly looked at differences in networks involving…
The prefrontal cortex (ughhhh)

Not only does ADHD affect the prefrontal cortex but so does Bipolar. 😭

Yep that part that helps…
With future planning, braking, 
Judgment, and regulation. 

It affects serotonin and dopamine.

REMEMBER:
Dopamine matters…
Because it is deeply tied to 
reward, drive, salience, and “this matters, go get it” energy.

But it gets worse… 💀
Insert photo of brain scans. 
The amygdala and striatal reward circuitry.

Damn… just like ADHD
More reactive emotional/reward systems. 

That’s what happens when systems tied to motivation, arousal, and emotional regulation start shifting out of sync. 

Research has also linked bipolar disorders to disruptions in sleep and circadian rhythms!

The brain/body timing system that helps regulate when you feel awake, tired, activated, or low. Those rhythm disruptions are not a side note. They’re a big part of the story.

Cause we need sleep for dopamine. Remember!?!

Bipolar tends to run in families,
but the science points more toward
a bunch of genes with small effects stacking together,
not one magical gene doing all the chaos by itself.
2025 study that found nearly 300 gene locations linked to bipolar risk!

it’s definitely not
“your DNA wrote the whole script and now you’re doomed to act it out.”
It’s more like your hardware may come with certain vulnerabilities baked in.
Stress, sleep, environment,substances, life experiences, and treatment
all help shape how that system actually performs.

So the point of understanding the neuroscience is not to reduce yourself to a broken machine.

It’s the opposite.
It’s to stop moralizing what may actually be brain-state instability.

To stop calling yourself lazy when the battery crashed.
To stop calling yourself enlightened just because the system sped up and put cinematic lighting on all your thoughts.

The goal is not shame.
The goal is diagnostics.
You stop asking: “Why am I like this?”

and start asking a way better question:
“What state is my system in right now — and can I trust my narrator?”

That’s when you stop fighting ghosts.
That’s when you finally start reading the dashboard.

Bipolar 2 is not just a “mood problem.”
If we’re going to deal with it honestly…

we need more than stigma.
More than memes.
More than coping slogans.

We need language.
We need maps.
We need tools.
We need reality.
And we need compassion that doesn’t turn into delusion.

So yeah.

Next patch: how to tell when your mind is speeding up before it starts calling it destiny.

Loser logging off.
Legend loading…

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.