Onika L. Dainty

I once signed up for three credit cards in a single day. When they arrived, I rushed to the mall and spent each balance in under three hours. At the time, every purchase felt like a need with purpose but it was hypomania.

Hypomania can feel seductive. It creates the illusion of power, freedom, and the “best version” of yourself. But if left unchecked, it can escalate into mania or even psychosis.

For me, hypomania often ends in manic-psychosis and hospitalization, with my care team working to bring me back to baseline. The truth is, during hypomania, I feel incredible, too incredible. My inhibitions vanish, boundaries dissolve, and everything moves at warp speed. Yet over time, I’ve learned to spot hypomanic episodes, manage symptoms, and stop them before real damage occurs.

This post shares grounded, compassionate strategies for managing hypomania with bipolar disorder and practical tools drawn from lived experience.

First Comes Awareness: Catching Hypomania Early

One of the most important skills in bipolar disorder management is recognizing hypomania symptoms early. This awareness comes from tracking your mood cycles with journals, sleep logs, or apps. Common cues include racing thoughts, decreased sleep, irritability, impulsivity, and excessive optimism.

For me, hypomania sometimes shows up as extreme fatigue rather than excess energy. My baseline is naturally high-energy, which makes early signs harder to detect. After back-to-back trips to the Caribbean and New York City, I unexpectedly crashed, sleeping for days. What looked like exhaustion was actually hypomania.

Even when you know your bipolar cycle, stress, travel, or disrupted sleep can shift how symptoms appear. That’s why reflection before, during, and after episodes is so valuable. Creating a personal “Red Zone Hypomania List”, a set of your own early warning signs that can help you and your support team recognize patterns and intervene sooner.

Grounding Practices That Gently Slow You Down

When hypomania enters your cycle, you can either ride the wave or learn to calm the waters. I used to let it sweep me away, but I’ve since discovered that grounding can slow the spiral.

Some practices that help me include:

• Sensory grounding: submerging my face in cold water, using weighted blankets, or aromatherapy.
  

• Movement and breath: gentle yoga, box breathing, belly breathing, or guided body scans.
  

• Stillness rituals: light therapy, meditation music, or intentional solitude that often leads to restorative sleep.
  

These tools may not erase hypomania, but they create space for rest and regulation.

Structuring Your Day to Reduce Overstimulation

Hypomania often thrives on overstimulation. Building predictable structure and routines can make a significant difference.

• Keep a consistent sleep schedule, even when you feel energized.

• Schedule downtime during busy events like weddings or conferences.
  

• Limit caffeine, reduce screen time, and avoid noisy environments before bed.
  

Structure, routine, and healthy habits are essential to maintaining emotional stability when managing bipolar disorder.

Knowing When and How to Reach Out

Even with the best coping strategies, there are times you need support. Having a trusted network including family, friends, peers, or professionals can be life-saving.

My father often spots pressured speech before I do. My Grama Judie, who helps manage my finances, notices when I hyper-spend. They give me space to self-correct, but step in if needed, following my crisis plan and communicating with my psychiatrist.

Over the years, I’ve built a bipolar crisis plan with questions my support team feels comfortable asking me, such as:

• “When was the last time you slept?”

• “Have you been taking your medication?”
  

These may sound invasive, but with trust, they become vital tools for early intervention.

Protecting Yourself from Hypomanic Impulses

Impulsivity is one of the most challenging parts of bipolar disorder. Protecting yourself means creating safeguards before hypomania hits.

Some strategies I use:

• Safe spending rules: delay big purchases, freeze access to credit, or hand over cards to someone I trust.

• Pause big decisions: whether about relationships, travel, or quitting a job, I place them on a 72-hour hold.
  

• Create a “pause kit”: grounding tools and notes from my baseline self.
  

• The buddy system: an accountability partner who isn’t afraid to tell me the truth.
  

These systems reduce the damage impulsivity can cause and keep me aligned with my long-term healing.

Final Thoughts: You Are Not the Choices You Make in Hypomania

Hypomanic impulses will come, but they don’t define you. Some are minor, others life-altering, yet none erase your worth. Hypomania is a symptom of bipolar disorder, not your identity.

During episodes, energy, creativity, and passion accelerate. It can feel thrilling, but also unstable. Rather than fearing hypomania, I’ve learned to treat it as a signal, an invitation to slow down, set boundaries, and lean on the practices that protect my wellness.

Guilt and shame have no place here. What matters is building awareness, showing yourself compassion, and learning to navigate the highs with wisdom and care.

To my readers: What helps you recognize when hypomania is approaching? What boundaries keep you grounded when the wave begins to rise?

Life Lesson #15

“Be in your skin and fall in love with the feeling.” — Onika L. Dainty

Learning to Live in My Skin

It took me nearly 42 years to embrace this lesson—and I’m still learning. Self-love and body acceptance don’t come easily when you’ve wrestled with body image issues most of your life. For over two decades, I’ve dealt with weight gain as a side effect of mood stabilizers and antipsychotic medication prescribed to manage Bipolar disorder. Even before my diagnosis, my self-esteem was fragile. I wore a mask of confidence—intelligent, funny, charismatic, and beautiful—but underneath, I was struggling.

From childhood, food became my battleground. At first, I starved myself, skipping meals for days at a time until my grade six teacher reported it to my mother. As a nurse, she adjusted her night shifts to watch me eat. But that surveillance pushed me into binging and purging, giving me a false sense of control while my mind unraveled.

Trauma, Diagnosis, and Body Image

By my teens, depression and anxiety consumed me. At 14, a brutal assault deepened my mental chaos and reinforced my eating disorder as a form of punishment. My body felt like both the scene of the crime and the enemy. Into my twenties and early thirties, those patterns stayed with me, compounded when I was diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder at 24. Medication stabilized my mind but made me feel trapped in a body I no longer recognized.

It wasn’t until homelessness, repeated hospitalizations, and addiction forced me into long-term care that I realized how deeply connected my body image and mental health had always been. My psychotherapist helped me see that sexual trauma often distorts one’s relationship with the body—leading to cycles of self-punishment that only break with forgiveness, compassion, and healing.

Writing an Apology to My Body

After a pivotal therapy session, I sat down and wrote an apology letter to my body. I apologized for starving it, for purging, for smoking marijuana until my lips and fingers bore the scars, for binging as a side effect of medication. I promised to let go of shame and guilt and instead honour my body with care, nourishment, and respect.

That was the turning point.

Redefining Self-Love and Acceptance

Nearly a decade later, I’ve kept that promise. I haven’t binged, purged, or starved myself. I’ve been sober for almost two years. I eat to nourish, not punish, and I’ve incorporated fitness into my life—not as penance, but as a way to feel strong and alive.

Yes, my weight still fluctuates. But instead of spiralling into self-loathing, I now meet those moments with grace, self-compassion, and resilience. I remind myself: I only get one body in this lifetime, and it deserves love in every season.

My body has survived trauma, illness, and recovery. It carries my creativity, my laughter, and my strength. And no matter its shape or size, it is mine. Today, I celebrate it—not as a project to be perfected, but as a partner in my healing journey.

Final Thought

Being in my skin and falling in love with the feeling isn’t about flawless self-confidence. It’s about daily forgiveness, compassion, and choosing to honour the body I once punished.

Self-love is not a destination—it’s a practice. And every day I continue this practice, I reclaim more of myself.

To my readers: How do you practice self-love when your body doesn’t look or feel the way you want it to?