> 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.
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.