Manic Thoughts: Everything Around Me Was Moving in Slow Motion

Manic thoughts- everything is moving so slow

When your body and mind are moving at different speeds than everything else

By Liam Ronan

One of the strangest parts of my manic episode was the feeling that I was moving incredibly fast while the entire world was moving impossibly slow. Not metaphorically. It was a literal sensory experience. Watching other people move felt like watching a video in slow motion. Watching myself try to accomplish tasks felt like being trapped in amber. The disconnect was total and disorienting.

I was thinking fast. I was moving fast. My hands were moving. My mouth was moving. But it didn’t matter because everything around me seemed to be happening at a fraction of the speed I needed it to happen at.

My phone was impossibly slow. Every app, every function, seemed to take forever to load. I’d reboot my iPhone repeatedly, certain that there was a problem, certain that if I could just restart it one more time it would match the pace I needed it to move at. It never did. The problem wasn’t the phone. The problem was that my perception of time and speed had fundamentally changed.

The physical manifestations were real. I was clumsy. My coordination was off. I’d hit my arms and hands against things because I was moving faster than I could control. I’d get abrasions and scratches from simple movements that shouldn’t have caused any damage. It felt like there was a lag between my intention and my body’s execution. I’d decide to move, and my body would move in that direction, but the spacing was off. The timing was off.

This is one of the aspects of mania that doesn’t get talked about as much as the grandiosity or the racing thoughts. The physical component. The actual sensation of your body moving at a different speed than the rest of reality. It’s not pleasant. It’s not exciting. It’s disorienting and frustrating and isolating.

I felt busier than I’d ever been in my life, even though I was in retrospect achieving much less. In my mind, I was hyperproductive. I was working constantly. I was making progress on multiple fronts. In reality, I was moving too fast to be effective. I’d start tasks and abandon them. I’d jump between projects. I’d accomplish fragments of things but nothing complete.

I’d watch someone else do a simple task and it would feel like it was happening in slow motion. The way they’d reach for something. The way they’d open a door. The way they’d say a sentence. I was so impatient.

To other people I probably looked like I was on cocaine, meth, or speed.

What I understand now is that this disconnect between perceived speed and actual accomplishment is part of the symptomatology of mania.

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