Ideas Like Berries on a Vine: What Rapid Ideation Feels Like During Mania

When your brain becomes a startup incubator you never signed up for

By Liam Ronan

I used to think I understood what having a lot of ideas meant. You know, the normal version. You’re in the shower, a thought pops up, you file it away for later. Maybe you scribble it down. Maybe you forget it by dinner.

That’s not what happened to me.

During my manic episode, ideas didn’t arrive one at a time. They erupted. The best way I can describe it is like berries growing on a vine. You watch one bud appear, it swells, it ripens, and just as you’re reaching for it, three more are already growing beside it. Some berries kept growing, fat and heavy with possibilities. A few shriveled up almost immediately. Forgotten. But there was always another one behind them.

A dog training business. A referral service that would connect dog trainers across the city. An antique store. A bookstore. A thrift shop. A studio for poets and musicians. An art store. An online news source. A visitors guide. A homeless assistance system. A homeless Shepard service to help store fronts move the homeless away. A house flipping business. A used car dealership.

These weren’t casual daydreams. Each one felt urgent. Each one felt like it could make me rich, like it could change everything, like it was the one I should be working on right now.

Except I couldn’t focus on any of them for more than a minute.

I remember trying to organize these ideas by creating business cards. Not one set. Multiple sets. I’d start designing cards for the dog trainer business, and before I finished, I was already thinking about a referral service. Then the antique store. The cards never got finished, but the idea of making them felt incredibly important. The specificity of it, you know? Business cards felt concrete. They felt real.

The speed of ideation during mania isn’t just about quantity. It’s about the feeling that your brain has become a machine you can’t turn off. You’re not sitting down and deliberately brainstorming. Your brain is doing it for you, whether you want it to or not. It’s relentless. It’s exhausting. And underneath it all is this absolute conviction that every single idea is brilliant, that every single one is worth pursuing, that you’re on the edge of something huge.

Which makes the inability to focus even more maddening.

Racing thoughts are much more than thinking fast. It’s the sensation that your brain is moving at a speed the rest of the world can’t keep up with. Your hands can’t move fast enough to write down all the ideas. Your mouth can’t talk fast enough to explain them. It’s thoughts pummeling you.

Rapid ideation during a manic episode isn’t creativity. It’s not genius. It’s your brain on overdrive. Some of my friends, including my medical doctor, told me that. They also warned that a crash could be coming.

It explains the numerous, lengthy calls and texts.

Some of those ideas might have merit. Some of them probably had genuine potential. But your brain’s ability to evaluate, prioritize, and execute is completely divorced from your brain’s ability to generate ideas. You’re stuck with the accelerator floored and the brakes missing.

I called landlords, even met with a few. I called the owner of a used car dealership. I tried to rent a space for a bookstore or shop of oddities. I almost bought a hotdog cart, and a new truck. Luckily the ones I tried to make deals with where smart enought to realize something was off with me.

The berries on the vine metaphor is real for me because it captures both the beauty and the problem. Berries ripening on a vine are lovely, abundant, and natural. But when your brain is the vine and the berries are ideas and you can’t stop the growth and you can’t harvest any of them and you’re just watching them pile up until the branch breaks, it stops being beautiful. It becomes overwhelming.

I didn’t know this was mania. I thought I was just having a productive period. I thought I was finally tapping into my potential. I thought if I could just move a little faster, work a little harder, sleep a little less, I could turn all these ideas into reality.

Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.

What I learned later is that this is one of the classic presentations of a manic episode. The explosive creativity. The inability to filter or prioritize. The urgent conviction that all of it matters. The physical restlessness that makes sitting still and working methodically feel impossible. The absolute certainty that you’re on the verge of something great, even as the evidence mounts that you’re actually just spinning in circles.

If you’re experiencing rapid ideation that feels out of control, you’re not broken. You’re not alone. And you’re probably not as close to launching six successful businesses as your brain is telling you right now.

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