I Thought My iPhone Was Broken Because Mania Made Everything So Slow

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When Your Brain Outruns Everything In Your Life

By Liam Ronan

There came a point during my manic episode when I was convinced my iPhone was broken.

Pages loaded too slowly. Texts took too long to send. Apps stuttered and lagged. I rebooted the phone over and over, sometimes multiple times in an hour, because something was clearly wrong with it. The device could not keep up with what I needed it to do.

It wasn’t just my smartphone it was all electronics.

A friend of mine was going through a similar manic episode at the time. He was paranoid that his electronics were malfunctioning too. Phones, laptops, everything felt sluggish and unresponsive. We compared thoughts about it. We both agreed: the technology was failing us. We were a bit paranoid.

Then one day, sitting in a parking lot, I realized what was actually happening. The electronics were not slow. We were fast. Our brains were running at a clock-speed that made normal processing times feel like an eternity.

The three seconds it takes a webpage to load might as well have been three minutes. The pause between tapping “send” and seeing the message deliver was enough to make me want to throw the phone against the dashboard.

It was not just screens. The entire physical world felt like it was operating in slow motion. I was thinking and moving so fast that I was clumsy, banging my arms on doorframes, knocking things off counters, tripping over my own feet. I thought I was being careless. In reality, my body was trying to keep up with a brain that had shifted into a gear human bodies are not built for.

I lost interest in television, the news, web browsing, email. All of it. These things that had been daily companions for decades suddenly felt unbearable, slow, hard to process, and difficult.

It physically hurt to try to focus on a screen for more than a few seconds. My eyes would wander. My hands would reach for something else. My thoughts had already moved on to six different subjects before the page finished loading.

This is what racing thoughts actually feel like from the inside. It is not just thinking fast. It is the world around you becoming intolerably slow by comparison. Your phone is not broken. Traffic is not unusually heavy. The person talking to you is not being deliberately long-winded. Everything is normal. Your brain just forgot what normal speed feels like.

After the episode, when the lamotrigine brought my brain back to its normal cruising speed, I picked up my phone and it worked perfectly. Fast. Responsive. Completely fine. It had been fine the whole time.

I was the one who was broken. And also, in a strange and terrible way, the one who was running better than I ever had.

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