I'm feeling super flowy so i think i'm going to go back to talking about my own interpretation of flow as possibly an equivalent to the experience of mania now before you jump to conclusions about what i just said i have a lot of explaining to do and it's not really a linear correlation it's not exactly the same but i feel like there's a lot of congruence ease and i was listening again to a talk by Steven Kotler I think I said that right this time and everything he talks about when he's talking about flow if I would replace the word mania it's a similar experience to me so Steven Kotler has never been in an experience of mania so he wouldn't necessarily have the same realization that it's a very similar state and if it's not a similar state at least has a lot of similar underlying principles and properties so he hasn't been in the manic state to know when he's listening to himself that he's talking about something when he's talking about flow he's really also talking about the experience of mania he talks about how flow is a spectrum he talks about how there's five neurotransmitters or neural chemicals that are our part of the flow state that we make inside our brains and bodies and and he said sometimes we have partial flow states where some of the neuro chemicals or neurotransmitters of flow some of the five are present but not all of them so I'm thinking to myself that mania is somewhere on that spectrum and it could even be an experience that is hyper flow like even beyond the regular flow experience or it could be maybe having some of those neurotransmitters but not all of them and of course there would have to be some kind of studies to actually confirm the neurobiology and neurophysiology and neural electricity of people that are in mania but good luck finding them to study them because when they're in that state of flow they're just flowing with the universe and not really one to want to be subjects of study and usually a person is treated after the fact after the mania turns into something else and person is then intervened with in some way and stephen also talks about how his flow state that he experienced healed him of Lyme's disease that he was debilitated for by for three years and in my mind if you think flow States heal it's possible that manic States heal and a lot of people that go into these states have maybe a history of trauma or they went traveling or they can't sleep or some people maybe fasted all these things can put a person into that manic state and in my mind if I'm going to keep with the theme that mania is equivalent to flow in a lot of ways it's possible that the manic state is a healing state in my experience I had some trauma happen before I experienced mania a couple of months before and I was having a hard time with it and then all of a sudden my being went into a state of complete ecstasy and wonderment for over a month and if I think about how I was basically struggling with in my psyche all of a sudden my psyche was blown apart my ego disappeared and I was just in a state of childlike wonder play creativity flow for over a month that could possibly have been a healing mechanism that could possibly have been almost like I was in so much pain and suffering that my my psyche went into that state in order to sort of overcompensate for the suffering I've had for a number of months and that's just a theory but to me I'm just comparing how his flow state healed him and I think that there's some healing that happens in the manic state and again I'm not glorifying mania but at the same time there's a lot of positivity in it and it usually doesn't it usually doesn't end up positive in the end people usually crash in some way and there's a number of thoughts about why that might be so for one a person's not used to operating without one's ego and in mania it's not operate it's not operating a person's not operating from their regular consciousness where they're stuck in the repetitive story that ke