Anxiety, Mania, and Depression: The Advantages

In my previous posts about anxiety, mania, and depression, I wrote about the difficulties that go along with these various states. While symptoms of depression, bipolar, and anxiety can be debilitating at worst and make life difficult at best, there are certain advantages that come with my bipolar and generalized anxiety disorder.

While anxiety can make it difficult to impossible to perform at work, the right amount of anxiety can actually improve work performance. I've mentioned before in a Mental Health Myths and Facts post that according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (Anxiety Can Bring Out the Best), employees with anxiety often outperform their peers.

Why is this? In many people, anxiety means fretting about completing tasks in a quality way. It also means worrying about what people think and say about them. With these worries, people with anxiety may work hard to complete a task in a way that is high quality and pleasing to their peers and supervisors. As long as the anxiety is relatively under control, employees can perform well due to increased self-scrutiny of their work.

Being bipolar can also bring about advantages. There are books and articles devoted to the subject, ranging from correlating bipolar with creative, even genius thinking (I'm not going to claim I'm a genius, but I will say that when I'm in a hypomanic or manic state, if I can stay focused, I harness some creative thinking while problem-solving and working on writing projects).

My bipolar also helps me get things done that I wouldn't normally work on. When I'm manic, I often engage in cleaning that I wouldn’t do on my own volition. Things that wouldn't normally bother me do, and I'll spend time vacuuming, scrubbing, or organizing things. The key is staying focused so I don't have ten things in various states of completion going on at once.

Depression doesn't come with obvious advantages. I hate the lethargy, lack of motivation, and weight gain that often accompanies it. Depression does, however, bring some advantages. For me, the number one advantage is creating more empathy. When I'm feeling sad for no reason, one of my strategies is counting my blessings. While this does not usually help me snap out of a depressive phase, it does, at times, motivate me to try to help improve the lives of people who don't have all the social, financial, and material blessings I do.

Being in a depressive phase can also help me appreciate the times when I'm not depressed and provide perspective for the times when I'm feeling well. When I come out of a depressive phase, I often appreciate the contentment I have as compared to when I am depressed.

So, while the various symptoms of my generalized anxiety disorder and bipolar can make life difficult, there are definitely advantages and perspectives that have been helpful and enriched my life because of these illnesses.

Thanks for reading.