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Some more tricks that work for me. If I can't sleep in the middle of the night, I get up take some Valerian herb, eat food with a lot of proteins and fat, which I guest signals the organism that it got the necessary life job done for time and relaxes it, sit some time out of bed and go to bed but lay in the opposite direction, I guest it kind of switches the context or something, it usually helps.

I don't know if my response is unique, but when I was in the manic stage they have rather small effect, but I get more rest and sleep through the night. At some point exhaustion, more healthy behavior and pills kick in and I go in the opposite direction. Then I don't actually need them, but have low energy and everything is negative instead of positive. Over time I learned not to escalate the situation, some tricks for what behavior calms me, like I mention with talking to people, doing something external, quitting self absorption, like forcing myself to pay attention to things. Also regular job or other commitments helps, kind of forces on you day regimen and healthy stress.

I got into first manic and then depressive state. It was long and created a lot of suffering and delusional thoughts. At the peak I felt like I did cure my inner psychological problems finally, felt light, capable, ready to really take on the world. I can do this, that and that. I learn new things, experiment, quickly go from one thing to another. At nights I can't sleep because I am too excited because I feel very free and see tons of possibilities. But people start to notice that something is off and I feel that something is very wrong, I become exhausted. Some time later I finally restore my sleep with a lot of pills. And after some rest, and realization how delusional and unhealthy my state was, I got into depression, just can't stop negative emotions, they are excruciating. What triggered me was probably free time, experiments with spiritual techniques and romantic love. That girl started to avoid me, which did not help my emotional situation. I think free time, when you are alone if you don't ground yourself in something, like work or other responsibilities can act like a slow weak version of sensory deprivation and trigger brain to make up problems and a world not entangled enough in common human reality so to speak.

@HII Well, I don't have clinical experience of curing people of anxiety, but may be you can still expose yourself to things that you are afraid of. There should be some. In that way you train your approach system to counteract avoidance system and beliefs that you are incapable of dealing with complex situations and should retreat. If pray/panic/avoidance system can just go off for some reason that we could not determine, we can still train its opposite, approach system, self esteem, bravery, which should probably help. Also as an idea, you sit and think what you are afraid of and write down answers. It is kind of approach in itself, you are not running away from yourself but do investigation, ready to face your fears at least in your head.

Here is advice from Jordan Peterson about anxiety. Lay out what you anxious about, in detail, decompose it into small problems, do safe gradual exposure. As a result you get braver "there is something in me that responds to taking that on as a voluntary challenge and grows and thrives as a consequence ... the people who pick up the stressor voluntarily use a whole different psychophysiological system, system of approach and challenge" which is basically way better on you emotionally than avoidance system and in the process you grow self esteem, learn that you are stronger than you thought.

Hey, I don't know you, so sorry if I am wrong. May be I am too cautious, but things can spiral into bad direction based on my personal experience, so here is my suggestion. Guard your sleep cycles, use medications if you must. If you can't sleep it signals dis-regulation in hormonal / neurotransmitter systems, too much excitement / dopamine or something like it. To restore just force quit any exciting stimulation, not just porn, which is especially bad at releasing dopamine, but other stimulation as well. Instead try to find something that calms and engages you, go out, talk to people. Go to a park, talk with friends, relatives or someone about something boring, draw, do something crafty, clean your room or something like it. May be calm video game, but I am not sure about it. Or solve some tangible problem of yours. I would also suggest quit meditation for a while and reorient yourself to the outer world instead of yourself. Again, may be I am wrong, judge what is most solid and sober thing to do for yourself.

There are two ways to grow, doing things based on what is told to you and experimenting yourself. They are both valuable, with only first you easily get stuck in things that don’t work for you, with second you just don’t know what is possible and your dogmas and low consciousness desires greatly limit you. Here is meditation example. Most instructions just don’t work for me, I don’t have the discipline and focus needed. I struggled a lot of time until I decided to experiment and find ways of meditation that work for me. Guided meditation like Headspace, it constantly reminds me to return to meditation after I get distracted on the second second. Gradually this instruction gets internalized, or so I hope. 1 min meditation with the bell sound every 10-20 seconds. Just right for my current concentration powers, years of video games and internet take their toll. Not really meditation, but contemplation. Read or watch some complex information like Leo or Peterson video, classical literature, Buddhist suttas, Wikipedia articles, philosophy. If you don’t really understand what is said, even better, you mind will get more engaged trying to crack it. It puts mind out of usual stupid loop into more sophisticated thinking. Then relax and do nothing, like sit in a chair or lie in bed. Interesting, insightful thoughts usually occur.

I find it useful to deconstruct concepts when you experience strong negative emotions. You have the motivation and can see results immediately. For example, after some problem at work I may feel bad and think how horrible life is. So I dig deeper and try to understand how this problem triggers negative thoughts like "People will think bad about me" or "Reality is unpredictable and I don't know what to do with it". I investigate what this actually means to me. What I usually find is a complex interrelated system of ideas, evaluations, emotions and so on. A computer analogy would be you playing an open source video game and getting repeatedly hit by a sword, each hit make you lose real world money. You can't stop playing that game for whatever reason but you can tweak the game. You study the game code, how all the game mechanics, your game avatar and enemy are programmed. After some time you are able to change the code so hitting doesn't not occur anymore or it doesn't lose you anything. In the process you learn programming.

I think personal relationship can have its place. Like for example I am writing that as if talking to a separate entity, but there is probably no ultimate separation between us, though for me it is just logical conclusion not real understanding. As Jordan Peterson said, humans are the most complex things we interact with, we evolved mostly to do that so to use that machinery to relate to a being as a whole makes a lot of sense.

@Joseph Maynor I checked your journal, wow, so much great content. You also mention Sabbath, which is an example of great things you can find in traditional religions. Regarding theism what do you mean by it? A type of religious system like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ? Some weak claim like "there are beings which are higher order and incomprehensibly, for humans, more advanced that humans"? Some strong claim like "world is governed by all powerful, all loving, all knowing God. Everything that you think is bad for you is actually for your betterment in the long run" ? Or something else?

Jordan Peterson is great, I highly recommend him too. Also maps of meaning course. I think the problem is that everything is metaphorical. Modern western rational, so to speak, understanding of the world is sipping into religion too and destroying it. Some priests try to explain Bible stories in modern scientific terms, trying to find contradictions and errors in science as a prove that religious stories are literally correct in modern understanding of the world. But that modern understanding with metaphors such as mater, energy, gravity, fields, space, time are a bunch of stories themselves and often different branches of physics have different somewhat contradicting stories. Scientific stories are deadly powerful when interacting with the world if you know what story to use when, Euclid geometry, classical mechanics or thermodynamics. Similarly religious stories can be very powerful to live a better life, but you have to know how to apply them. It is not just word games, if a person sincerely tries to live by religious stories, then his world changes, and changes can be so great that any rational arguments, mathematical scribblings and carbon dating of the earth will mean nothing to convince a person who experienced such life transformation.

I do study religion. Here are some interesting finds. In Catholic tradition there is integrated tradition of consuming information, digesting, integrating, forming intent, contemplation, meditation etc. called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_Divina. In Orthodox Christian tradition you can find a description of how deeply ego can corrupt spirituality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelest Buddhist scripture contains mind blowing wisdom: https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn01/sn01.020.than.html, https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an02/an02.005.than.html. In the last one Buddha tells how important is effort: "You, too, monks, should relentlessly exert yourselves, [thinking,] 'Gladly would we let the flesh & blood in our bodies dry up, leaving just the skin, tendons, & bones, but if we have not attained what can be reached through human firmness, human persistence, human striving, there will be no relaxing our persistence.' I also found for myself that things that I considered old, irrelevant, boring can have enormous depths of wisdom. Like for example, I was shocked recently by encounter with some eastern European communist era literature.

I was thinking about reality in terms of a system of perceptions and had the following epiphany. Life or conscious experience is a work of development or progress, at least at my stage of psychological or spiritual development. When you see, hear or stimulate yourself with new things you add to your system new things. If you sit down and relax for a bit, things will start to bubble up. As you become more aware of them, some things will become released and go away, some things will integrate better with your core. The more you meditate and chill out the more integrated, peaceful and relaxed you become. But when you stimulate yourself two things can happen. If you somehow find in the external world a match to your subconscious inner conflict you will become more aware of it and it can be released or integrated. I think, if you relax a little bit and try to become aware of your authentic desires you can find such things. If you just stimulate yourself with random staff with just a craving for novelty and escape you just add more things to the unbalanced system that you have. Awareness is the first part of the process. Another part is doing what you can. But doing things have at least two problems: laziness and fear. In case of laziness you can try do not distract yourself with other activities and contemplate your resistance or just do it, I don't have an opinion of what is better yet. In case of fear you do what you can to cure and prevent what you are fearing not only in yourself but also in others. This way you do not escape reality but thy to accept it and deal with it. I think this process is a healthy therapy, at least it helps me very much. Interesting thing is, the more slowly I try to do it the better things come out in the end. If I try to hurry I actually slow the process and make it less effective, at least in my subjective experience.

I think true science and true spirituality have the same basic core: increasing understanding and awareness and removing bullshit. Fortunately in science there was some kind of progress in recent years, there is a somewhat good community of people who are trying to increase understanding. But most people still fall for pseudoscience. In spirituality it is much worse than that, almost everything I think is pseudosprituality and you only can find nuggets of truth here and there. The problem may be is that it is easy to show experiment but it is much harder to communicate internal world. So science is in much, much, much better shape right now.

@Leo Gura Let me express my doubts, I think it will be beneficial and I don't necessarily think that you are wrong, I just want to look at it from other perspective. But what is wrong with phenomena of the world, like experiences, smells, thoughts, concepts, how are they a prison? There would not be anything like that after death. This flower only exist as a brain activity, this smell or thought is only exist as a brain activity. So you are saying that after death there would not be "nothing", instead there would be a timeless subtle "nothingness" that exist now but we are distracted by phenomena? What if that "nothingness-awareness" is just a small feature of reality that lead to interesting things in human brain, because human brain integrates tons of information but there are also other examples of "nothingness-awareness" that are boring and featureless, and our human existence is very rare and lucky in some sense? What if concepts of self and things are good and useful? What if good enlightened people are in some sense build on foundation of concepts with more subtle and developed processes above them and not build on removal of all concepts, may be they just go unconscious? What if "nothingness-awareness" is not a source but just a product of the brain or something else? What if reality is much more complex than space, time, existence, phenomena? We conceptualized even quantum mechanics with invented mathematical language and built wonderful things. What if we can conceptualize enlightenment, why not? What if probability of ultimately breaking something in your psyche is much greater that developing it? What if that process of self inquiry and meditation is dangerous and can lead to mental problems in some people? There are examples http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/meditation-is-touted-as-a-cure-for-mental-instability-but-can-it-actually-be-bad-for-you-10268291.html http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/23/is-mindfulness-making-us-ill#comment-67355752 What if you need a good teacher for doing this work? How can you find a good teacher and be sure that he is not delusional himself and subconsciously or even consciously motivated by ulterior motives? What if it is all just delusions and enlightened people just have delusions more pleasant to experience? What if enlightenment doesn't exist, it is a delusion and the most dangerous and persistent one in the world, because it promises more than anything else in the world, to end suffering, which gives mind infinite reasons to defend it?

There are parts of the brain which are active when people have self referential thoughts, thought about you, your position in relation to others, status and so on. I heard about a research somewhere that long time meditators have these regions more quite than normal people. As for mind body problem, I think it assumes that we have understanding of mind or body, but we don't. We have standard model here, other model there. Basically we don't know shit about reality. Here is an answer to mind body problem by Chomsky: He says that there have been no concept of physical body since Newton, so there is no actual problem, "physical" is just an honorific word, like "real" or "serious".

O man, this is the biggest problem with enlightenment for me. I actually believe that there is no single enlightenment and all religions and spiritual traditions are not the same and there is no line from normal to enlightenment. There is a huge, huge field of conscious experiences and what normal humans usually experience is a small island in that field, but in that island you can interact with other people and live usual life. And many people do not get to that island and have different mental issues. There are places much better that normal human island and there are much worse. So I would advise you to proceed with caution and use your best judgement. Do not just think that you need to destroy everything in your mental life and you will be free, you need to carefully examine and improve it. This may not hold true for some people who are very set and comfortable in normal position, may be they need strong kicks like drugs or whatever. But if you have problems bordering mental issues in such experiences I would advise you to ground yourself, live the best responsible normal life you can, become confident and mentally strong and then try to seek some new meditative experiences. May be it is possible that there is even no need for lofty meditations and you can just focus on living responsible, caring and attentive life and it will lead to better conscious experiences than any meditation.