Election, sleep, and bipolar disorder: signs to watch for

Conditions and Diagnoses

Late-night debates, group chats pinging in the small hours, arguments that keep you up at night. For people with bipolar disorder or in treatment for depression, sleep during these weeks says a lot.

October 21, 20269 min read

Illustration for the article: Election, sleep, and mood: when short nights call for attention

It’s almost two in the morning, and the only light on in the house is coming from the study. Inside, someone who should have been asleep hours ago is quietly recording a voice message, replying to three group chats at once, opening one more video. From the bedroom, his wife hears the keyboard and can’t decide whether to get up. In the morning he’ll be up before everyone else, upbeat, talking fast about Saturday’s meeting and the list of people to call. He’ll say he has never felt better. And he’ll have slept four hours for the third night in a row.

In another house, the scene is the reverse. A woman who has been in treatment for depression for two years, and had been doing well, has started waking up at four in the morning with her heart racing. She picks up her phone, reads the news, and can’t get back to sleep. She spends the day slower, quieter, with no desire to answer the sister she argued with on Sunday.

The two scenes have little to do with either person’s candidate. They have a lot to do with sleep.

If you have bipolar disorder, are being treated for depression, or live with someone in that situation, you may have recognized something here. There’s nothing strange about an election shaking up your mood. It shakes up almost everyone’s. But for some people, what calls for attention in these weeks isn’t just the result. It’s what this period is doing to their nights.

The election throws off the clock before it throws off the mood

Nobody decides to sleep less during an election. It just happens. The debate ends late, and the conversation about the debate ends later still. The family group chat pings at midnight. The argument from dinner keeps running through your head after the lights go out. And there’s a diffuse feeling, hard to name, that something important is happening and that you can’t afford to miss any of it.

This isn’t just a Brazilian thing. In 2024, 69% of American adults told the American Psychological Association that the presidential election was a significant source of stress. The setting changes; the body’s reaction looks much the same.

For most people, a few bad nights cost some tiredness, some irritability, a day that drags. Once the election is over, sleep finds its rhythm again. For someone with a mood disorder, those same nights can cost more, and that’s why they deserve a different kind of attention.

Why sleep carries so much weight in bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder is a condition in which mood is organized into periods: phases of depression and phases of elevation, called hypomania or mania, when the person becomes sped up and more energetic, with poorer judgment and a decreased need for sleep. Between one period and the next, the person often returns to their usual self.

Sleep holds a central place in this story, and it runs in both directions. Shortened nights can come before a mood shift. And a mood shift, once it begins, shortens the nights. Each one feeds the other. In clinical practice, the link between sleep and bipolar disorder is one of the most consistent observations: a change in sleep is often among the first signs, sometimes days before the person or the family notices that something has changed.

In depression, sleep speaks too. Waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep, broken sleep, or the opposite, the urge to stay in bed, often accompany or signal a turn for the worse.

That’s why, for someone with a mood disorder, sleep works as an early warning sign. It isn’t the only one, but it’s usually among the first to appear, and it’s the easiest to observe.

Sleeping little is not the same as needing little sleep

There’s a distinction worth keeping in mind, because it separates two very different situations.

The first is the ordinary bad night. The person sleeps little because they stayed up, worried, reading the news, and the next day they feel it: they’re tired, sleepy, wanting to go to bed early. It’s unpleasant, but it’s what you’d expect.

The second is something else. The person sleeps four or five hours and wakes up feeling just fine. They don’t miss the sleep. They have energy to spare, too many ideas, an urge to start things. Sometimes they don’t even register that they slept little; they simply didn’t need more. This decreased need for sleep, when it shows up in someone with a history of bipolar disorder, deserves to be taken seriously and reported to whoever oversees the treatment.

The euphoria of mobilization and the irritation of arguments

Getting involved in an election is not a symptom. Campaigning, debating, rallying friends to a cause, following every poll: all of that is part of life for a great many people, on any side, and there’s nothing pathological about it. It would be a mistake, and an injustice as well, to read someone’s political engagement as a sign of illness.

What deserves attention isn’t the engagement. It’s the change compared with how that person usually is. Someone who usually follows politics with interest and suddenly spends nights awake, talks faster than usual, takes on too many commitments, spends in ways that are out of character, loses their filter in conversations where they’ve always been careful. The difficulty is that the energy of a collective cause looks a lot like the beginning of a mood elevation, and the group, instead of finding it odd, applauds. The excitement that at any other time would raise eyebrows passes for enthusiasm during a campaign.

And elevation doesn’t always come as joy. It often arrives as irritability: impatience, a short fuse, arguments that escalate far too quickly. A campaign provides plenty of pretexts for that. The fight in the family group chat steals a night of sleep, the bad night brings the irritability closer to the surface, and the next argument already starts from a higher pitch. It’s a cycle that closes without anyone noticing.

What the family can watch for

The people who live with someone usually see it first. From the inside, the person almost always has a harder time noticing in themselves what others can see. A few signs deserve attention in these weeks:

shorter nights with no tiredness the next day;
faster speech, topics tumbling over one another, difficulty being interrupted;
many new plans at once, spending or commitments out of the ordinary;
irritability that doesn’t fit the person’s usual way of being;
or, in the opposite direction, waking in the small hours, withdrawal, loss of interest, whole days in bed.

None of these signs, on its own, is a diagnosis. What matters is the combination and, above all, the difference from how that person usually is.

One important caution: disagreeing politically with the family is not on this list, and it can’t be. Someone’s diagnosis should never become an argument in a fight. Lines like “you only think that because you’re having an episode” hurt, push people away, and make it harder for the person to hear genuine concern when it does exist. Observing is not policing. The best place for what the family notices is a conversation with the treating doctor, ideally with the person’s own knowledge.

When to contact the treating doctor

There are times when it isn’t worth waiting for the next scheduled appointment. When sleep disappears for several nights. When that feeling of not needing to sleep shows up. When distress starts to take over the day. When frightening thoughts come up. When the family notices a change that doesn’t go away. In those cases, the treating doctor should be contacted right away.

What to do about these changes is a clinical decision, and it belongs to whoever knows the history and oversees the treatment. The role of whoever notices is to speak up early. Changes caught at the start tend to be simpler to address than changes discovered late.

It’s also worth remembering that this period doesn’t end on Sunday. The week after the result tends to be one of intense emotion, for those who won and those who lost: relief, euphoria, frustration, anger. Sleep tends to follow along, and the signs described here still apply after the 25th.

And then there’s what these weeks stir up inside. An election touches on hope and hopelessness, on threat, on belonging, on the wish to be part of something bigger. For someone with a mood disorder, these experiences can take on an intensity that is hard to separate from the mood itself. Psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offers a place to think about what politics is carrying for each person: what the result seems to decide about one’s own life, where so much anger comes from, what the mobilization promises. When that space goes hand in hand with medical care, changes in sleep and mood tend to be noticed earlier, because someone is looking at the whole person.

In weeks this noisy, the most important sign is often the quietest one: how many hours the person slept, and how they woke up.