At AI Native DevCon London 2026 I gave a talk about bipolar disorder, what living with it has forced me to learn, and how the same patterns keep showing up in the way we work with AI.
What the talk is about
Managing bipolar disorder is largely about regulation. There are things that push your state around - sleep, rhythm, stress, people, substances - and the work is to spot the ones that destabilise you (dysregulators) and counterbalance them with the ones that steady you (regulators).
This is hard partly because the condition can come with compromised interoception - your sense of your own internal state, the thing you’d normally rely on to tell where you are. When that’s unreliable, you can’t fully trust your own read on yourself, so you lean on what’s around you instead.
Once you’ve spent years pathologising your own behaviour, looking for what’s adaptive and what isn’t, you start to recognise the same shapes elsewhere. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of them in AI-native engineering:
- Transformative shifts in core beliefs
- Addiction
- Grandiosity
- Attentional fragmentation
- Pressured speaking
- Maladaptive creativity
The counterweights - the regulators for each of these - are described in the talk.