Educational reference
About this symptom
Racing thoughts describe thinking that moves faster than usual, jumping between ideas with loose connections between them, and often outpacing the person's ability to express or act on it.
People describe several trains of thought at once, ideas arriving faster than they can be written down, or being unable to hold one topic long enough to finish it. To others it may appear as speech that leaps between subjects.
It can be experienced as exhilarating and productive, particularly early in a hypomanic episode, or as exhausting and intrusive when the pace becomes uncontrollable.
Racing thoughts occur in mania and hypomania, and a related experience occurs in anxiety, where the content is typically repetitive worry rather than shifting ideas. Stimulants can also produce it. The distinction between anxious racing and manic racing is usually clearer in the surrounding features: sleep, energy, mood and behaviour.