6:27pm September 26, 2014

The stress and being sleepy thing

feliscorvus:

Someone (youneedacat, I think?) wrote recently about getting really tired as a type of stress response. What IS that even about? Because I am pretty sure that happens to me, at least some of the time.

Right now I am effing exhausted despite having slept a decent amount and being adequately fed and coffee-enabled and everything. (And I don’t have a fever, I checked). And I think it’s because I’m stressing out about my senior cat (who is probably having surgery next week to remove a suspicious mass that could be feline breast cancer, basically).

And it’s making me remember this thing that used to happen to me in school. Where essentially, I’d get to class and find myself just feeling overwhelmingly sleepy. Sometimes the stuff I did that I got in trouble for (like getting up and wandering around the room, reading unrelated books under my desk, etc.) was stuff I was doing *just to stay awake*, because trying to sit at my desk made me feel like I was going to fall asleep any second. The weird part was…basically as soon as I got somewhere quiet or with less people in it (like if they sent me out in the hall due to fidgeting) I would have a ton of energy again. o_0 So now I’m thinking maybe the tiredness was a response to overload, because I also used to get it when I was out with my parents. Like when we would go to amusement parks and stuff…after a few hours I’d basically get super “draggy” and would want nothing more than to go back to the hotel. I would sometimes get so “tired” that I’d start feeling nauseated just from walking. But again, as soon as I got somewhere less overloady I’d feel much better. 

The thing that puzzles me about this is what the mechanism could possibly be. I mean is it due to certain brain chemicals being depleted by stress and then restoring their usual levels when the stress is reduced? How can that even happen that fast? I guess it could be one of those things where a sensation of one thing manifests in a weird way because autism, but it would be interesting to know how the hell this even works because I’m sure it’s a real thing.

Oh wow – all of that is true of me as well, by the way, including getting sleepy in classroom situations and doing weird things to try to keep myself awake and getting in trouble and everything.

Although when I have a really severe sleepy-stress-response I don’t bounce back very fast at all.  But then I don’t make cortisol anymore.

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