Don't Panic

It happened this morning. It's why I'm up at 9 a.m. on a Sunday posting on a blog until my heart stops racing and I can fall back to sleep. It's not a full-fledged panic attack--I know I'm not dying, but my body does react like the world is ending. Like it surely will end if I don't get out of bed and do something about it. Like every little worry--work-related, school-related, financial, personal--everything I was remotely stressed out about before sleeping attacks me in the wee hours of the day.

The ironic thing is I went to bed without a care, on cloud-9 actually, after a game night with friends. Apparently that's not as strange as I thought.

1 in 4 people experience panic attacks, usually caused by "a loss or too many changes too fast," according to a Women's Health article I just Googled. There's no concrete evidence as to what causes them, the article says, other than what the writer called faulty wiring:

"One theory is that in some people the brain circuitry responsible for processing emotion and fear is in a state of hyperexcitability...This may cause the brain to mislabel nonthreatening, everyday stress as highly dangerous and set off a false alarm that sends your body into Defcon 1 status."

Another Google search has just let me know that anxiety and other neurological quirks are common celiac disease symptoms, since that same malabsorption issue I wrote about in an earlier post "interferes with neurotransmitters that regulate mood," according to about.com

Celiac talk aside, it turns out spontaneous attacks often happen when one is just lying in bed. There's no concrete way to knock them out, but the article suggests opening up about them (look at that--I'm curing myself right now!), distracting yourself (boo-yah), and the ever-present solution in our society: get yourself some drugs.

I think the distraction worked. I'm going back for another hour of rainy-day, lazy Sunday sleep.