Asperger's and weird stress symptoms

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I find that I can often get crazy stress-related illnesses instead of my shutdowns, or when I don't allow the shutdown to happen. I've had all sorts of things like going to sleep at night but waking up every 10-15 mins and falling back to sleep, over and over... or finding myself losing feeling and control of movement down the right half of my body... or making involuntary twitches with my limbs... or getting pains and rigidity in my stomach and almost fainting... and other wacky stuff. I know these are not actual diseases and were each stress-related because after all the necessary tests, the doctors could not link any of these with a known illness and usually ended up asking, "Are you stressed?"

So... do you get any weird symptoms like these when you're stressed..?

I've been in the hospital a few times for hypertension and panic attacks, aggravated by SSRIs.

Have you told a doctor or psychologist/psychiatrist?

They have subsided a bit after five days in a hospital to get my stress-induced blood pressure better controlled about three weeks ago, but yes, definitely. I had "Zzzzzt!" sensations going off inside my head, and I had "flushed" sensations wafting though my entire body ... and at the time I had no idea all of that and more was because of stress. Be a bit cautious in the area of meds, but a good doctor can help you survive your current stress while doing whatever must be done to significantly reduce it over the long haul.

Absolutely! if I do not watch my anxiety and stress levels they get to the point that I start to experience physical symptoms. I can't stay asleep for more than 10 - 15 minutes at a time, my right or left hand starts to twitch (feels like an electric shock), I have extreme nausea, headaches, and sometimes my heart beats way too fast. Eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of exercise, and having someone to talk too has helped tremendously. If you can identify when your stress levels are getting to high, then you and a friend/ doctor/ phyciatrist can brainstorm some quick ways to release some of your stress before it starts to affect your physical health. For instance when I have had a bad day at work and need to calm down I usually (when I get home) go for long walks, do some shadow boxing, or work in my garden.

Stress can cause seizures. Even tingling is a mild seizure.
I get the seizures from stress, stimulants, sugar and alcohol. Usually I'd say from too much but any small amount can set me off.
They can feel like tingling, burning, sharp pains, electric shocks.
If the twitching turns into a paralysis on the right side that is because of a seizure.

Doctor's are hopeless at noticing a seizure disorder when it's there. Go to a Neurologist.

I get these black-out seizures when I stand up, sometimes.

Have you been diagnosed with seizures?

I went to a neurologist after experiencing something similiar to this. It wasn't like fainting because I didn't fall out. The neurologist could find nothing wrong. About a year later I finally convinced my primary Doctor to see a cardiologist. They did a tilt/table test on me and found out I had Neuro Cardiogenic Presyncope. Basically, that means that the brain and cardiovascular system are not communicating properly and the blood does not always get to the brain like it should.

It can cause some very strange things like feeling chilled in 100 degree weather.

I understand that it is a genetic condition that can express itself at different times in life. It showed up for me after an extremely stressful period in my life.

I can't say these are related to an ASD or not but I can think of a couple of things.

I tried to go to the doctors and tell them I think I am getting migraines but I think they figured it was from stress/anxiety. I can't even figure out how to describe it to them. But the main pain is my head. I can't think very well and it effects my whole body as well. Flourescent lights and computers can make it even worse and I feel like I can barely get enough energy to think. Or have a hard time thinking. Almost two years ago I ended up throwing up twice in a row from it and I wasn't sick from a flu or anything (usually this doesn't happen). This also can effect my jaw and I told them that. I do get a buzzy feeling over my body like cold jittery feeling maybe. This can happen every few weeks at times or so, sometimes more often. This hasn't happened in a few months though. I've tried to describe this in person twice and unless it's happening I have even a harder time trying to figure out what all the feelings are and how to describe it them. I wished I was more articulate to them because they might listen better.

Also, last year I thought my heart kept fluttering or something for a couple days and worried I was having some sort of heart attack. Well, they checked my heart out that day and my heart turned out fine. I didn't feel any more anxious than normal either.

I know I'm not being a hypochondriac and worried they thought I was. Maybe they thought it was psychosomatic or something like that.

Within the last year or so I started to get the nerve to just take myself to the doctors more often.

Going to the doctor with inexplicable illnesses was actually part of the process that lead me to getting diagnosed with Asperger's! The symptoms I presented with never made any sense as an illness in themselves, and when all the possible tests had been done I'd almost always get asked, "Are you stressed?" to which I answered "No" at first (I was actually too used to being stressed so I didn't recognize that I was stressed - BIG problem!) and eventually I got sent to a cognitive behavioural therapist. Sadly I couldn't afford to keep going to that guy so I went to the free counseling service instead and it was the counselor who realized pretty quickly that I had something neurological going on. Now I'm diagnosed and finally working on my problems.

I'm not sure whether to see a doctor about these symptoms or not, now that I know that they're stress symptoms... Would it be of any benefit? Are GPs likely to have advice when it comes to distinguishing between an illness or stress illness? That'd be pretty helpful...

(edit) Forgot to mention, yes I have a psychiatrist appointment now, but I won't get to see her til late next month cos of waiting lists, but I'll make sure to mention it to her. I had an occupational therapist until recently but she didn't have enough expertise in emotional stuff to help much

Yes.

I saw your post in the other thread about bottling up your emotions until you had a week of panic attacks. I did a lot of emotional bottling, fronting as NT, bottling up meltdowns. for most of the 1990s. I was specifically bottling up meltdowns because I had several where I destroyed possessions of mine that were kind of important to me, and I wanted that to stop. The meltdowns also kind of freaked me out because they were so uncontrollable once they happened. At some point after that I stopped bottling them up, but this wasn't a good thing either (and still isn't), although I finally shifted them from anger to mostly tears.

In 1997 I started having panic attacks while I did not feel stressed at all. When I saw a doctor at Kaiser, he prescribed some benzos and suggested events in my life that I was happy about were actually creating stress (I was just restarting my freelance writing career, other things had been going somewhat well). Anyway, these ended after a couple of months. A second round started up in 2003 while I was doing my third term of my fourth attempt at college - I had panic attacks for a solid month, none of the symptoms made any sense - I felt like I was having bowel problems, strokes, I was exceptionally dizzy and weak (sometimes one side of my body, sometimes both) and the ground felt like it was moving. I had normal pains sort of fuzz out into constantly re-referred pain with a much fuzzier-yet-more-uncomfortable presentation (pain doesn't bother me, but this weird senation was extremely distracting), and numerous other symptoms. I ended up fixating on using eMedicine to prove I didn't have these conditions, which meant I ended up studying a huge amount of medical information, but every time I determined I didn't have one thing, I'd develop symptoms of something else. Yes, this was a huge mistake, but it's the way my mind works - I try to assess what's actually happening and deal with it, but I couldn't find any logical basis for what was happening.

At the time, I was doing well in school, I liked school. I didn't feel stressed.

I ended up going to the ER and then a clinic for immediate treatment of the panic symptoms, but they didn't do much beyond that (and on my third ER trip I was treated pretty horribly), and I think a combination of things managed to help defuse things.

I found during this time that hyperfocus could distract me from my panic attacks and all of my somatic symptoms would vanish. The only way I could deliberately induce it was playing Halo Co-op on the X-Box - I could play non-stop because death meant respawn instead of restarting the level, which made it easier to maintain hyperfocus with the distraction from the panic waiting in the wings.

This was, perhaps, the first time I really noticed hyperfocus as a thing, too. Prior to that it's just how I wrote my freelance work and I didn't really think of it as anything more than just focusing on a thing, but I realized it's pretty total if it shut down everything else going on in my brain (or at least everything else I was consciously aware of). I didn't realize that hyperfocus was a thing that ADHDers or autistic people do. I even described the state to medical professionals and they didn't have any idea what it meant.

Unfortunately, while I was referred for mental health care once I got on the Oregon Health Plan, my therapist quit or was fired while treating me, and the clinic I was going to wouldn't assign me another one - instead I would have to do support groups.

I am not sure if I was experiencing the same thing you were, but I hadn't really thought to connect the fact that I was bottling up a lot of emotion and this happened. I connected it directly to school. It may have been both.

nervous twitching caused by anxiety issues? Most definitely! I've been having excessive stress build up due to a violent living situation (I bailed my family out of that and now we're in a hotel selling our stuff for tickets to Michigan), but a couple of days ago all the stressers built up, a guy almost hit my truck cutting in front of me in line trying to get gas and I flipped out. I don't remember too much of the time following that other than I went into convulsions, lost memory of I think 15 minutes, and ended up being taken to the E.R. by ambulance. Again, they said they don't think it was seizures but I was diagnosed as having an acute anxiety attack and was prescribed xanax to control the twitching which I've had the last week or so. While the meds seem to be helping me from "flipping out" but I still have this annoying and constant twitching-- more like a whole-body jerk actually.

I can think of one instance when I had a weird physical reaction to immediate short-term stress.

A good friend was pressuring me to answer a question (in an online chat), and I just couldn't. I wanted to give an answer, but I didn't have one, and the harder I tried to come up with an answer, the more my mind just blanked out. Then my eyes started having sudden jerky/jiggly motions and it was hard to see, so I disengaged from the conversation and rested and was fine in a few minutes.

Several years back I was experiencing a lot of stress and drama in my personal life. At the same time I was having some issues with feeling dizzy and lightheaded. While I never conclusively tied the two together, the symptoms were serious enough that the Army docs put me on anti-vertigo meds. Come to think of it now, I've had a few dizzy spells in the last few weeks and I'm currently stressed about some personal stuff. Funny, a woman was involved in both instances.

When I am around people I get sweaty and dizzy. It's from high blood pressure spikes. I have really high blood presure already so the anxiety related spikes have damaged my heart causing to enlarge and my kidneys have reduced function by 20% leaving me with just 80%. In 2005 when my bosses moved my work area so I would be around my co-workers incase I was injured someone would find my body they put me behind the loudest most vibrating machine in the shop. (Big machines and vibrations cause me extreme anxiety)The combination of doing this for months helped cause me to have congestive heart failure from all the blood pressure spikes. I almost died and spent 5 days in ICU being drained of fluid.

I've had that. Worst feeling ever. I was shivering for an hour, even while sitting in the sun.
What brought me down was some yogurt. That's my super food.

I do get cold a lot and at the same time of day and has little to do with the actual temperature.