Stress-Response Hyperstimulation

Hi, everyone! I know that I promised to try and work harder to post more frequently, and that hasn't really happened yet, but I am trying. I am, however, here to talk about something that I've been thinking about for a long time, but that just came up in the past few days again. And that thing is stress-response hyperstimulation.

There really isn't much online information about stress-response hyperstimulation. But the Anxiety Center website lists the symptoms of hypersensitive nerves and senses as:

• Your nerves are overly reactive
• You find you startle more easily
• Your senses are overly keen
• Your hearing is more sensitive
• Your skin is much more sensitive
• You are frightened more easily
• Your taste is acute; foods taste stronger than normal
• Odors are more poignant; things smell stronger than normal

Now, pretty much anyone can experience hypersensitivity. When there's a stressful event, your body goes into overdrive and it becomes more sensitive to things. As you calm down, so does the hypersensitivity. Its very similar to a panic attack in that way. In fact, hypersensitivity can actually be a symptom of a panic attack.

Stress-response hyperstimulation is different. While plain hypersensitivity is caused by an active stress response and goes away given a few minutes, hyperstimulation arises from extended periods of stress or high intensity episodes. Unlike an infrequent trigger of the stress response, your body can't quickly and properly recover from frequent or extremely intense stress episodes. This leads to your nerves being hyperreactive; constantly alert and more sensitive than normal. It takes much longer for your body to recover from this than an infrequently triggered stress response.

So how does this tie in with my experiences? I've been fairly consistently stressed out for years now. Ever so often I look stuff up and come across stress-response hyperstimulation as something that I almost definitely have. A few days ago was one of those times.

I think I've only really managed to recover from it once, back when I first left public school 5 years ago. It took months of doing almost nothing, and certainly nothing stressful, for my nervous system to calm down from its super sensitive state.

My experiences currently match stress-response hyperstimulation very well. I keep getting nerve pain without really any cause. I get what I call "allergy headaches," that I'm still trying to figure out, but that I'm pretty sure are at least affected by my sensitive nerves. I can't stand the smell of cooking food--it makes me horribly nauseous--and meat is the worst offender. I'm super sensitive to smell and taste and touch and motion. Now, some of those symptoms are at least partially explained by my migraines, but I still feel all of that even when I don't have a migraine. Bottom line: I have stress-response hyperstimulation from being excessively stressed out for an extremely long period of time.

So what can I do about it? Well, I would love to just drop everything that's stressing me out, but I can't live in a stress-free bubble, so that's not really a doable or rational thing to try. There are, however, some things that I'm going to try to do or implement in my life that will hopefully help my hypersensitivity dial back from the unbearable level that its currently at. There are a few things that I'm already doing/have done: I already do light to moderate exercise every day, I deleted most of my social media apps, I don't consume much in the way of stimulants, and I do mindfulness and deep breathing every day. Things that I'm going to try are: eliminating electronic devices as much as I can after 8pm, create electronics-free times during the day (I can't do entire days because I rely on my phone for alarms to remind me to do things like take medications and to interact with friends), I'm going to try to have more fun in my life and to laugh more often, and I'm going to try to stop using my heating pad every night. The last one may or may not make sense to most people. Basically, I used to use it for cramps so that I could sleep. Now, even though I'm on a continuous birth control and rarely get cramps, I still use it every night because the heat and the slight weight on my abdomen is soothing. However, I understand that having something with an electrical charge touching my skin for a good 9-10 hours a day is probably not good for me. Not to mention, I have discoloration on my abdomen from the minor burns I've gotten from repeated usage of the heating pad.

With any luck, all of those changes put together will help to heal my nervous system and get it back to a more healthy level of sensitivity. I'll do my best to post an update in a few months to let everyone know how its going.

Love always,
Sam

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(Source: https://www.anxietycentre.com/anxiety-symptoms/hypersensitivity.shtml)