Curious about unusual stress/danger responses

i have no specific question here, I'm just wondering how many other people have weird and interesting physical and/or mental reactions to this shit. :B

For context, I've lived through three violent and severe earthquakes so far. Unlike literally everyone else I know, I enjoyed the experience. I felt happy, not stressed, and while I still got the adrenaline rush from being severely startled each time there was an aftershock (so, more or less constantly for about five months) I just plain had pretty much zero negative mental effects from it, immediate or ongoing. In fact, that was one of my most productive six month stretches in the seven years since. I felt assured and in control of myself, in complete contrast to everything else that was going on around me.

Tl;dr, shit's great :D

 

when bad shit is going, i either shut down completely or i start laughing, and usually i have no way of predicting which way it's gonna go
which is a little bit frustrating

 

When I'm very stressed I often do to something similar, @Kemmasandi ! I just have this constant adrenaline rush and get very immersed in whatever I'm doing and feel like a superhero. All negative thoughts and feelings get banished, and I also tend to think more things are fun or funny in some ways, and tend to feel more excitement. Usually, once the stressor is behind me, all the exhaustion and the negative feelings catch up to me and I spend days wanting to sleep all day and being unmotivated to do anything. This paradoxically means that often I remember certain times in my life as being both horrible ("I barely had time to eat and sleep and was living on caffeine and looking horrible and unable to process most of anything due to a sense of constant impending doom") and amazing ("I learned and did so many amazing things and felt very accomplished and was always so fiery and felt a huge sense of purpose in everything I did"). Two examples of this were the 3 weeks in which I wrote and presented my undergrad thesis (which was amazing) and the 3 weeks it took me to make the series of watercolor-and-embroidery illustrations for my drawing class last June. Ends of college semesters in general tend to be like that.

 

when i feel an adrenaline rush, i either blank completely and shut down, or i HYPER FOCUS IN on whatever i'm doing. like, if i'm driving and i hit a patch of ice, suddenly all my being is focused on driving and straightening out the car. for that moment i am one with my car.

but the SECOND that the moment has passed, i'm left feeling weak and shaky and drained and i hate it. i hate it so much. i am the opposite of an adrenaline junkie because i just find the entire experience upleasant and spoon-draining.

 

I grin and giggle a hell of a lot when I'm scared while driving. Has to be when I'm the driver, though. As the passenger, I want to cry and hide from reality. As the driver, straight to fucking come at me attitude with giggling and a bright amused jitteriness that lasts for an hour or two after. I got really hyper and chatty once I got home safe, and was aware of myself nattering on, but couldn't muster the usual anxious feelings about it to care.

 

Scared laughing is my shit. If it is like actually dangerous, or I ping it as that regardless of how sensible it is, I either have a panic attack or just kind of go emotionally dead inside and become an automaton of solving a problem.

 

My thing is probably exacerbated by my having alexithymia, which makes it hard for me to tell what emotions I'm feeling at any given time in general. I basically have three modes - 'default neutral', 'energetic' (which encompasses anger and strong amusement and happiness as well as strong fear), and 'anxious and depressed' (which is what it says on the can). When I get anxious, it's almost exclusively over interacting with people and my own future actions. If a potentially dangerous thing doesn't include one of those, I get tossed into 'energetic' mode. When that happens, I get the immediate spike of energy and euphoria, and then it's a slow downward slide back to my default more than anything.

These sound pretty close to my experience! I've been describing it lately as just feeling more alive, more awake and a part of the world than I usually am. Particularly at the moment - I'm wrestling with chronic fatigue and an adrenaline rush is basically the only thing that staves this off for a little while. :/ Fortunately I'm too tired to actually go out and look for it, because I suspect it would be hard to stop myself from doing something stupid to get that high.

 

I tend to go into a focussed mode that isn't very safety conscious. Like I'd get my siblings out of the way and then try clear away whatever mess there was (this was unadvisable in hindsight since it was like straight after and there were cracks in the chimney) or keep busy in some way. I'm actually not sure how actually useful I'm being because there was one instance where I asked if I should put on my shoes before going to pick up my siblings from school. One larger earthquake that I was outside + alone + didn't see anything fall down I got a rush of euphoria/energy and then got told off by some random old guy for laughing. Long term is another story and since I was down south studying when there was one last year I discovered that they really freak me out when I'm not there.

Basically eq response varied depending on where I was and when it happened (I'm pretty sure September just made me tired because we ended up sleeping in the kitchen and the oven kept rattling) Also I'm assuming where you live because otherwise some of this may not make sense idk

 

I think you've assumed correctly - Canterbury quake sequence? If so, hello South Island buddy :D if not, ignore me lmao

 

Yep. Hi! :D

 

Once my mom and I were victims of an armed robbery attempt, where I was inside the car and the two robbers pointed the gun at my mother, outside. She screamed and grabbed the gun to point it away from her and there was a struggle - the robbers fled when the neighbors noticed - and while this was all going on I was pretty much paralyzed; but as soon as the immediate danger was over and my mom was being taken to the clinic (she got hit in the head with the butt of the gun and had to get stitches) I sat on the hallway floor of my apartment building and laughed for a solid ten minutes.

It's my goddamn stupid stress response. Funerals? MARIE LAUGHS. Airplane passes through areas of severe turbulence? MARIE LAUGHS. Immediate threat to life in the form of an angry robber with a gun? MARIE LAUGHS. Cat knocks laptop off the counter and shatters the screen completely? GUESS WHAT HAPPENS

 

The funeral thing actually happened, too. My godmother's sister lost her ten years long battle with cancer a couple years ago, and she and my godmom were extremely close. Godmom was understandably devastated during the service, crying and crying and crying, and I was supporting her and her sister's son while my mom was talking to my godfather and my godmother's mother, who is like 90-something, has a heart condition, and was almost passing out. Like, it was a terrible, terrible situation.

And I was almost laughing all the time. Like, my sortacousin was shell-shocked staring at the distance not knowing what to do now that he was an orphan and I was holding my breath so no one noticed I wanted to roll on the floor laughing.

I was only saved from unintentionally shitting on half of my family because my grandma, bless her, noticed something was wrong with me and asked me to take her to the graveyard's cafeteria. As soon as we were out of earshot she started cracking jokes about death and let me get the thing out of my system.

 

Laughter when you Need To Be Expressing A More Appropriate Emotion is the biggest pain in the ass. I haven't had anything that awkward yet, touch wood. I do have a tendency to grin and laugh when I'm intensely fucking angry, though, because it feels very similar to me (energetic emotions, again).

 

When I'm angry I get The Shakes and a goddamn stutter. It is so fucking annoying. I have learned to Not Be Angry because there's nothing more ridiculous than getting stuck in a five second stutter loop when you're trying to tell some idiot to shove their shit opinions up their ass

 

When bad things happen I go into a state that Lissa calls "cold". I do what needs to be done. I don't feel anything emotionally at the time. I held Dani, performed CPR, talked to the 911 people calmly while trying to keep her alive. When it is over or someone else has taken the responsibility for it (EMTs, usually) and my work is done I fall apart. It leads to people thinking I don't care about my loved ones because I can be cold and clinical while they are having seizures or meltdowns.
I cried for two days while the hospital tried to keep Dani alive after her heart attack. I do not feel bad that I was calm while trying to keep her alive.

 

i had a vaguely stressful encounter the other day, and realized that when i'm facing someone down, one of my legs starts shaking. it's like my knee gives up and is relying on the calf for support, and the calf is just meat obviously, and cannot do anything. but it's very difficult staying focused in stressful interpersonal situations when your leg isn't behaving.

also, the last time i had a performance review, my vision greyed out so much that all i saw was my boss. kind of felt like fainting


but, sure, that one time i broke my finger in a hydraulics filter-smashy thing at work, i was like "nah i'm cool i'll walk it off," grabbed another filter, and was suddenly sitting down, with no memory of the space in between - but totally chill.

i think my brain has weird definitions of what "bad situations" are

 

As others have said, my inappropriate-yet-default reaction to certain things is laughter. For me, that mostly applies to other people getting hurt. I have a hard time with empathy, and once someone else hits a certain level of distress or pain, it's very hard for me not to laugh at them. I'll still help them, of course, but I don't generally experience it as stressful, scary, or bad. When a dog bit my little brother's face, I felt amused and laughed because it looked funny. When my partner fell on a ladder and hit their shin, I laughed because the noise they made was funny.

When I'm the one getting hurt, I don't especially care/react emotionally, and I do what needs to be done to take care of it. Examples: when I cut my foot and needed stitches, I clamped down on the cut and asked for help so calmly that the teacher didn't believe me until they saw the blood; when I broke and dislocated my arm, I set the bone myself and then got help (I was 9); when I badly broke my foot, I hopped calmly to my car, drove home, hopped in the front door, and said "hey mom, my foot is broken."

If I'm being threatened by a stranger, especially physically, I tend to feel exhilarated. I know rationally that it's bad, but a large part of me reacts with "yess an excuse to demonstrate/practice self defense and show that I'm not easy to hurt."

 

Found a simpler way to explain the thing:



When I'm stressed, everything about me becomes this video.

 

More inappropriate laughter: I laugh when I'm in pain. I slipped and whacked my head on a cabinet corner once and spent the next five hours bursting into giggles. Wasn't concussed or anything, luckily, but the blood got everywhere.

Anger mostly feels like a rush of confidence, like I can do no wrong. With predictable results of me acting like an ass. I'm a tiny noodle-armed nerd tho so at least I don't physically fight people.

 

Same hat on the pain, haha. It doesn't work for internal aches like periods and upset stomachs (which I unfortunately get frequently), but pain from injuries, hell yes. XD I keep walking into the cup lid stacker at work, and every time it happens I just feel this little burst of happy adrenaline- suddenly, I'm alive again.