Rude Awakening

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Does anyone experience this: Upon awakening you get immediately hit by extreme anxiety and do NOT want to happily greet the new day. At one point, I went on "Lexapro". It worked but made my depression "clearer" to me...more tactile. The meds made me eat too much and I gained 40 pounds...which really was depressing and rather unhealthy. I stopped cold turkey without any real side effects...other than grouchiness. Does anyone else experience this "rude awakening"? Could it be low blood sugar? What a loathsome feeling.

I have an Aspie friend who suffers from that sort of thing and it IS linked to low blood sugar in his case. It happens sometimes in the day as well and then he simply has to eat immediately. In fact, come to think of it, another geeky guy who worked here years ago reported something similar.

Some people need to eat a low glycaemic index snack before bedtime to last them till morning.

The blood sugar testing is pretty easy. They may need to test at various times of the day, though. Have you reported this to a regular doctor before?

I get this a lot,

On some occasions, I've actually had panic attacks upon waking up, and haven't been able to get out of bed.

Yeah, it's apparently linked to the hormone cortisol (or lack of it.) Waking is stressful for everybody, but neurotypical people produce the stress hormone cortisol in response to it--autistics do not. (That's probably also why we don't deal well with stress in general.)

Report on the study that published these findings: http://www.healthnewstrack.com/health-news-1147.html

I hate waking up. I'm also not too keen on falling asleep. It takes me hours to do either.

That's another typical ADHD and AS problem.

I am on medication (Strattera) for ADHD which has the side-effect of insomnia. The problem is, if I take it in the morning, I am more susceptible to meltdowns, so the insomnia is preferable. Strangely enough, in the past if I had periods of insomnia I usually became unhappy and felt very sorry for myself. With this insomnia, I wake up tired, but I have a good mood and I am still able to work.

I have that too. I never feel properly healthy or alert until around 11am. I am physically cold, lethargic, get a lot of head rushes, and can't face doing anything except curling back into bed and falling asleep. Then around 11am to noon my metabolism 'wakes up' and I feel normal.