Please help me say this more tactfully

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A friend has recently started to ask me to come over at the last minute (last minute=same day or less notice), and every time she suggests it, my stomach turns to a knot and I stress out. I don't do well with last minute schedule changes, and since I am in burnout mode it is way worse and I start freaking out and feeling overwhelmed and shutdown. But I also don't want to keep telling her no. I would like to let her know how I feel about these suggestions, but my experience is that I am usually too direct and will cause offense and not actually achieve clarification. Please help with a tactful way to phrase/handle this.

An easy one-time answer is, "Oh dear! I can't do it tomorrow -- can we do it Thursday instead?" The trick is to give a specific alternative at the same time as you give the refusal, rather than to either just say no, or to leave it ambiguous. A permanent solution might be to say on Thursday, "This was great -- why don't we get together every Thursday, then I'll have one nice thing to look forward to every week on my otherwise chaotic calendar."

The idea of the specific alternative is good; I'll have to put that in my bag of tricks.

We do have a regular day we get together--Tuesday evening after I get off work. But the last few weeks a few things have come up and we only made it once last month, so we both made the comment we want to see more of each other. I meant that as we should not let our regular day go by, and she took that as starting to suggest randomly to get together this afternoon or things like that. How do I tell her I just want to get together on Tuesdays every week.

I feel you are approaching this from a feeling of inferioty. Your feelings are just as valid as your friends are. I would suggest you say something like " I'd love to, but I've already made plans for that day. Why don't we meet at ( bar, restaurant, mutual friends, mall, etc., on "blank" day instead?)

What about just directly telling her that it makes you feel anxious to make plans last minute? Something like "I really do want to spend time with you, but changing my plans last minute is very stressful for me. Can we schedule these things ahead of time? How about _____(insert a suggested date and activity)"