What causes this - weird adrenaline rush at night or early morning

[beyondinfinity]

Not often, but sometimes I experience this at night. I'll wake up at some point and my heart is racing and I'm overcome with adrenaline and fear like I am going to die. I feel so weird that I actually am afraid something is physically wrong and my heart is going to stop and I'll actually die. It happened last night and I had to keep repeating to myself "I'm ok" as I focused all my mental effort to relax and make it stop. All of a sudden within seconds it stopped and I was back to normal.

The experience doesn't last long, probably less than a minute in total and always is accompanied by the racing heartbeat and adrenaline rush. Not sure if the adrenaline starts first or is a by product of my realization of the heart rhythm which makes me agitated.

Has anyone else experienced this? What did you do about it? Did you ever find out what the cause was?

[PanicCured]

Check this out: I had this daily. I used to wake up at 5 AM and my heart would get to the 160s bpm in full blown massive panic attack. Sometimes the middle of the night I would awake to this shivering freezing feeling and then result in massive panic attack. I no longer have an anxiety disorder, but I still don't know what that was or why exactly it occurred at those times. But I may have insight into yoru question:

"Not sure if the adrenaline starts first or is a by product of my realization of the heart rhythm which makes me agitated. "

It took me long after my anxiety went away to realize that I would awake, and feel a weird symptom, then I would cause the heart to race after that. I told every doctor "I would wake up with my heart racing" but I was wrong. There was this split second where I went "Oh shit!" that caused the fight or flight response. So I learned to not add 2nd fear. When I'd wake up with weird symptoms, I learned to not do the "Oh shit!" thing. Now why it happened out of my sleep, I don't know. What I did was focus all of my efforts into getting better. I figured out some of the whys but not all. All that matters is I got better. Sounds like you are on the right track calming yourself down.

I wrote a Quick guide you can try next time this happens. Report back the results:

http://anxietyforum.net/forum/showthread.php?9512-The-Quick-Guide-to-Stopping-Panic-Attacks