Your heartbeat races. Your face flushes hot. Your breath quickens. Your muscles tense and twitch. You feel light-headed. The world suddenly seems terribly exciting or scary—maybe both. These are all signs of sexual arousal, but they can also be signs of a panic attack. And when a blogger who goes by Sarah Jane noticed this similarity last summer—at a time when jet lag from a recent trip was exacerbating her already-potent panic disorder—she turned to erotic novel The Boss, by Abigail Barnette.

Though she’s already read it several times, revisiting it again and again, she found, helped calm her down. “You can interrupt your stress or anxiety with something that produces a similar physical response, like increased heart rate, but also provides you with more positive feelings,” she explained on her blog. “A few minutes before I pick up one of my favorite erotic novels, [my] racing heart is perceived as very scary. But once I start reading, it’s just arousal.”

What she stumbled upon was a positive spin on “misattribution of arousal,” a psychological phenomenon that describes our mind’s tendency to look for clues around us to explain an exhilarated or agitated feeling. In a famous experiment, scientists found their research participants were likelier to pursue a woman if they met her on a rickety bridge than if they met her on a safe, stable one. The scarier bridge, so says the theory, created a fearful physiological state which the participants figured was just sexual arousal, making the woman seem more attractive. Some people, like Sarah Jane, have learned to use this response to their advantage—and a great way to do that is through erotica.

Courtesy of Avon, CreateSpace, Montlake

Though women’s porn consumption rates are rising, many of us are still way into erotica: 85 percent of romance readers are female, according to a 2015 Nielsen report. Theories abound about why women gravitate more to textual porn than the image-based kind: We’re said to be “less visual” and more sexually inhibited, or have lower libidos in general. But sex educator Emily Nagoski’s 2015 book Come As You Are has a better explanation: Namely, that emotional context is much more vital to women’s arousal than it is to men’s.

Nagoski writes that women get turned off more easily than men when confronted with “external circumstances and internal states such as stress, attachment, self-criticism, and disgust”—all responses we can have to visual porn, which has a tendency to objectify and shame our bodies, classify us as either “good girls” or “sluts,” or emphasize how useful we are to men over our own pleasure.