My flatmates are coming back tonight. They've been away three weeks. Aside from upstairs stomping around, and last night having music on right above my bed, it's been peaceful.
My feeling infuriated and my adrenaline reaching close to my coping edge with upstairs' noise last night is alerting me to how my tolerance levels for outside sound which I'm not involved in being particularly low right now.
You know when music has a beat that you can feel even with ear plugs in? That was me last night. I resisted screaming and yelling, although I did slam a few doors.
My flatmates being back will bring closer noise. Whilst I hope it will feel soothing and familiar, knowing my emotional idiosyncrasies, I know that there will be times when my adrenaline rage/anxiety levels will attempt to 'break the sound barrier'. I know I'm feeling vulnerable right now. I know I'll have times when it's hard.
Plus the kids next door kick a ball around their garden, often against our fence. And that sets me into enraged panic too.
How can I learn to bear external sound - music, voices, TV, walking around - without feeling my nerves are stretched to screaming pitch and I feel like wanting to thump someone - or myself?
Any coping strategies that don't involve shutting the sound out with ear plugs or my own music? [which don't tend to fully work, anyway].
Anyone else deal with this kind of thing?
I don't really know many coping methods, but fairly often I have issues with noise too... I was told awhile ago to try things like going for a walk when it gets too much, though obviously avoiding noise isn;t ideal... I think the main problem with an aversion to noice is it's hard to distract yourself as the noise feels like it entres your very being and reonates in such a way to prevent any consentration on anything other than it.
im sorry i have no advise but i've started experiencing an intolerance to certain loud noises (traffic, busy places)
just wanted to send hugs really i guess
I have the exact same problem.It's very difficult to cope with.I spoke about it with my psychiatrist and she gave me Alprazolam/Xanax to calm down everytime I feel the rage is coming.
Hitting pillows and throwing stuff against the wall works for me quite a bit.Also,ripping a bunch of old newspaper helps.There are different kinds of anger,but these things calm me down a bit.I don't know if they work for you,but it's worth trying.
I know how difficult it is to cope with anger.Sometimes I feel pathetic for being angry about stuff like that,stuff that the majority of people don't mind at all.
Take care.
You can buy me with a coffee,I'm so cheap. Got bitten fingernails&a head full of past;Got a broken heart&your name on my cast.
&&I wanted her to tell me that she will never wake me.
I do not know the answer to this, as I also get hypercausive (high sensitivity to sounds) at times. Especially when I am tired or my anxiety levels are high. I tend to have the added ability to turn my hearing aids off, which can help dampen the sounds a bit...
I am working on trying to get my psych to prescribe me an anti anxiety med or something similar... having to wait for them to stop trying therapy first though.
I will let you know if I think of anything useful.... and will be interested to see if anyone else has ideas.
*safe hug*
Roiben x
If the Human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we wouldn't.
I get this. It is usually when I'm unable to leave my room or limit the noise by making my own noise (e.g distracting myself). I sit there getting more and more furious and upset. It is often infuriating, but it is more distressing. Sometimes I feel that people are doing it to actively hurt me or cause me stress. (They're not, they're just cleaning the dishes, or walking around or playing the piano and generally living!). I end up having to put my headphones in but it doesn't work much (like you said) because the noise just interrupts. I'm very keyed up. Sometimes I open the window and put my head out and listen to the wind, it doesn't stop the noise but it helps. It is even better if it is raining. I don't know why this helps.
Out of curiosity does this happen to you outside your house? I'm sure one of the triggers for my dissociation is over-stimulation. Sometimes I think my brain is firing so quickly trying to cope with all the sensory input that it blows a fuse. I don't know if that is possible, but that is how it feels.
I'm sure one of the triggers for my dissociation is over-stimulation. Sometimes I think my brain is firing so quickly trying to cope with all the sensory input that it blows a fuse. I don't know if that is possible, but that is how it feels.
I think that happens to me too. And I find that wind and rain calm me down too, allowing me to think and exist without being bombarded by everything around.
Katie - regarding headphones, there are the huge Skullcandy ones, the big noise-reducing ones. They seriously make everything quiet. But I doubt you'd want tp have to buy a pair to deal with the issue. I'm sorry I don't have any better ideas.
For those doubts that swirl all around us
For those lives that tear at the seams
We know… we’re not what we’ve seen
For this dance we’ll move with each other
There ain’t no other step than one foot
Right in front of the other
Is it possible to explain to your flatmates that you need a spot in the house that is somewhat quiet? You can't really do anything about the other people, but if you explain to your flatmates that you're going through a rough time right now and is making you very sensitive to noise, they could be able to give you periods of them where they will try to be more quiet then usual, giving you a bit of relief.
Especially since this seems to be worsened by stress, there isn't much else that you can do besides trying to relax when you feel the panic coming on and avoiding too much noise to overwhelm you. I am a HFA (High Functioning Autistic) and deal with noise/touch sensitivity all the time, and so I do relate, especially when trying to explain it to others. What I usually do to try and explain it is that my ears cannot process everything as well as everyone else, although I don't hear more then anybody else, what I do hear gets muddled up easily, especially when I'm stressed or very tired. Of course, it could very well be different for you, but I think that explaining it to your flatmates (if you trust them enough to not bully you over the information, which a few jerks have done to me) is the easiest way to deal with this because people are for the most part very empathic, and if you explain it, they will do their best not to make things worse for you.
But these are flowers that fly and all but sing: And now from having ridden out desire They lie closed over in the wind and cling Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire. Robert Frost, "Blue-Butterfly Day"
So far so good with my flatmates. I'm feeling comfortable adjusting back to them being around. And they're being very sensitive to my adjusting back, like silently acknowledging that I have been on my own the past few weeks, and it takes time to get used to having them around again.
Upstairs. Well, they've been quieter. What I've been doing also is put in my ear plugs when I go to bed before any noise starts. That seems to help. So I'm preparing/being proactive rather than reacting.
we have trouble with sounds alot sometimes.. youknow like when you are real sick physically and sounds that usually dont bother you give you adrenaline rushes.. we do that sometimes when we are not sick physically.. i hate it.. we all hate it.. think it has something to do with anxiety levels maybe.
I think that happens to me too. And I find that wind and rain calm me down too, allowing me to think and exist without being bombarded by everything around.
I'm glad this happens to someone else. I have tried to explain it to people before and they didn't understand. Sometimes it can get to the point where I'm sure inanimate objects are mocking me...e.g chairs loom over me with big 'grinning' faces...and there is this one picture in a corridor that one time I felt was almost vibrating....objects can appear at the same time very fuzzy and also almost on top of me. I feel that with sounds too, as though they were created/born to get inside me...okay now I sound very egotistical.
Interesting thread Stellata, I hope the situation in your house is a little easier and you're beginning to adjust.
I know how you feel, I have a very low threshold for noise, it steams from problems with my ears, but ive always had sensitive hearing. I either like things with no noise or really really loud so it blocks everything else out. Everything in between just makes me feel a bit skittish.xx
There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you.
But there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.
I aint no abacus but you can count on me.
Glad to hear that earplugs are helping somewhat, and that your flatmates are being considerate.
I can get easily annoyed by noises when I’m trying to really concentrate on something. Especially when I’m immersed in a bout of OCD thoughts (which are always on foundations of math etc.) and feel like I need to go through them and have them make sense before I can enjoy anything else.
Fortunately the OCD has been getting better the past year or so (probably due to a combination of my continual work on the underlying concepts, escitalopram, and reduced external stress) and I’m not nearly as stressed out by various noises as I once was.
But it can still bug me pretty easily, and I usually end up moving to another room or playing white noise on the computer when someone’s watching TV or having a decently loud conversation nearby.
I think I used to be able to ignore meaningful noise fairly easily when I was a kid such that it didn’t really prevent me from thinking efficiently, but since early adolescence it definitely has. I guess just because I know more and am thinking about more difficult things a lot of the time now.
I don’t have any really good advice about methods to deal with it other than isolating yourself from it via acoustically insulating materials (earplugs, fingers in ears, closing doors, soundproofing rooms) or playing non-annoying noise to squelch it out. Maybe in the future we can modify ourselves so as to be able to disconnect the cochlear nerve input at will. Though there would be some safety issues with that.
The vast majority of the time when I was in my room at university last year (included while sleeping), I had my laptop running white noise in a loop via iTunes and listened to it via medium-sized ear-covering headphones (i.e. not earbuds, but also not giant DJ headphones).
I used the one-minute free “brown noise” clip from http://whitenoisemp3s.com/free-white-noise ; I’m not aiming to specifically endorse that site but it’s the best clip I’ve found so far. “Brown noise” apportions more of its power in the lower frequency ranges, which at least for me is easier on the ears than “white noise” proper.
Similarly I mention iTunes by name because it’s the only music player I’ve tested so far that will play a loop without inserting a skip (i.e. a fraction of a second of silence) between the end of the current instance of the loop and the start of the next. I know that Windows Media Player and RealPlayer don’t have this capability. So far I haven’t bothered to test other media players.
Unfortunately neither model of iPod I’ve tried is capable of looping without skipping; I’ve tested a 2004 20GB Classic and a 2008 4GB Nano. I don’t imagine that more recent models have this capability, but I could be wrong.
I’m not sure about iPhones and comparable devices from other manufacturers; I’d say they’re more likely to be able to play loops without skipping since they have more general-purpose operating systems and so might have more flexibility in how the playback is handled. But I don’t have one and have never tested it.
It seems like a firmware update could make all the iWhatevers capable of looping without skipping. But maybe not. And even if it could, I’m not sure there’s enough demand for the company to work on the issue.
I guess you could modify it yourself, but that would require a level of competence I don’t have, and I’d be wary about downloading unauthorized patches unless there were very good evidence that they would actually work and didn’t include some hidden malicious component.
Also, someone told me last weekend that most if not all linux distributions include a command that lets you direct the output of a pseudorandom function to the speakers/headphones/etc.
Which would produce possibly-more-grating white noise rather than brown noise. I’m not sure how easy it would be to make a certain subset of the random function more probable so as to skew the frequency spectrum, but I imagine you could do so if you know enough.
The headphones I have are the noise-canceling variety but to be honest I wouldn’t have paid extra for the noise-canceling feature if I’d tested them first; it doesn’t really work too well.
The most it can truly eliminate are relatively time-uniform, lower-frequency background noises like the whirr of HVAC, fans, dishwashers, etc, which at least for me aren’t a source of annoyance, and actually are usually helpful in that they can mask annoying sounds like unwanted talking and music.
