#hearing sensitivity

I cover my ears because I was yelled at my whole childhood and have severe trauma with loud noises

Last night I was sitting in my college's cafe, while a friend was on shift for a few hours. For some background information, they play music pretty loud from some speakers, and there was an event that evening which brought a lot of people in to the cafe (so lots of audible voices).

I thought for the first 30 to 45 minutes there, that the noise level was fine, that it was not a bother to me. But around the hour mark, I was beginning to feel increasingly more fatigued. Eventually, it reached a point where I was rereading passages from my book over and over, because I was struggling to take in and process the words on the pages. When I could not focus on it anymore, I gave up, and instead found myself occasionally zoning out, staring out the window or at the table. I had to shake myself a few times, when I realized what I was doing.

I deliberated over putting my ear defenders on, but I could not bring myself to use them with so many people around. So, I convinced myself after a while to leave and find somewhere quieter within the college's campus center.

In a more isolated spot, I put my ear defenders on, and immediately felt a wave of calm wash over me. Despite that though, I still found myself crying, curled up, with my face buried in my knees.

What brings me to believe this is a matter of auditory processing, instead of it being due to my introverted nature, is that I hardly interacted with people in the cafe last night. The only times were when two or three people asked me about if seats were taken. Sure there were a lot of people there, but social drain is primarily the result of engaging in conversations, or other social activities, for long periods of time. Considering this, simply sitting in that Cafe, reading and keeping to myself, should not socially drain me to a great extent like that.

I can see how I would associate the fatigue with socializing; gatherings of people tend to involve a decent amount of noise. I believe I may have been overlooking the noise factor (as being a potential causation for the fatigue), because I was under the preconception that it was the human factor (along with mental health factors) that were the primary cause.

I told a friend about this late last night, saying that I still cannot feel sure about this, even though it sounds very possible. She told me, "I think it is okay to not be sure." She continued on, saying something along the lines of: if you have gone this long without being aware that this is a possibility, then that means this is not something you can easily be sure of for the time being.

i wear headphones most of the time, but hardly ever listen to anything through them - it’s mainly for making things less loud because i have pretty great hearing but not great processing of the sensory information in general, if that makes sense? (So I get overwhelmed + ill by places that are loud, bright, busy, etc because the sensory information isn’t processed ‘properly’.)

The audiologist explained that wearing headphones or ear defenders is a good and fine coping technique to a degree, but that it can make your hearing more sensitive - apparently being in silence or quiet puts part of your basic brain on high alert, because the fact that you’re not getting background auditory information from your environment makes part of your brain think the silence is because there’s a predator, and that ‘the other animals have all gone quiet so they won’t be discovered’. Obviously when you’re making things quiet with headphones it’s not because there’s danger, and we’re not generally in that sort of situation at all, but the part of your brain that goes on high alert means you’re straining to pick up on sounds that you can’t hear (either well, or at all) in the hope that you’ll be able to detect the ‘cause’ of the silence from an environmental perspective, so your hearing gets more sensitive to try to protect you. (Plus, it can also apparently make you background stressed, because a part of your brain is trying to reconcile the fact that you’re in a situation that it thinks should be loud with the fact that you’re not picking up on those sounds because of your headphones/ear defenders)

Listening to white noise or nature sounds is meant to counteract both parts of that - it gives you some background noise to focus on (but noise that’s nonintrusive and easier to block out than people sounds) so your brain isn’t straining through silence + making you more sensitive to sounds, and also reassures that basic part of your brain that freaks out when it doesn’t have background noise by telling it that your environment is safe.