One thing I have learned about myself in the last several years is that I am a sensory avoidant person. Sounds that other people seem to tune out without trying, like a ticking fan, a hum in the walls or a far-off car, stay in the foreground for me.
One of the few things that has helped me with this is earplugs and active noise-cancelling headphones. The grocery store is one of my primary triggers for a shutdown. When I wear ear defenders or earplugs there, the shutdown is much less severe, if it happens at all. When I do have a shutdown in the store, I tend to go non-verbal.
Recently I found out they help at night too. Last night I slept better than I have in a very long time, and the only thing I changed was sound. For years I thought I was just bad at falling asleep. It turns out my nervous system wasn't getting the quiet it needed to settle.
The night
It happened by accident. I'd had a challenging day, so I put on my over-ear active noise-cancelling headphones to cut down the noise while I relaxed to a YouTube documentary about elephants. I fell asleep with them still on.
It was so quiet. The room didn't disappear, but everything my brain usually has to fight through faded out. I fell asleep without the usual long stretch of lying there listening, and I stayed asleep.
That one night told me something I'd been missing: my trouble sleeping is likely sensory. When the sound goes away, the sleep shows up.
The morning after
I woke up feeling refreshed. Then I took the headphones off, and I felt disoriented.
Looking back, it makes sense. I went from hours of near-silence straight into the full soundscape of the house, all at once. A few things were probably happening together:
- Contrast. My brain had spent the whole night in quiet. When the headphones came off, every sound it normally filters, or struggles to filter, arrived at the same moment.
- Turned-up sensitivity. After a stretch of reduced sound, the brain tends to raise its sensitivity for a while. Ordinary sounds can seem louder and sharper than usual. For someone who is already sound-sensitive, that's a big jump.
- The noise cancelling itself. Some people feel a slight pressure or odd sensation from active noise cancelling. Taking the headphones off removes that suddenly, too.
- Just waking up. Coming out of deep sleep is when my system is least ready to process a lot at once.
It felt the same way it does when I'm getting overwhelmed. So it wasn't an unfamiliar feeling, but I definitely kept an eye on it. It faded once I put in my noise-reducing earplugs.
The fix I stumbled into
To cope, I put in my filtering earplugs, the kind that lower the volume of the world without blocking it out completely.
Normally in the morning I can hear the whole outside world: cars on the road, the fan we leave on for white noise, and the plethora of little noises the house makes. My earplugs turn all of that down. This time, they turned the disorientation down too.
I didn't plan it this way, but it worked as a step down. Less sound than the open room, more than total silence. My system got to ease into the day instead of being dropped into it.
The catch: hearing my own bones
There's one thing I don't like about my earplugs. With them in, I can hear my bones moving, and my own voice gets loud inside my head. Without meaning to, I start whispering.
This has a name: the occlusion effect. Normally, sounds from your own body (your voice, chewing, footsteps, joints) travel through your bones and mostly escape out of your open ear canal. When an earplug seals the canal, that sound gets trapped and amplified, especially the low tones. Your brain judges how loud you're talking by what you hear inside your head. So when your voice sounds louder, you automatically drop your volume.
That also explains something people have told me for years: that I talk too quietly or too loudly without realizing it. Earplugs make that more likely.
What's Next
What started as an accident might turn into a routine:
- Falling asleep: noise-cancelling headphones.
- Waking up: switch the headphones to transparency or ambient mode for a few minutes before taking them off. Or start a familiar steady sound, like rain, before removing them.
- Easing in: filtering earplugs while I get going, with the lights low and no screens for a few minutes.
- Settled: nothing, or the earplugs again if the day gets loud.
One great night is a clue, not a cure. Here's how I plan to turn it into better sleep more often:
- Make it a real experiment. Wear the headphones for a week or two and jot down a line each morning: how long it took to fall asleep, whether I woke up, and how I felt. That turns a lucky night into something I can show my doctor.
- Figure out what did the work. Was it the silence, or the steady, calm sound of the documentary? I'll try some nights with noise cancelling alone and some with a familiar, low-key sound playing, and see which helps more.
- Quiet the room itself. The fan we run for white noise is also one of the sounds I'm blocking. A quieter fan or a dedicated white-noise machine could help on nights I don't wear anything.
- Wind down on hard days. That night came after a challenging day, when I was already lowering my sensory input. Building that into the evening, like dimmer lights, less noise and something calming, may help my system settle before bed.
- Plan the landing. Keep the earplugs by the bed so the morning step-down is ready, instead of scrambling for it once the noise hits.
Here is to a better night sleep, and perhaps feeling a little less tired throughout the day.