Question about sensory overload from sounds.

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I was wondering for you people who get sensory overload from sounds have you ever tried this:

Just focus your mind on something else and ignore the sounds.

Like if you having a conversation with someone and their are a lot of noises around, just ignore the sounds and focus on their words and your conversation.

Or if you walking down the street and their are too much noises, just focus your mind on something else like getting to your destination. Just ignore the sounds.

Does doing this yelp you, just focus your mind on something and ignore the sounds?

Yes, I've tried it and no, it doesn't work for me.

me, neither.

It's actually kind of hard to imagine that someone with this issue would not try that at some point... it's a pretty obvious thing to try.



I can't separate a voice from the background noise very well, so ignoring the noise doesn't work here. If it's very noisy, I can't follow what someone is saying at all (especially when there are other voices in the background). If it's not quite that noisy, it takes a lot of mental effort to follow what someone says, and it's quite exhausting.



Basically, for some noise that's not too intense I can ignore it, but only by shutting out everything. I can't just ignore some sounds and pay attention to another very well, and a lot of noise or certain types of noise will cause an overload regardless. So I guess it helps in some cases, but not most.

The whole thing with being autistic and having sensory overload is that you can't block out sounds. Do you even know anything about sensory overload?

No I do not, I am one of the people on the spectrum who doesn't get sensory overload. Which is one reason I made this thread, to learn more.

Perhaps you should research it. You weren't asking questions though, you were basically saying "have you ever just tried not having sensory overload?"

That's like saying "have you ever just tried not being autistic?" It's not something that comes with an off button.

It doesn't work. You just wind up being more frustrated.

I'm autistic, yet I've never really had one of those noise over load thingies you guys speak of!

The best research is to ask others who experience it, to hear from them first hand.

I didn't say "have you ever just tried not having sensory overload?" , I just asked what happens when you tried to ignore or block the sounds out.

Yes.



No, because it never works. If anything, it pushes me into overload faster.

I am incapable of simply ignoring the sounds at will -- I can't regulate my attention well enough, and many of the sounds that cause overload also cause pain (hurts my ears) that would be difficult to ignore even if I had normal attention-regulating abilities....when I went for an auditory processing assessment, the audiologist wound up skipping the first part of the tests because my hearing is so sensitive that the sound involved was loud enough to be excruciating.

Last edited by animalcrackers on 31 Mar 2013, 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Under some conditions I can tune everything out, but usually I can't tune anything out. I use things like headphones to assist, at least when I had headphones.

Difficult, I have tinnitus so I've pretty much got sensory overload all the time.

I've had it all my life, and sometimes I can't ignore it, so when there are a lot of added sounds I may get a little grumpy, or go somewhere more quiet, put my head in my hands and wait until I can rally.

Sitting here now the ringing in my ears is pretty constant.

Being sound sensitive can be awful, but when you can't get away from the sounds it can be quite difficult sometimes.

I'm trying to think of a way to explain it...

imagine you've got a backpack on. everything that stresses you out goes into the backpack. suddenly dropping 60lbs into your pack because somebody yelled at you but then apologized and bought you lunch and took that 60lbs out of your stress backpack wouldn't break you, necessarily. however if you were already carrying around 95lbs then suddenly adding 10lbs might easily have you lying on the ground.

with people who get sensory overload, the physical environment they're in is like a constant addition of weight to their coping-backpack. if the sun is shining really brightly through my living room windows I've got another 10lbs on my back for as long as it keeps shining. if my mom starts vacuuming that's another 20 for however long she does it. if I can only carry 100lbs then on a day I slept in and I'm lying in bed in my PJs and my boyfriend just made me breakfast in bed and told me I'm an amazing person, a car alarm is not going to make me have a meltdown. however, if I'm trying to figure out how to pay off my student loans and the walls are a really bright color of red and the neighbors are fighting and I can hear it through the wall, shining a flashlight in my eyes might be enough of a sudden jolt that I lose it.

that said I might be able to carry 110lbs for a while, but the longer I have to do it the crankier I get, and the less you'd have to increase the weight for me to have a meltdown. so it's not that there's a clearly defined threshold of "this is too much sensory information for me to handle", or "when it's noisy I can't concentrate on what people are saying", it's that dealing with things takes endurance, and things that individually might not bother us too much can all add up together and cause a meltdown, or things that we can deal with for a little while may eventually wear us out and cause a meltdown even if we can handle them for 10 minutes or an hour or even a week or a year.

it's almost never just one thing. it's almost never an issue of what we're concentrating on, or even what we're aware of.

it's a subconscious thing. I've had plenty of meltdowns, especially before I was diagnosed and knew what was going on, where I would start crying or be *really* angry without even knowing the reason why. often whatever I was dealing with emotionally when a noise or other sensation sent me over the edge I'd suddenly think was a bigger deal than it was, because I didn't understand that what overloaded my coping ability wasn't just inside me. nobody tells you "maybe the color orange will make you cry sometimes", but if I've got enough other stuff on my plate, sticking me in a brightly lit room painted some color I don't like and with a tv on would make me lose it and drop out of school or quit my job when putting me in a quiet dimly lit room painted a color I picked would make me go back to work and be fine for 6 months.

it can be acute (car alarms or blaring stereos do this to me) but often it's subtle and just slowly exhausts me emotionally without me necessarily even noticing it.

intensity is a factor. length of exposure is a factor. change from the norm is a factor (someone saying my name at normal volume in a quiet room can make me jump out of a chair, but a jackhammer in the middle of manhattan at noon wouldn't be as big a deal.) it can get really complicated.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfNB-RtqEyY[/youtube]

Perhaps this is slightly unnecessarily aggresive, specially since DVCal is asking, not stating.

Anyway, DVCal, it's not a matter of concentracion. You just can't filter. You hear everything around, no matter you want or not, or you concentrate in anything (a conversation, or a not audotry stimulus) or not.

As advantage, you're always the first one to hear the pizza guy even before he rings the bell.