overwhelmed at night

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I have problems at night.

When I close my eyes, I get overwhelmed by the sounds. The creaks of the house, the wind blowing through the trees, the sounds of animals. If I am sleeping near a stream, I think I hear voices in the water.

Sometimes I become terrified, sometimes I just can't sleep. I have to drown out the sounds with music or an audiobook. When I was younger, I would have to read until I fell asleep.


Does anyone else have this issue?

Be glad you don't live in my neighborhood.
I live near a firehouse and a hospital, so you can imagine
the sirens I hear in the middle of the night.
I also live near an airport, so you can imagine the plane engines overhead.
It's not constant, but it's common.

I actually enjoy hearing natural sounds like crickets.
Wind blowing through the trees is nice.

Voices in the stream? Interesting ... I would simply hear water passing by.

Don't like dogs barking, don't like the occasional creaks, but oh well, I live with it.
My neighbors are, at this point in time, generally quiet.

Here's an idea, don't know if it will work for you, and it's kind of unusual.

How about, instead of focusing on how the sounds are keeping you awake?
You focus on, simply put, the sounds themselves?
Like the wind blowing through the trees ... simply acknowledge that it exists and is happening, and then move your thoughts on from it after accepting it.

As for the "voices in the water" ... is this your imagination at work?
Because that is a sound I know I would not want to focus on, so I would handle it a different way, depending on knowing more about what's causing the fear.

I can't live in cities or near busy roads. I don't sleep. It is better away from those things, but this spring the crickets got so loud that I was only getting a couple of hours of sleep a night.

I can actually live with that, but sometimes it gets bad, where the sounds become terrifying and overwhelming.

The cicadas were out in force this year.
And they happen to produce a sound I enjoy ... but that said,
I can easily see how it can be overwhelming.
Even many NTs complain about the noisy cicadas.

I had the cicadas and the Mormon crickets this spring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_cricket

I like them both, I just couldn't sleep, and neither of these terrify me.

Have you tried earplugs or ear defenders to block out the background noise?

This sounds like anxiety and hypervigilance , your mind is working overtime trying to interpret every sound you hear , analyse if it is dangerous and come up with good strategies to protect you. When your mind does this it can sometimes trick you into thinking a sound is a voice which elevates the anxiety making your mind work even harder - a vicous circle. You need to break the vicious circle , mindfulness might help?

I have tried earplugs and they work to a limited extent. It a more severe form of what I deal with all day. My mind tends to be stuck in overdrive and if I give if something to do, I can actually get work done. So when I need to write, I put in a movie that I have seen many times and like. I can consciously ignore it, and my subconscious has something to distract it.

At night, it is similar, but much more extreme, and it does produce a large amount of anxiety. It is like all my sense of hearing gets turned to 11, and I am acutely aware of touch. I have woken up at night thinking it was an earth quake and it was just the blood pumping through my ears.

Any sound can wake me instantly. If I am in a good place mentally, once I have identified it, I can go back to sleep, but if I am stressed out and anxious, I become terrified.

Audiobooks seem to be the best thing for me. I will have them playing softly on my ipod while I sleep and it seems to distract me from all of the other sounds.