Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Sound sensitivity is not a fault in your hearing. Under threat the ear opens out towards high and low sounds, the range that carries warning, and that is the range which makes ordinary life feel loud.
Screeching, growling, humming, scraping: those are the frequencies that signal alarm in the animal world, and a system on guard widens to catch them. It is common after trauma, and it turns up in autism and sensory difficulties too. The reframe helps, because the answer becomes building safety rather than being told to stop being so sensitive.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'He who endowed you with hearing, sight, and understanding' (Quran 67:23). Hearing is a gift doing its job, even when its setting is turned up further than you would like.
قُلۡ هُوَ ٱلَّذِيٓ أَنشَأَكُمۡ وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرَ وَٱلۡأَفۡـِٔدَةَۚ قَلِيلࣰ ا مَّا تَشۡكُرُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘It is He who brought you into being, He who endowed you with hearing, sight, and understanding- what small thanks you give!’
Qur’an 67:23read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of chronic pain found altered perception of the body's internal state, and carefully separated accuracy, self-reported sensitivity and awareness of one's own awareness. Perception genuinely shifts with a condition rather than with attitude. That is a different sense in a different population, so it stands as a parallel rather than direct evidence about hearing.
Di Lernia D, Serino S, Riva G. (2016). Pain in the body. Altered interoception in chronic pain conditions: A systematic review.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A system expecting danger listens wider, so more of the world arrives as noise.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Stand on one foot for half a minute, a hand on a chair if you need it, and put all your attention into the foot on the floor.
If your usual trouble is going blank, feeling unreal or watching yourself from a distance, this is the kind of work that tends to reach that.
A child at the nursery door who charms you, then rages, then crumples is running through the whole repertoire in ninety seconds. Nothing has gone wrong yet.