Autism related anxiety and silence

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Anxiety caused by autism spectrum related disorder is quite different it seems, compared to anxiety from non autism related disorders. For me, silence can help with anxiety sometimes. Especially complete silence. I do that mostly by keeping windows closed at home and turning tv off and so on.

Can you explain if silence helped sometimes with your anxiety, and if yes, did you achieve this silence by closing windows like i did or how? and how did the silence help?

thanks.

TBH, only if I went outside and sat still. Not technically silence, though. If inside, I usually would just go to sleep to resolve the anxiety. Hope that helps.

I'm incapable of experiencing silence. I have 24/7 bilateral tinnitus.

It started in 2008. I even hear it in my dreams.

I'm an all-or-nothing chick, unfortunately.

The only good news about it is that it started after seeing Ozzy in concert.

It didn't start straight away though. Maybe three days later.

I'll forgive Ozzy just this once, if he's the reason.

I've found that silence can have a calming effect. But it's not easy for me to find silence, especially when I'm living in a city. The nearest I can get to it most of the time is when I run a fan or play pink noise through the hi-fi. I find it almost as good as true silence. The brain soon loses interest in constant, smooth sound, and then my thoughts are less interrupted. Having my thoughts interrupted usually feels frustrating, and I think frustration leads to stress and anxiety.

Silence makes me anxious, so i always have to have background noise. I am p. Much always listening to music and daydreaming.

Oh yes I love silence. It was bliss today when my husband and daughter went off to work and college after a week of them both at home with me. I love them but they are so noisy.

I've tried silence. And it works for about 2 minutes. Then my mind wanders back to what was making me anxious in the first place.

I stumbled on a solution for me. I play classical piano sonatas. Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin. My brain can understand the sound better because it's only one musical instrument. It's structured, predictable and calming. I put them on repeat and let them go while I do something else. I think it reduces my anxiety because "I" control what I'm hearing. No commercials, no interruptions, no vocals, no emotional tugs. It's all abstract. Except when Chopin gets in your face, and takes over the room sometimes.

I think my motor neurons are firing while I hear the music, trying to figure out how to play the music I'm hearing. It's all subconscious of course. But it's brain activity that takes me away from my anxiety for a while.

Silence? What's that again? Living below inconsiderate f***s like our upstairs neighbours, silence is completely denied for me.

Silence causes a lot of anxiety for me. If there's too much silence, I hear voices of things that people say to me. I need to have constant background music, especially when I'm sleeping. I enjoy classical, meditation music, jazz and military music (mostly German).

I have a constant inner monologue running so if it's silent outside my head, I only have the inner monologue.

If it's noisy around me, I have that noise to contend with PLUS the inner monologue. It's deafening with both, so I like silence around me so I can only hear one of them rabbiting on.

e.g. at the moment my inner monologue is singing 'When in Rome' very loudly, talking about how someone annoyed me at work many years ago, planning how we are going to move house soon, and complaining about the ironing I have to do in a minute

I don't have an autism related anxiety.

What I have is either hormonal, emotionally state based or purely situational due to EF issues -- than generalized intolerance and overwhelm of many things directly tied from autism.


Silence doesn't make me 'less anxious', a working, functional internal automatic self regulation does.

And I wish I have that 100% at the time -- but due to multiple factors, it's not always the case.

Silence itself is not what regulates (or dysregulates) me.

In part, sure, but it's not always the solution -- I have to understand if it meant because I need to rest my head, rest my hearing or rest whatever decoding systems I've been overusing in my head -- or not since if it's not, silence won't be a solution.

It's actually several, multiple and likely unpredictable and many are unavoidable factors -- ranging from which reproductive cycle I'm at, if and when I had abused my senses, if and when I got upset/happy/etc. during whatever specific situation that I suddenly cared too much, my sleep quality, my breathing, how much I worked out, what I ate, if the damn nose isn't blocked/dripping/making too much noise/itchy to annoy the heck out of me, etc.

Then if a situation happens during X, Y or Z state...
Or if the trigger exists during such time, or if the trigger suddenly does not exist because of A, B or C state.

There are states that makes me anxious, there are states that only makes my body anxious yet my mind is not, and there are states that makes my mind anxious yet my feelings are not, there are states that gives me emotions and drives me to have anxious thought and to me, they're annoying than worrying.

So many, it's maddening to try and track them all.


In another note; I miss true silence.

I also have tinnitus. Both ears. My left ear is particularly louder and on higher pitch than my right.

Likely caused by; partially disregarding sensory intensities combined with possibly a form of digital addiction back when I was a teenager (habit), and decades of ear pressure due to constant sneezing messed up my ears (a complication) it particularly messed up my left ear.

However, unlike most accounts I've read so far, I'm not particularly bothered by it.
I can truly imagine why it can be annoying -- I imagine days, years of my struggle breathing through the nose and all the trouble it caused.
No amount of silence could remove it or help me ignore it.

But for some reason, tinnitus just doesn't do that for me. I don't understand how or why am I not reactive towards something like this.

... Also covering both my ears with both my palms and fingers tapping on the back of my head method partially works for me; it only 'lowers' the left ear volume in my case; and it eliminated much of my right ear's tinnitus for a time though.


Well, I have sensory thresholds (a point when I'd start feeling overwhelmed and stressed, silence would give me a 'rest'), and I have sensory tolerance (which is high apparently) that I'm not dependent on silence as a 'comfort zone' -- to a point that I can take painful hyperacusis as painful yet not particularly anxiety inducing.

I do not have misophonia to be anxious about particular noises, nor have to rely that much on silence to specifically calm me down.

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