Sound Sensitivity

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Loud or unexpected sounds create a sense of urgency for me. I wish I could just wear noise canceling headphones all the time because I love the peace that comes over my body when I have them on. Unfortunately I can’t do this because I have to appear normal at work and am embarrassed of the whole situation.


Alternative options to headphones?

There are earplugs for noise sensitivity that filter out background noise, but you can still hear speech like in ANC heaphones. I can recommend Loops, I wanted to give a try to Vibes as well. Earplugs appear less obvious in my opinion, but not all people find them comfortable.

Depends where you are. I've got a few speakers around my house connected up to an mp3 player which plays rain and thunder sound effects to drown out incoming noises. It works quite well, but it's not very portable.

These days a lot of employers will make reasonable accomodations.
The difficulty with Aspies is that our needs differ too much from person to person so they won't know what you need unless you speak up.

I can wear my headphones at work whenever I need to, just like anywhere else these days. The awkwardness decreases with practice. I use Loop earplugs whenever I don't want headphones and they work well for me.

There is nothing wrong with using accommodations to make your life more bearable. Employers, on the whole would rather have a healthy, productive employee who is capable of advocating for themself. I have only had one negative experience, and that was someone telling me it was rude to wear headphones in public, but that was a random stranger who was asked to leave the store after trying to grab my headphones.

I have very bad sound sensitivity. There's one person at my clubhouse who likes to belt his words into his karaoke microphone and it really pierces though my eardrums.

High fidelity earplugs should help at loud bars, concerts, and movie theaters.

I recommend a white noise machine in your workspace