Auditory System Unwinding: A Personal Reflection 

This is another personal story I wanted to share following the completion of my blog series on nervous system unwinding across various systems of the body. In this entry, I’m focusing on the auditory unwinding of nervous system dysregulation through the lens of my own experience, particularly within the Auditory system.

It’s been quite an eye-opening experience revisiting my past blog posts about nervous system unwinding. When I re-read them, I start remembering things as far back as my childhood. It’s almost as if I can trace a thread through the various aspects of my life and see how they tie into the patterns of my nervous system’s responses.

So, here we are. At the auditory system. A system that, if I’m honest, I’ve been aware of having issues with since I was very young.

Ages 2 Thru 18

As some of you may know, I’ve written before about my fall from a bunk bed when I was about two years old. I don’t have memories of the event itself, only what was told to me afterward. I fell asleep on the top bunk and landed straight on my face. While I can’t recall the trauma directly, certain things related to my jaw and face have lingered over the years. I often thing that this is a source of where my nervous system dysregulation may have started.

Something that I heard repeated often as I grew older were comments on how sensitive I was to sound. My parents told me stories of me being particularly sensitive to blender or food processors sounds. The sound of those appliances would make me cry. Apparently, another thing that would make me cry was when my dad would burp loudly.

Both of my parents mentioned that my sensitivity to sound began around the age of two. It was during the time we lived in a specific house. Which coincided with the period when I was about two to three years old. This is also right after the fall from the bunk bed.

As I continued to grow, I noticed more experiences with sound that seemed to cause some discomfort. When I was taking dance classes, I remember the sound of tap dancing being particularly jarring at first. Over time, I got used to it, and eventually I started to enjoy the rhythms of the taps. But it’s interesting to reflect on how that sound seemed to stir something in me initially.

When I was in high school, on the weekends I would go to my dad’s office to clean for extra money. I was setting the alarm system for the building, but I made a mistake with the code. And the alarm went off. The sound was absolutely piercing, and I’ll never forget how traumatizing it was. It scared me to death. Even after that experience, I was constantly paranoid whenever I had to go back to disarm or arm it. I remember one time, I forgot something inside and needed to go back. But I was so afraid of triggering the alarm again that I sat in the car for half an hour. I waited for the alarm to go through its cycle before I even dared to enter.

2020 to Present

Fast forward to 2020, when my illness started worsening. It seems like everything I went through back then triggered major responses in my body. One night, I was driving home. I was having issues in my left arm, (which I still have issues with it to this very day).

My left arm was tense and I was holding it in a stiff position at 12 o’clock on the steering wheel. My right arm rested more comfortably. I was driving through a tunnel. Suddenly, a car behind me revved up very loudly and sped past me and the other many cars within the tunnel. The sound was so overwhelming that I could literally feel it in my arm. It was as if the noise was penetrating through my whole body. My system instantly went into fight-or-flight mode. My heart rate increased, my breathing quickened, and I was physically shaken by the experience. That moment was a major trigger, and it flared up a lot of my symptoms.

One thing that stands out from that time is the ringing in my ears. From 2020 to 2023, I experienced a strange shift in it. I likely had been dealing with it for years and grown accustomed to it. It was so weird because during this period, there were moments when the sound would abruptly stop. It would leave an abrupt and unsettling silence. The contrast was jarring, and in those quiet moments, the ringing would become almost deafening, especially when everything else seemed to stand still. The intensity of the ringing coming and going appeared to heighten during my most challenging periods of illness.

Another experience I had during the 2020 to 2023 period was frequent popping in my ears. While I’ve been accustomed to this sensation for quite some time, it became much more pronounced in recent years, especially after I stopped pursuing additional therapies or modalities that could interfere with my system’s natural process of self-regulation. The ear popping often occurs when I swallow or yawn, but sometimes it happens unexpectedly, even when I’m stretching

Reflecting

Looking back on these experiences, I’ve started to consider the concept of auditory unwinding and what it might look like within my own nervous system.

Could my heightened sensitivity to sound from a young age have been one of the first signs of nervous system dysregulation? It seems possible. As I’ve learned more about how the nervous system functions, it becomes clear that early traumatic events, like a fall from the bunk bed, could have shaped how my nervous system processes sound and other sensory input. The intense reactions I’ve had to certain noises, the ringing in my ears, and the physical sensations I experience all point to a deeper issue within my nervous system.

Video about Auditory Sensitivity: Misophonia, Phonophobia, and Hyperacusis: Auditory Sensitivity and Mental Health