Dear Meg:

For a few years, you’ve been living with your boyfriend and your mother in a flat. The flat below yours has been rented to different students over the years. You can hear them talking, closing doors, etc. You wrote that even when it is quiet, you are worried: “Will I sleep, will I be able to sit normally in my living room”. You feel anxious, panicky at times, tense, nervous and helpless over the noise situation and the unpredictability of it. You’ve been “doing relaxations before bed, learning breathing deeply” in your efforts to relax this “Anxiety and panic over sounds”. You can’t afford moving out at this time and you worry that moving out will not solve the problem because there will be other neighbors in the next and next place. Also, “other noises aren’t scary for me”.

My input: you perceive the downstairs neighbors’ noise as a threat. This is why you feel fear about their noise. Other noises don’t bother you because you don’t perceive them as a threat. The fear developed over time because you couldn’t predict the noise, and you couldn’t feel safe that at any time it will be quiet. For example, you couldn’t count on 8pm- 12 pm to be quiet. No noise-safe zone for you.

What would be the point to relax and try to sleep between 8-10, if this is your bedtime, if so often before when you fell asleep at that time, or were just about to, you were awakened by their noises, is the worry.

At this point I have three suggestions but please post again because I may have more suggestions (I was in a very similar situation more than the one I mentioned to you):

1. Silicone earplugs (be careful to not push them in too far, keep them clean so to  avoid infection, use them according to instructions).

2. Noise machine, or it may be called sound machine or sleep soother, it is a small machine that produces a regular sound, such as rain, or ocean waves crashing against the shore, or a train motor sound, or whatever it is- a regular, non-changing sound that will give you the noise-predictability that you need throughout the night.

3. Check and see if you can get the neighbors’ attention and cooperation on closing the doors instead of slamming doors as well as not playing music or yelling or whatever they do between a certain hour to a certain hour, basically from your bedtime until the morning. If they cooperate, even if not  perfectly, you will feel better, or safer, simply because you know they try, that they care enough about your suffering to make an effort to be quieter.

– A noise is not as scary and distressing if we know that there is no intent on the part of the noise maker to harm us. So if they try to be quieter, the intent factor is gone and you will feel safer.

anita

Dear Meg:

“when I try to explain he don’t get it”- here is a way to explain it so that he can definitely understand: if you were able to record the neighbors’ noise and then increase the volume 200%- he will have an understanding of how you hear those noises.

When we are afraid of noises, we hear them much LOUDER than an individual who is not afraid of them.

It makes sense that there is a connection between your current noise sensitivity and your childhood experience of paying attention to noises your father made so to figure out if your fahter was drunk and what to do if he is.

At this point, your fear is focused on the neighbors’ noise- this is what I suggest, try it and let me know how it works for you: next night as you lie down ready to sleep, purposefully remember how it was when you were a child focusing on noises coming from your father. Remember what you heard, how it felt. It can help to bring back the original trauma to mind so to separate the present circumstances  from the past childhood circumstances. This way you will no longer have the past making the present sound louder than it is.

Does this make sense to you?

anita

Dear Meg:

What I suggested will work on the conscious, meaning you bring the past to your awareness for the purpose of –

– connecting your present-time fear of your neighbors’ sounds to your past-time fear of your father’s sounds.

Reads to me that your Trauma of childhood was that your father greatly disturbed your life for a long time. You feared him and therefore, your brain amplified his sounds so that you know what he is doing and protect yourself.

Fast forward, you are an adult, and your neighbors disturbed your sleep for a long time. Daily or nightly you fear that they will disturb your sleep yet again. Your brain does what it did before- amplify their sounds.

When you go to sleep tonight, simply have in mind the memories of childhood when you lay in bed and you heard your father come in the home, go  into his room, whatever it is that you heard. No need to analyze anything, to overthink- remember, that  is all.

Do not have any expectations of anything, just remember and try to relax into those memories.

I will be looking for your next post and we can continue to communicate as long as you want to.

anita