Need Feedback on Approach - Sound Sensitivity

A while ago I recovered from a sound sensitivity, triggered by a traumatic event a couple of years ago in which I developed insomnia for months after being unable to escape an intrusive sound in my apartment building while sleeping. It sounds small...but as the property did nothing to resolve it for way too long, it led to an awful feeling of being utterly stuck, my anxiety spiked to record highs, and I quite literally could not sleep for months.

The issue was originally fixed, though the insomnia continued long after that. I then became hyper-fixated on any "uneven" sounds emitted by the fan(s) we have in our room. My husband has always slept with a fan, and I prefer it to silence as well, but when it begins to develop the slightest sound, my nervous system kicks into high gear - sweating, heart pounding, obsessive thinking - and it leads to me being unable to sleep. I had overcome this a while ago, or so I thought.

The trigger has returned and my seeming inability to cope with it has led to some sleepless nights again. Now, I know the answer is "get a new fan!" "turn it off!" But I've come to learn those things prolong my fear rather than help me to work through it. I can't stress enough how slight this sound is. I KNOW I should be able to sleep through it and that the problem is not the noise, but the trigger that it is and the danger it represents to my nervous system.

I'm struggling with the right way to approach this, and am wondering if anyone has feedback. I want to overcome it. I am leaning towards exposure therapy in which I allow myself to try to sleep with the fan on and employ relaxation techniques like acceptance, affirmations, breathing. And just continuing on this track, while reminding myself it is not the end of the world if I have poor or interrupted sleep, and thinking that in time, I will become de-conditioned or de-sensitized to the stimulus. Has anyone on here ever done exposure therapy themselves? This would be flooding rather than the gradual form of exposure therapy.

I can't express how dumb this all makes me feel, but it is a very real fear response that I am struggling with. Thanks in advance for your feedback, all.

 

This will totally explain what is happening.
You can heal and fall back into old patters. Tanner did, and he offers hope that you can move through this.




Graduated exposure is part of Alan Gordon’s work. It is also basically how Dr. Sarno eventually (it’s not in his books) described how we get back to life.

Learning to address your overall physical anxiety response via Claire Weekes will help you with the anxious feeling that triggered your stress response. What you describe was fear of the physical sensations of anxiety (which is what somatic tracking addresses). Separately, address the emotional response you had to feeling a lack of control over your own sleeping preference and your unconscious anger that provokes. People often do this by journaling. Tanner mentions this.

 

Thank you both for your responses. I slept well for a few nights and had another sleepless night yesterday as I tried to sleep without drowning out the disruption. My anxiety felt like it was cyclically peaking throughout the night, and unfortunately, it felt very much like a setback. Today, I plan to re-read Dr. Weekes' book in hopes that it will remind me of the mindset and energy I need to approach this with... @Cactusflower I appreciated the video, and really find myself at a mixture stages. I spend my sleepless nights and the early mornings after steadily in stage 2 (fear, avoidance, despair), and then move to stage 4 (education, or in my case "re-education") and just barely into stage 5 (belief). I truly do jump around. But this helped me to trust the temporary nature of my current state...

@JanAtheCPA I appreciate your willingness and ability to cut right to the heart of it. Here is where I think I struggle... I have these terrible bouts of anxiety or pain flares that motivate me like no other to employ my healing strategies. And then, the nature of my symptoms - and typically also my anxiety - is that they calm down to near non-existent levels for a period of time, or the flares are smaller and more manageable for a while. And so my focus moves away from this work each time that occurs. I had really dedicated myself to journaling on a near daily basis for several weeks, and then followed one of the longest bouts of no symptoms I've had since this started. During that time, I also found out I was pregnant, so I haven't been sure if the relief was from the distracting news or the work I'd done up to that point. Since then though, the emotional work has been inconsistent.

I went back and read the reply to my post way back in October and this quote struck me "Self-judgement and self-pressure are not going to allow you to self-heal." ... this is so very true for me. Even when I am really working to be accepting, to let go, I am doing it with those two driving forces. No wonder it does not work. It is such a difficult thing.

I am still very fearful of so many things - physically, emotionally, mentally. I struggle very much with this. I understand that I need to do the work consistently, and not just for symptom cessation but because it will lead to a more authentic self and a better life. I really do hope one day I can come to this thread with a success story.