this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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ADHD
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How fascinating! I've never come across the coffitivity thing before - I surprisingly don't hate it, though it does slow my reading speed down a fair bit. I honestly don't know yet if I like it or not. It probably wouldn't help my speech discrimination any, but it doesn't seem to overload me.
Brown noise is incredibly soothing (even moreso if you throw in some rain sound on top...) - white and pink are a lot harsher, but not stressful per se.
Prisencolinensinainciusol doesn't bother me any.
I mainly get triggered by the henhouse noises of parties and the like - people scream-laughing out of nowhere, and waves of noise building up and crashing as people successively talk over each other until they can't any more, then reset. Not just chaos, but stabby chaos.
I guess having an undercurrent of structure under the chaotic music (and not having the dynamics of someone sharpening a knife on a broken plate) helps, though I'm not sure that's a sufficient explanation.
I suspect also that the problem tends to lie in too many pieces you can put together, making it too hard to tune out, and so ending up with too many balls to juggle at once.
Hmm.
Maybe try listening to some "discordant" music and see how you respond? This https://youtu.be/RPUXsqshayk song is particularly jerky at times but still follows a recognizable structure. It might make an interesting boundary test.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/RPUXsqshayk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Do you have a degree of social anxiety? Over the years I've noticed that multiple sources of sensory input get overwhelming when I'm stressed. If I feel in control and "calm" I can just mentally filter it all as a single background noise but if my anxiety is real bad or I'm upset about something else I feel like I'm being assaulted from all sides.
If I'm at a bar with friends I'm comfortable with and we're relaxed and chatting then I'm fine. The music and myriad of conversations all just become a single background noise. Drinking probably helps.
If I'm struggling to accomplish some task and it's really getting to me, any noise from multiple sources puts me on edge and I'll do pretty much anything to stop it.
And if it's not an anxiety thing for you, it might just be that it's from multiple sources. Sensory overload isn't usually a physical thing, it's how our brain interprets it, which means our state of mind or even our perception matters. The music you listen to you know is coming from one place: your headphones/speakers. You know it's meant to work together so your brain can file that away as a single thing to comprehend. A noisy party with 20 different conversation that you know are all separate? Your brain is trying to view them all separately and ADHD can make you want to interpret all of them.
I think that last bit is most likely and could just be the basic of what your brain is doing. But for me personally, stress triggers my brains inability to filter all background noise as a single "noise" because it's on high alert fight-or-flight mode and on the lookout for dangers so it's taking everything in that it can to locate the danger.
I think something like that coffitivity thing could help you acclimatize you to it if you're looking to change your reaction. Train your brain to view that kind of noise as a singular source and not 100 different sources. And with the internet being what it is, there's almost definitely something out there that will imitate whatever environment you're wanting to adjust to.