I just turned my music down.
Why is this important? Well, at the same time, I also pulled up a reminder that I wanted to talk about different kinds of background noise when it comes to being neurodivergent and trying to create an environment for focus.
So. Timing.
The most important thing to state here is that this is what works for me; it is not a recipe for perfection for everyone with some form of neurodivergence.
I have often been asked “Why don’t you put on headphones?” as a way to resolve issues with noise in a space. The answer is: I can’t. It doesn’t work for me.
I saw a video recently where it was a skit between two people (one ND, one NT) discussing how they parsed the conversation flowing around them in a crowded room.
For the neurotypical person, they focused in on the person they were speaking with, tuning out everything in the background.
For the neurodivergent person, they pointed out that every single conversation in the room was equally audible. It became a mashup in their head, making it nearly impossible to focus on the conversation with the person near them, because their brain gave equal weight to the conversation going on at the next table over.
I saw this and screamed “YES” because that’s it. Exactly.
Add in random background noise, which my brain also cheerfully elevates to high importance level, and hearing becomes difficult. I have to look at someone and see their lips moving. I don’t read lips. But I have to be able to put the two things together to get my brain to remember that THAT is the particular sound to pay attention to and parse.
I do not do well in crowded or loud environments.
This also means that when I’m in my office, and there are sudden noises coming out of the arts studio down the hall, my brain is constantly picking up on them as Important Must Pay Attention things rather than relegating them to background.
The reason why putting on noise cancelling headphones to pipe music into my ears does not work is because putting it CLOSER to me makes it WORSE. Headphones scream “most important” to my brain, and thus, that becomes the focus thing. Not the words on my screen. Not the task at hand. Certainly not writing.
I suspect this may be a similar problem with notifications on my phone or Discord or whatever… brain promptly elevates their status, and I can’t function until I look at them. Side point, letting it go.
Anyway.
Right now I’m listening to a playlist made up of songs from anime I’ve watched—opening credits, endings, insert songs. And I just turned it down, because even having it be very familiar music in a language not my own was too much today. I needed it to be even more distance from. (Yes, it’s playing on speakers—no headphones here).
Does this affect me only when I’m trying to write or work? Nope.
I wear earplugs when I sleep, because if there is noise, it will wake me up. My brain is very insistent on that importance level of the things it hears.
Husband loves white noise, and I hate it. I find the chirping of night bugs, or running of water, or rumbling thunder all very distracting, yes, even when I’m sleeping. I tune in rather than tune out.
And the funny thing is, yes, he’s ADHD too. And I know so many people who have ADHD who find white noise to be something that saves them. Without it, they can’t focus. And I do get that.
Hell, as a teenager, I studied to top 40 hits on my radio, then replayed songs in my head to remember what I was reading at the time when the song played (and then would reread the page in my head, man I wish my memory worked that well now!).
So as I said at the start: not everyone who is neurodivergent processes things the same way. For me, I like having sound, but I need it be distant enough from me that I can put it aside, and it needs to be predictable in some way and not grate on my skin/eardrums.
(Just hit fast forward because that song had autotune which was absolutely distracting.)
Anyway. There are side points to this, like my discovery that I can process audiobooks, but had to figure out when and how they worked for me. And the knowledge that something that is background in one place might be distracting in another. And the fact that things change over time as our brains change (and in my case, apparently as my hormones change—did you know that menopause affects ADHD? SIGHS. Yeah, I know that too, now…).
Oh, and the different kinds of music that are required for different projects. Currently anime music works for me. Eventually I’ll go back to overly familiar pop punk. Or classical piano and guitar (wrote a whole book to that particular soundtrack).
But the short version is, figuring out what worked for me helped increase focus. And there are still days when I don’t know the answer, and wish I could tune everything out with earplugs in public spaces, but the flipside of everything is that when I’m not sleeping, I kind of freak out when I can’t hear the world around me. So.
Aren’t brains fun?