Being deaf is: constant baseline soundmaking anxiety | Hacker News Reader

Being deaf is: constant baseline soundmaking anxiety

blog.melchua.com

96 pointsblackhole20 comments

This article hits home for me. I was born with a severe hearing loss, and I have recently got a Med-EL Opus2 / RONDO Cochlear Implant -- which changed my life for the better.

How?

It reduced so much stress, I was surprised that I was carrying so much. It was simply things like going to the toilet (you think, "am I going to make a really awful rude noise that everyone will hate me for?") or drinking your coffee ("is this awful?!")... even typing at work, or taking to a colleague and hoping that I wasn't interrupting someone else.

Then I realised: everyone else is simply bloody loud, they generally don't care about how loud they are when they're eating, shutting doors or chatting to someone. They don't. Only I did, I was the only one who constantly worried.

It wasn't the fact that I could suddenly hear things, which I could, it was realising that I was overthinking, overanalysing every situation with that sound was involved. That included _breathing_. I would literally slow my breathing if someone were to sit next to me on a bus. Severe anxiety due to sound.

I'm still very anxious if I am to watch a movie, in my own house, by myself... in fear I'd wake the neighbours on an adjourned property. (to put this in perspective, my wife came home and she couldn't even hear the movie in the next bedroom.)

THIS was seriously the hardest thong I've had to face but it's been worth it for the reduced stress and anxiety.

Thanks for posting this!

I'm thankful for your comment and the original's author article, it helped me realize I'm not (utterly) mad.

Even though I haven't been completely deaf in a fairly long time (some form of congenital defect, sorta fixed, on and off, will get worse again), I still have a very hard time judging loudness. The way I do most things - even mindlessly simple like walking, grabbing a pen on a table or eating - I minimize sound as much as possible, like not/barely touching the floor with my heels.

I know it's kind of ridiculous to most people, but I'm also not sure the same people quite realize how continuously stressful it is to have little to no feedback from a sense you should normally be able to rely on.

These behaviors have become second nature for the most part, but I still feel like I'm letting down everybody when I do make noise, on the few occasions where I'm not mindful of my actions.

As a bit of an aside, I find it interesting that the loss of a sense generally seems to bring about a completely different level of introspection and self-awareness, not better or worse, just profoundly different (or I'm completely biased).

If you were staying over at someone else's house, would you have found it welcoming for them to say something like, "oh and I'll text you if you make too much noise with anything."?

Most likely... not. That would make things awkward and more anxiety would result as you're trying to be even quieter so the host doesn't hear you!

Good thought though...

And being deaf doesn't seem to protect from other drawbacks: Some deaf people are very sensitive to vibrations, therefore when they want to sleep they need their relatives to shut doors very quietly.

> everyone else is simply bloody loud, they generally don't care about how loud they are when they're eating, shutting doors or chatting to someone

Except for the toilet noise you mentioned. Every person I talked to about this is worried about his/her toilet sounds. Just check how often you'll hear noises from an occupied stall when you're in a public restroom. In Japan toilets even have noise makers integrated or people carry noise makers to overplay their own sounds. Whenever I find myself in this situation I remind myself that I'm on a toilet and it was built for that purpose.

I once went to a dinner party at someone's house where the toilet was just off the dining room. That was... awkward.

Cochlear implants are amazing. My daughter recently had a play date with another 7 year old girl with one and it's like she was fully hearing.

My Mum was deaf and sadly died in 1989. I wish she could have lived to have one installed.

Related: "Dorm of the Deaf" http://dustinland.com/archives/archives319.html

  > When the world around you doesn’t give you feedback,
  > and the best gauge you have of your own noise level is
  > frustration on the faces of the people near you

People laugh at HN suggesting technical solutions to every problem, but this really does seem like something that could be solved (or at least mitigated) by a microphone, some small LEDs, and a gutted wristwatch. Light up more LEDs depending on how loud the sound is relative to the average level of the previous N seconds of recorded audio.

A web search for [wrist sound sensor] didn't find anything relevant, but this is probably because I don't know what such a device would be named.

edit: Following the trackback at the bottom reveals the author is a hardware hacker. I wonder if she has tried to build such a device -- if not, maybe it's much more complicated than it seems.

A similar tool, though not designed for exactly that purpose, is a sound level meter or a loudness meter. There are small handheld ones, but I don't know of any that could be worn on a wrist or that have a useful UI for a deaf person.

A LED would require to look at the device in order to notice the sound. An alternative might be haptic feedback as available in the Apple Watch.

My thought as well.

check out flutter - http://correll.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=2353

Great post. I had never considered that aspect of deafness, but it's so obvious in retrospect. Thanks.

I agree, just reading the title already gave me that feeling as if a little puzzle piece had just settled into my Weltanschauung.

> I type loudly during quiet thinking breaks in class, constantly rustle books and papers in the chapel, and make munchy-slurp noises when I eat with gusto. Until my twenties, I didn’t know those things made noises.

It's a constant thing isn't it, adjusting your own loudness depending on the environment you're currently in, it happens almost unconsciously. Having the need to pay attention to this all the time with the only way of getting feedback being reading other people's reactions or explicitly being told would probably make me anxious too.

This also makes me think about how essential feedback loops are for efficient learning, both in humans and machines.

I remember reading this article about a person who had no sense of smell, and how they had to always make sure that they have no BO, have to worry about not being able to smell gas or rotten food, and various other things that the rest of us didn't have to struggle with. It's these subtle things that makes the lack of a sense more challenging than one would expect from the common perception of these disabilities.

My dad has very bad hearing, and can be quite noisy sometimes to the point of being annoying. I remember complaining to him about this occasionally. I never considered he might be worried about annoying others, and may be trying to hide his anxiety on top of that. I'll have to ask him. Thanks Mel.

Smart watches can be valuable for things like this I guess.

Something like having an app on iPhone monitoring the mic, showing a gauge or vibrating at a threshold on the Apple Watch (might be easier on Android). Would be useful feedback. Are there any apps / devices for such purposes on the market?

This sounds similar to the sort of social anxiety I've felt around trying to figure out how to avoid creeping people out.

Very, very interesting. This gave me some useful perspective, also the post about the Basketball player (interrupt-driven).

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