Sensitive Hearing at Night

Why small sounds get bigger after dark, and how loud is too loud

If ordinary sounds bother you during the day, night tends to make it worse. This page covers how common sound sensitivity is in autistic adults, why a quiet bedroom does not always help, and practical numbers for volume, distance and headphones.

How common it is

About 4 in 10 autistic people have hyperacusis: discomfort, sometimes pain, at volumes other people find ordinary. That comes from a meta-analysis across ages. In a 2024 doctoral study of 936 adults, 40.2% of autistic adults had hyperacusis and 35.5% had misophonia, a strong emotional reaction to particular sounds such as chewing, breathing or a ticking clock. The two often overlap, but they are not the same: one is about loudness, the other about specific sounds.

Sensitivity and sleep are linked. In a study of 631 adults, insomnia was more severe the higher people scored on sensory hyper-reactivity.

Why night makes it harder

In the daytime, a refrigerator or a neighbour's television is buried under traffic, voices and your own activity. At night those layers drop away and the same sound stands alone. Nothing about the sound changed; there is just less around it.

That is why "make the room quiet" is not always enough, and also why the first instinct, covering everything with loud noise, can backfire for someone who finds the noise itself hard to bear. More on white noise →

Sudden can matter more than loud

A study of autistic children measured the startle reflex and found a larger startle to quiet sounds than in non-autistic children, with no difference for loud ones. The reaction also lasted longer. Comparable adult data are thin, but many autistic adults describe the same thing: a short, unexpected sound breaks sleep more than a steady one.

This is why the app makes no interface sounds and nothing beeps or pops up while it plays. Every track starts with a short fade-in, every preset change fades over a couple of seconds, and the Sleep Timer ends with a fade-out instead of a cut. Do Not Disturb switches on during playback, so calls and notifications stay silent; alarms still ring.

How loud is too loud

• Start lower than feels useful. A level that seems quiet in the daytime can be too much at night.
• Distance helps. Keep the phone at least 2 metres (6 feet) from your head, with the volume below about 50%.
• Headphones need even less. Sound at the ear is much louder than sound across the room. General safe-listening advice from the World Health Organization is to keep personal audio below about 60% of maximum volume; with sensitive hearing, start well under that, and take them off if they become uncomfortable.
• Turn the high tones down. The app's Soft sound switch reduces everything above about 5 kHz. You hear it most on noise, which loses its hiss; the music changes very little.
• Lock the volume. Volume Lock blocks the hardware buttons, the swipe gesture and the mixer, so a stray touch in bed cannot make the music louder.