Why Your Hearing Goes When You Freeze

People describe it in almost the same words each time. The sound goes far away. It is like being underwater. I could see their mouth moving and I could not make it into words. There was a high tone and everything else dropped behind it.

It is one of the more disturbing parts of a freeze response, partly because it happens to a sense people assume is passive, and partly because nobody tells you about it in advance. This page is about that one symptom.

Hearing is not passive

The first thing worth knowing is that hearing involves a great deal of active processing, and much of that processing is adjustable in ways vision is not.

Your auditory system is continuously deciding what to amplify and what to suppress. It suppresses the sound of your own chewing. It picks one voice out of a room of voices. It stops you noticing a fan that has been running for an hour. None of that is under conscious control, and all of it can be turned up or down by the state you are in.

So a change in what you can hear during a threat response is not a fault in the ear. It is the system doing what it does, with the settings changed.

What actually changes

Attention narrows onto the threat. The same narrowing that produces tunnel vision applies to sound. Whatever your system has decided is the danger gets amplified and everything else gets pushed down. This is why people frequently remember the shouting perfectly and have no memory of the traffic outside, the television, or their own phone ringing.

Comprehension goes before perception. The commonest version of this is not that the sound is quiet but that it does not turn into meaning. You can hear that someone is speaking; you cannot convert it into words. Language processing is among the first things deprioritised under a strong threat signal, so the sound arrives and the parsing does not.

Middle-ear muscles are involved. There are small muscles in the middle ear whose tension changes what range of frequencies passes through most easily. Their state shifts with your overall physiological state, and the practical effect is that the frequency band carrying human speech can become harder to pick out of background noise. This is one of the reasons people in a high-threat state can find a crowded room suddenly unintelligible while still hearing a door slam perfectly.

Your own body gets louder. Heart rate is up and blood is moving faster, and some people become aware of a pulse or a rushing sound. Against that, external sound seems to recede.

Dissociation adds distance. Where the freeze tips into dissociation, the whole sensory field can take on a sense of remove, and hearing is often where people notice it first because it is the sense we use to stay socially connected in real time.

What it is not

It is not deafness, and it does not damage your hearing.

It is not inattention or rudeness, although it is very often read as both, particularly by someone in the middle of an argument who has just asked you a question.

It is not evidence that you were not listening. In most cases the person was listening extremely hard, at a system that had stopped converting the input.

What helps in the moment

Do not strain to hear. Effort narrows attention further, which is the thing producing the problem.

Widen your gaze. Deliberately taking in the periphery tends to loosen the narrowing across senses, not just vision.

Lengthen your exhale. Out longer than in, at ordinary depth. This is the fastest available route to changing the underlying state, and the auditory changes follow the state rather than the other way round.

Ask for it to be repeated, or written. "Say that again, more slowly" is a complete and reasonable sentence. So is "can you put that in an email".

Say the last word you caught, out loud. It gives the other person something to work with and it puts your own speech production back online.

When to get it checked

This is important, because several of the descriptions above overlap with conditions that have nothing to do with a trauma response, and some of them are urgent.

See a doctor, and do not assume it is psychological, if:

• The muffling is in one ear rather than both.
• It persists after the episode has ended, or comes and goes independently of stress.
• It arrives suddenly and does not resolve. Sudden hearing loss is treated as a medical emergency and outcomes are better the sooner it is seen.
• There is ringing, spinning, a sense of fullness in the ear, or loss of balance. That combination points toward inner-ear conditions.
• There is ear pain or discharge.
• You are on medication that can affect hearing, or you have had recent loud noise exposure.

Anaemia, thyroid problems, blood pressure changes, migraine and some medications can all produce auditory symptoms that a person under stress will very reasonably attribute to stress. Get the physical causes ruled out before settling on the psychological one.

If it is a pattern

Recurring auditory changes under stress, once physical causes have been excluded, are worth raising with a trauma-informed therapist rather than managed alone. They tend to sit alongside other shutdown symptoms, and the useful work is on how readily the response fires rather than on the symptom itself.

Related: what the freeze response feels like in the body, how to unfreeze in ninety seconds, dissociation vs freeze, and the freeze response more broadly.