What Your Surroundings Are Trying to Tell You
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in a house after everyone has left for the day. Or the specific texture of a busy café on a Tuesday morning — cutlery, low music, someone’s laptop keys. Or the sound of rain on a window that takes you somewhere you have not thought about in years. We rarely choose to listen to these things. They simply arrive, and we move through them, already thinking about something else.
Sound is one of the most emotionally direct senses we have — and one of the least examined. We notice what we see. We think carefully about what we say. But the auditory landscape of our daily lives largely goes unobserved, quietly doing its work on how we feel, what we remember, and who we briefly become in any given moment.
The Soundtrack We Stop Hearing
There is a well-documented phenomenon in auditory neuroscience called habituation — the process by which the brain learns to filter out sounds it has decided are not new or threatening. It is efficient and necessary. Without it, the hum of a refrigerator or the background noise of an office would be unbearable. But habituation also means that much of our sonic environment becomes functionally invisible to us, even as it continues to shape our mood, our sense of safety, and our emotional state.
This filtering is not neutral. Research suggests that certain soundscapes — particularly those dominated by human-made noise — are associated with elevated stress responses, even when we have consciously stopped noticing them. A study published in Environmental Health Perspectives found that chronic exposure to traffic noise was linked to measurable increases in cortisol levels and cardiovascular stress markers. We adapt. But adapting is not the same as being unaffected.
What happens, then, when we deliberately stop filtering and simply listen?
Why Sound Reaches Where Words Cannot
Sound has a peculiar relationship with memory — more direct, in some ways, than visual cues or even smell. Neuroscientist Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis, found that familiar sounds and music activate the medial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain closely tied to autobiographical memory and self-referential thought. In plain terms: certain sounds do not just remind us of the past — they briefly return us to it. The feeling is not symbolic. It is almost physical.
This is why hearing a song from a particular year can land with more emotional weight than looking at a photograph from the same period. The photograph shows us what things looked like. The sound, in some sense, returns us to how things felt.
Dr. Constantine Sedikides at the University of Southampton, whose research on nostalgia spans more than two decades, has found that nostalgic experiences — frequently triggered by sound — tend to increase feelings of social connectedness and personal continuity. His work suggests that nostalgia is not simply sentimentality. It serves a genuine psychological function: it reminds us of who we are across time.
The Everyday Soundscape as Emotional Data
Most of us think of our emotional lives as something that happens inside us — generated by our thoughts, our relationships, our circumstances. We rarely consider the degree to which our environment is continuously contributing to how we feel. The ambient sounds of a space carry information: about safety, familiarity, pace, connection, solitude. A home that sounds a certain way. A workplace with a particular acoustic texture. A neighbourhood whose sounds have changed.
When we slow down enough to actually hear our surroundings — not as background, but as foreground — something shifts. The familiar becomes slightly strange. And in that strangeness, there is often something worth noticing: a feeling we had not named, a memory we had not visited, a quiet discomfort or unexpected warmth that had been there all along.
This is what attentiveness does. It does not create new feelings. It surfaces the ones that were already present.
A Note on the My Fyrst Approach
At the heart of My Fyrst is a simple idea: that emotions are signals, not judgements. They are not problems to be solved or moods to be managed — they are information, arriving continuously, asking to be noticed.
The tradition that inspires My Fyrst recognises nine essential emotional qualities — each one considered a distinct flavour of human experience, each worth paying attention to in its own right. Listening back to the sounds of your own life might surface something close to Adbhuta — that quality of open wonder, of encountering the familiar as if for the first time. Or it might bring something quieter and harder to name. The framework is not a map to follow. It is an invitation to look more carefully at what is actually there.
Self-awareness, in this sense, is not a grand project. It grows through small acts of attention, practised consistently over time.
An Invitation
The next time you are somewhere ordinary — a kitchen, a desk, a park bench — try actually listening for a moment. Not for anything in particular. Just to what is there. Notice whether it matches how you feel, or contradicts it. Notice whether it reminds you of something, or someone, without your permission.
Our surroundings are rarely as neutral as we assume. And the sounds we have stopped hearing are sometimes the ones that have the most to say.
My Fyrst is a personal practice, not therapy or clinical support. If you are going through a difficult time, please speak with a qualified mental health professional.