Self-Induced Dysregulation: On the Psychology of Sound, Emotional Baselines, and the Environments We Choose
We live in an age saturated with emotional volatility. From road rage to workplace tension to domestic impatience, much of modern life is defined by a low-grade, ever-present hum of dysregulation. In psychological terms, this is often attributed to external stressors: economic instability, digital overload, social fragmentation. These are real, and their impact is not to be dismissed. But I wrote Self-Induced Dysregulation because I believe we are missing a key part of the picture—one that sits at the intersection of volitional behavior, environmental psychology, and emotional health.
The question that guided this work is deceptively simple: What if some of our emotional volatility is self-generated, not through what we believe, but through what we absorb?
The Problem Beneath the Problem
What triggered this inquiry was not an academic paper, but my own quiet mornings. I begin my day in silence or listening to soft, ambient piano music—a soundscape that gives me internal room to think, reflect, and remain still. On my early morning commute, I notice that this peaceful auditory baseline shapes how I respond to other drivers. I am calm and relaxed, even when others are not. And yet, I began to observe with growing clarity that many people around me—visibly agitated, driving erratically, impatient at stoplights—are immersed in soundscapes of a very different kind. Music with aggressive rhythms, talk radio built on outrage, podcasts that celebrated sarcasm or sensationalism. I began to wonder: Are these inputs merely preferences, or were they constructing emotional realities?
In the therapeutic world, we’ve long understood that sensory environments can affect mood. We know that soft lighting, calming music, and serene spaces can help people regulate. We understand this in designed settings like spas, clinics, or meditation retreats. But what about the everyday world? The kitchen filled with background news while cooking. The commute soundtracked by high-BPM club music. The household where television never stops humming. What happens when the most consistent emotional training ground we live in is driven by sound?
This paper is my attempt to answer that question—or at least, to frame it properly for further inquiry.
Affective Soundscaping: A Framework for Auditory Self-Regulation
The term I introduce in the paper is affective soundscaping—the habitual use of self-selected auditory input (music, media, ambient sound) to shape emotional tone. The core hypothesis is that people are often unaware of how profoundly their auditory environments are shaping not only how they feel, but how they behave.
This model proposes a simple but consequential loop:
Auditory Input → Physiological Arousal → Affective State → Behavioral Output → Feedback Loop
For instance, someone experiencing mild anxiety may reach for high-intensity music to “override” their state. That input increases arousal, which momentarily feels energizing, but over time conditions the nervous system to seek stimulation rather than regulation. The result? A learned dependency on dysregulating inputs, reduced tolerance for silence, and a baseline emotional state that trends toward reactivity.
We see this play out in common patterns of daily life:
Aggressive music or cynical talk during commutes leading to heightened driving aggression.
Background news while cooking subtly introducing anticipatory stress into the domestic space.
Sarcastic or emotionally sharp podcasts shaping the tone of one’s inner dialogue, and eventually the tone used with others.
These are not isolated events; they are daily rituals. Over time, they become affective baselines; defaults mistaken for personality. Many people think they are naturally anxious, or naturally irritable, or simply "not morning people," when in reality, they are operating under the emotional influence of soundscapes they curated without reflection.
Emotional Fluency Begins in the Environment
One of the deeper arguments in the paper is that emotional fluency—the ability to move fluidly between emotional states in proportion to life’s demands—is increasingly disrupted by the environments we construct. People are not simply emotionally stuck; they are emotionally conditioned by the media they consume and the sensory tone they maintain.
In clinical settings, we teach emotional regulation as a skill. We work with clients on self-talk, cognitive reframing, mindfulness, and body-based grounding strategies. But if we overlook the environment in which those skills are being practiced, we miss the full picture. Regulation doesn’t begin in the therapy session, it begins in the kitchen, the car, the office, the bedroom. These are the real emotional training grounds. And if they are filled with auditory clutter or affective noise, no amount of internal effort will fully offset the external dysregulation.
Why This Matters Now
Culturally, we are living through a time of normalized reactivity. Sarcasm has become the lingua franca of many media platforms. Outrage is monetized through algorithms that reward emotional intensity. Reality television, combative podcasting, and rage-inflected news have redefined the soundscape of modern life. What was once entertainment has become emotional atmosphere. And like air quality, we often don’t notice it until it has already reshaped how we breathe.
This is not a moral argument. It is a psychological one. The cost of ambient hostility and overstimulation is not just cultural polarization—it is emotional exhaustion. And people are beginning to feel it. We see it in rising rates of burnout, attention fragmentation, and sensory intolerance. We see it in the way people struggle to sit in silence, to stay in a neutral state, or to tolerate emotionally flat interpersonal moments without needing to escalate them.
The premise of this paper is not to condemn any specific genre or platform, but to raise awareness: these choices matter. They are shaping nervous systems, social behavior, and self-perception in ways we have barely begun to study.
The Research Gap
As I reviewed the literature for this work, I was struck by the divide between two kinds of research:
Clinical and therapeutic uses of sound—where music and sound are harnessed intentionally to heal, regulate, or soothe.
Environmental psychology and media studies—which often focus on screen time, media violence, or cognitive overload, but largely ignore audio environments.
What’s missing is a bridge between these worlds: a research agenda that explores how self-selected auditory environments affect non-clinical populations in everyday life. How does long-term exposure to sarcastic or aggressive media affect emotional resilience? Can intentional soundscaping reverse dysregulation? What content types are most destabilizing for different personality traits?
These are questions not yet answered, and they deserve serious attention; not just in clinical psychology, but in public health, education, and design. If sound is as powerful as we know it to be in structured therapeutic contexts, we must begin to take seriously its unstructured, daily use in lived environments.
Sound as a Moral and Psychological Choice
To curate one’s auditory environment is not merely a wellness strategy, it is a form of psychological self-respect. In the paper, I call for a new concept: sensory literacy—the ability to identify how various sensory inputs impact emotional states and behavioral tendencies. Just as nutritional literacy helps people understand how food affects their energy and health, sensory literacy helps people understand how media and sound shape their emotional ecology.
There is no universal soundscape. What calms one person may irritate another. But that is precisely why awareness is necessary. The more individuals become attuned to how their emotional state shifts in response to auditory input, the more agency they have to design environments that support, not sabotage, their well-being.
In this sense, Self-Induced Dysregulation is not just an academic paper. It is a call to recognize the power of the sensory spaces we build and the hidden architecture of everyday emotional life.
Final Thoughts
I wrote this paper because I believe many people are suffering in ways they cannot name. They describe burnout, reactivity, anxiety, or numbness, and yet they do not consider the role of the environments they move through, especially the auditory ones. They think something is wrong with them, when in fact, they are simply trying to emotionally function inside a soundscape that was never built to sustain psychological health.
What we choose to hear becomes part of what we become. That is not poetic—it is neurological.
This work invites us to ask:
What am I letting into my ears, my nervous system, my sense of self?
And does it align with the life I am trying to build?
In a world saturated by noise, the most radical act may be to listen more carefully, and to choose more wisely.