The sympathetic nervous system kicks in, speeding up the heart rate, raising blood pressure, and triggering the body to produce inflammatory cells. Over time, these changes can lead to chronic inflammation, high blood pressure, and plaque buildup in artery walls.
To complicate matters further, when you begin to lose the ability to hear a specific frequency due to aging, disease, or injury, the auditory system goes into overdrive and overrecruits another frequency. This overrecruitment helps you hear softer sounds, but it also amplifies unwanted noise.
Noise reduction tool
You can close your eyes, avoid being touched, and even deprive your taste buds, but you can’t turn off your ears. They work all the time, even while you sleep. Brault told me that this is one reason why there are no effective treatments for noise sensitivity disorder. “It’s really hard to suppress the nervous system’s response to sounds that are distressing or that the brain misinterprets as dangerous,” she said.
So it’s no surprise that Brault is a firm believer in finding tools and equipment that can help eliminate ambient noise. Of course, the most obvious are earplugs, which significantly reduce ambient noise by preventing sound waves from reaching the inner ear, which is where your body’s response to noise is first triggered. Protective earmuffs operate the same way and are generally more comfortable and easier to use than earplugs. However, depending on your environment, they may not be as practical as their smaller, less noticeable counterparts.
“Typical foam earplugs attenuate high frequencies, just like the keys on a piano. But there are specially designed earplugs called high-fidelity earplugs or “musician’s earplugs” that attenuate (attenuate) sound evenly at all frequencies .” Meinke said. She mows the lawn, wears high-fidelity filtering earplugs when she goes to loud live music events or restaurants, and wears electronic shooter earplugs or earmuffs when she conducts firearms impulse noise research.
A more sophisticated solution are Bluetooth-enabled noise-canceling headphones, also a birthday present from my son last year, which emit sound waves to supplement and cancel ambient noise. This technology allows me to listen to the latest true crime podcast, or lose myself in Spotify’s Feel Happy playlist, all while blocking out the sounds of my kids arguing in the same room.
“These tools not only minimize the physical effects of noise pollution, but they also give you a sense of control over the sounds in your environment,” Brault said. “Be sure to do your homework before buying. Some of these devices are legal and they can be a boon for people with sound sensitivities, but others are essentially useless.”
Worried about inadvertently drowning out the sounds of approaching cars, crying babies, or dogs who need to open the door to pee while running? Meinke says that if you wear earplugs that match the amount of attenuation required for your listening environment, you’ll never be in a position where you can’t hear anything.
environmental control
Meinke told me that whether you use high-tech tools or creative furniture, it’s better to spend money on effective prevention efforts up front rather than pay for hearing aids and rehab downstream. “You can modify your space to plan for the sound levels you want to achieve,” she says. “Soft curtains, fabric art on the walls, absorbent flooring, acoustic ceiling tiles and wall treatments. All of these can help mute sound.”
I don’t have heavy curtains or sound-absorbing floors, but I now use an air purifier and white noise machine in my home office to drown out disruptive sounds during work hours. I choose meditation soundscapes on YouTube. I also asked my husband and sons for their ideas on how to lower the volume together. My youngest had an idea from school. His teacher uses a web tool called Bouncy Balls to raise awareness about rising noise levels (other options include Too Noisy Lite and Calm Counter).
I opened Bouncy Ball on Google Chrome and watched in fascination as the multitude of brightly colored circles bounced in line with the ambient noise level in my kitchen. When the noise gets too loud, depending on the sensitivity level I choose, a noise alarm from the site (not me) tells the boys to quiet down. Soon, I started placing my laptop in the middle of the table while I ate. Yes, I know a screen during meals isn’t ideal, but neither is deafening conversation, and it did reduce the cacophony to a hum most nights.
While there’s no foolproof solution for silencing the mind-numbing decibel levels in our homes, I’ve found that when I use tech tools and practice self-care (getting enough sleep, rest, and getting rid of the clutter), it creates a The output of nervous voices my beloved children became more manageable.