I have always been fussy about noise. I don’t mind overhearing people talking, but I recoil from other instruments in the disgusting opera of everyday life: open-mouthed chewing, rhythmic sniffing or coughing, phone alerts, pen-clicking, nail-clipping.
For a long time, I was able to tune these sounds out, or politely remove myself from situations where they were bothering me. But during lockdown, my ambient fussiness grew to a fixation. The problem was that there was nowhere to politely remove myself to. The woman who lived above me in our quadplex also rented the garages below to run a business making minimalist metal wall hangings, a task that involved a fair amount of what sounded like welding. The unpredictability and pitch of the noises made them impossible to ignore. The floor that separated me from my neighbor’s workshop was completely uninsulated, and the wail of her equipment felt like a personal test. She, perhaps more so than the virus itself, became the locus of my pandemic stress.
Fortunately, there were plenty of noise-canceling solutions to pick from. Whenever I sat down to work, I would put on my Jabra headphones and fire up an app called Noisli, which allows users to create layered soundscapes. (I paid $10 a month to use the app during all my waking hours, and because I coveted the paywalled desert cicada option.) Over that I played music on Spotify, swaddling myself in a curated cacophony. I kept my headphones on all day, thrilled by the control I had over my environment. I had always envied people who seemed unbothered by noises—they probably don’t drunk-text their exes either, or eat beyond capacity—and now I was one of them.
That was just the beginning. The craftswoman moved out; my devices stayed. I bought a loud air purifier and put it on the left side of my bed. I then put a LectroFan white noise machine on the right side. With the ceiling fan on, I slept surrounded by sound on all sides. The sensation was akin to sleeping in a dryer, encircled by womb-like whirring. Noise-canceling devices had proliferated and taken over my home. They had even entered my person, in the form of the special narrow earplugs I bought for my dainty ear canals. I obtained a small portable white noise machine meant for babies and toted it around my apartment like a daemon. I would place it next to my tea while I ate my breakfast and fire it up when garbage collectors came, when my new upstairs neighbor—this one a penitent law student, mercifully—was clip-clopping around, and when the leaf blower at the church across the street started a-blowing. I was safe. I was smug.
Then human error abruptly forced me from my sound cocoon. Packing in a hurry for a work trip to Albuquerque this past spring, I forgot my baby white noise machine, my little ear plugs, the ear buds I exercise with, and the charger for my noise-canceling headphones, which crapped out midway through the flight. I bought new earplugs at the airport upon arrival, but they were incompatible with my tight canals. I didn’t sleep well that night or the next, nor on the plane home.
It wasn’t so much actual noises that kept me up as the expectation of noises. I had leaned into noise-canceling tools under the banner of reducing distraction, which I understood to be the enemy of productivity and well-being. But though my devices had been effectively masking noise, they hadn’t made me any better equipped to stay calm and focused when noises intruded. Because these tools are so effective, it’s easy to treat them as panaceas rather than spot treatments. Once I realized I had overdone it, I had to correct not just a habit but a lifestyle.
After my trip I scuttled back into my sound hidey-hole like a crab and remained there for several weeks, content in my habits. But one morning, as the man with the leaf blower across the street began his work at dawn, I realized that I’d been so absorbed in what I was reading and eating that I hadn’t heard it start up. I hadn’t needed my baby white noise machine. I saw a glimpse of life without noise cancellation, or at least one with a balance.
Intrigued, I reached out to Jane Gregory, a doctoral research fellow at Oxford University who specializes in and suffers from misophonia (a phenomenon whereby certain sounds inspire a very strong negative reaction in the afflicted). Gregory told me she has her own armory of noise management tools. These include three different sets of headphones, foam earplugs, and a Siri-connected speaker that allows her to eat with her family without policing their chewing. But she is careful to employ these tools only once a noise starts bothering her, rather than using them all the time to prevent noise from becoming a problem. That way, she isn’t unnecessarily risking over-sensitizing herself to her surroundings.
I had noticed that when I took off my headphones or removed my ear plugs, I was more aware of the sounds around me for a short time. But I hadn’t realized that trying to block out noise might actually exacerbate the problem. As Prashanth Prabhu, an assistant professor of audiology at All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, describes it, the brain tries harder to hear sounds when it’s receiving less auditory input. Noise-canceling headphones, ear plugs, and other tools may provide relief in the moment, but they can have long-term effects on your sensitivity.
There are certainly occasions when it’s useful to block out noise. I think my lockdown headphone regimen, for instance, was necessary for keeping the peace in my building at a time when further tension would have made an already-stressful situation intolerable. My mistake was that I failed to let go of my noise-canceling tools once my neighbor had gone.
I had started a new job shortly before lockdown, and I was terrified of losing it amid widespread layoffs. My life felt precarious, so I controlled what I could: I organized and re-organized my entire apartment, I made a Google spreadsheet ranking my loved ones. I approached my work with the same mania. In Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, authors Flora Lichtman and Joe Palca point out that a core feature of annoyances is that they keep us from doing something (or, at least, we think they do). Traffic is not inherently annoying; it’s annoying because it stymies us from getting wherever we’re going. My neighbor’s workshop wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I weren’t so preoccupied with my own delicate circumstances.
Humans have long sought to shield themselves from their environments rather than strengthen themselves to absorb potential threats. Excessive and improper use of antibiotics, for example, may protect us from harmful bacteria in the short term, but this has also strengthened the germs’ resistance mechanisms. Once we start to feel like it’s possible to live without something bad, we feel that we must. But both germs and annoyances are ubiquitous. Learning to live with them bolsters us for times when our defenses fail.
I asked Zachary Rosenthal, director of Duke University’s Center for Misophonia and Emotional Regulation, for some advice on weaning myself off of noise-canceling devices. He recommended evaluating the situations in which one experiences sound sensitivity to determine which ones are likely to result in a particularly negative reaction, such as a tantrum. If, for instance, you know that sitting next to a crying baby on a plane is likely to cause you to have a public meltdown, you might put on your headphones when you hear an infant preparing for liftoff. But if the situation is not dire, you can try distracting yourself by starting a conversation with the person next to you, or changing seats, or finding another activity that holds your attention.
Gregory, from Oxford, who is also a clinical psychologist, often encourages patients grappling with misophonia or noise sensitivity to practice “opposite action”: making yourself do the opposite of what your emotions are telling you to do. One way to do this with a noise is by imagining a sound is being made by something else which doesn’t offend you. Another opposite action might be to smile warmly at the perpetrator.
I tried this with the leaf blower. I imagined a possible backstory for the blower’s handler in which he was very ill and had to leaf-blow at dawn–even though whenever I watch him from my windows, gargoyle-like, there never seem to be any leaves to blow–so his employer wouldn’t find reason to let him go. As a chronically redundant employee myself, this made me feel close to the man. When the potency of the first scenario wore off, I imagined another possibility, and another. I understand this is called “empathizing.” I have not grown to enjoy the sound of the leaf blower, but it has become less offensive to me.
Opposite action has a separate utility that resonated with me: It can make one feel more in control in the face of noise. As a terminal asshole, I have long felt an inflated ability and responsibility to keep the world around me from slipping into anarchy. I do this by glaring. When you take a call in the quiet car of a train, I’m the one boring a-hole in your back with my eyes. I often feel that if I don’t glare at an offender, something will happen: The noisemaker will become emboldened by my passivity and the sound will grow more intolerable.
But there’s also shame in being a warrior of the quiet car. Trying to suppress the urge to glare—knowing that I’ll just feel like a noise cop once I succumb—only makes it worse. So I sit there, eye twitching, torn between an irrational but powerful fear of escalating annoyance and the horror of being a glarin’ Karen. Opposite action doesn’t require me to try to ignore a sound, which is impossible. Instead, I give the sound my tacit permission to exist. I still get to be the boss.
My urge to conduct the world around me is the most persistent behavioral symptom of lockdown. But even if my neighbor hadn’t been banging away beneath me for most of 2020, I think the pandemic still would have escalated my desire to cancel noise. The sounds of other people going about their lives should have been soothing during a time of forced solitude. Instead, they became a reminder that other people, perhaps infectious ones, were always nearby. Anything outside our immediate communities and environments became a threat, and everyone had their own ways of sealing themselves off. Some of us disinfected incoming groceries and packages; some of us sterilized incoming sounds. A 2021 evaluation of social media in London found that tweets complaining about noise more than doubled during lockdown (an additional survey supported the results). And in the United States, curmudgeons took to Twitter to complain about the Blue Angels, whose ficus-shaking roar has always been one of the most exciting sounds of summer to me. Any sound violated our fragile sense of control.
Training myself to tolerate noise, and annoyances in general, is part of a long process of exiting the bunker I built around myself during the worst months of the pandemic. I’ve been experimenting with letting more sounds in. I try to jog without my headphones once or twice a week; I run along a creek sometimes, and its babbling is pleasant and summery, less repetitive than the creek sound offered by Noisli. In May, I purposely left the baby white noise machine at home on a trip to West Texas (where, truth be told, there was no noise anyway) and I have stopped having breakfast with it. I try to focus on the morning birds, the wind in the trees, and other woodland niceties.
I would love to live without needing the illusion of control over my surroundings—to dance in the breeze like an inflatable tube man. Unfortunately, you can’t force yourself into an entirely new personality. But you can take off your headphones.
