Noise-Induced Stress

We all know that we are happier when we sit in a nice cottage without electricity far from the city, traffic, cars and noise and just hear nothing except the natural sounds of the nature, which in general are very low, compared to the on-going white noise we hear near around cities and several km around any city or big road.

In the city where I live now, ventilation system is very very developed. In fact there is no building that has no ventilation, ventilation that is noisy. Nobody here cares about that noise, except me.

I am unhappy sitting in a house or building where I hear the noise from a ventilation.

I am happy when I sit in a house where there is no sound of any ventilation.

The contrast in my emotional feeling is like day and night between the two places. This has been true all my life. But when I was young I never understood the reason why I felt happy in my parents summer cottage and unhappy in our house that is located near a big road.

Most people presumably do not understand why they get different emotional feelings in different places. They do not understand why they like a certain place, and dislike another place. They do not relate it to the fact that the place that they like has no white noise, while the place they hate does have white noise on-going all the time.

Most people do not hear it since they do not pay attention to it. I think it does not change anything really. I think their emotional reaction to the white noise is exactly the same for everyone. The only difference between me and the rest of the population is most likely just a matter of what level of ignorance people are at. Most people ignore things that affect their health condition. Most people are not paying very much attention to what happens in their body, until suddenly one day they get a heart attack, or they get tinnitus. Not until then, do people care to pay any attention to the emotional feelings and their physiological reactions to those emotions.

Now there are a lot of research showing that noise is related to heart attacks. Hence the connection is clear. What remains now, is just to make people aware of the connection, and try to improve our society accordingly.

It has been known for some time that we need fresh air. Hence ventilation system got high priority and in this country where I live now, it got regulated by the government.

However, at that time it was not know that ventilation sound leads to heart attacks and tinnitus. We still have no solid research evidence for this, but I am very convinced that this is true.

We do not need to sleep with an open window in a house next to a big road to get increased stress hormons in our body. Hearing a white noise from the ventilation is clearly enough. I can measure my own emotions and compare my feeling when I sit in a house with a ventilation and a house without it and compare. It is clear to me how it affects my body.

Now it only remains to inform the rest of humankind about this issue and try our best to fix the problems in our society.

There is also a very stubborn misconception that silence would cause hyperacusis. There exists no scientific evidence supporting this belief. On the other hand there are lots of evidences telling us that noise can induce hyperacusis and tinnitus.

 

Doesn't it mask your T?

 

Tinnitus or not doesn't matter. Noise from ventilation causes heart attacks and early death.

I can bet the following. I haven't checked though, but I am sure I am right. Among people who get more than 100 years old, more than 95 percent of those people live in a quiet place.

It wouldn't surprise me if statistics would also show that people who live in noisy cities live shorter than people who live in more quiet cities. However, here the huge difficulty is to find the right measure for the noise. I claim for example that Seoul is a quiet city since there is no artificial ventilation in any building there, and away from any of the big roads, it is very quiet since the buildings are so dense they prevent noise from traffic to be spread out.

So hard to do research in this area, but I could do it since I am well aware of what one should be looking at.

The major problem is to find out how noise alone affects people, taking away other factors such as food etcetera. So hard to do research, but not impossible.

 

About four months ago a sound started that is probably what you're talking about: ventilation. I can't tell whether it's coming from the roof of my apartment building or a nearby building. It's on and off. I really hate it, especially at night. It's much worse than the other environmental sounds I deal with daily: Trains, planes, and automobiles. (It's not just a movie; it's my real life.) I have always found noise to be stressful. Now it's more stressful than ever.