I think we all know by now, the importance a good night’s sleep has on both our physical and mental health. We are constantly reminded how we should be getting at least 8 hrs of good quality sleep a night and there’s plenty of social media posts out there with a plethora of tips on how to achieve the best sleep hygiene and bag as many zzzs as possible. In this post, we’ll talk about noise pollution and how it affects our health.
What is Noise Pollution?
Noise pollution is define by Britannica as ‘unwanted or excessive sound that can have deleterious effects on human health, wildlife, and environmental quality. Noise pollution is commonly generated inside many industrial facilities and some other workplaces, but it also comes from highway, railway, and airplane traffic and from outdoor construction activities.’
How Noise Pollution Can Affect Our Health
Often the perfect sleep environment is out of our control. It’s all very well keeping technology out of the bedroom, avoiding bluelight before you go to bed and loading up on magnesium baths and melatonin supplements; But if your walls are not so thick and your delightful neighbour insists on playing disaster movies at full volume at 1 am or blasting the coffee machine at 6am (I’m speaking from personal experience here), no amount of sleep hygiene is gonna get you the required holy grail of 8 hours restorative shut-eye.
I get pretty frustrated with the lack of attention that is given to general noise pollution and the effect that this has on our bodies, in particular the nervous system. I had reluctantly become fairly accustomed to city living having lived in both London and Barcelona for years but with the pandemic lockdowns my body relaxed into a time without constant City hubbub and traffic and from the moment life ramped up again,I felt like my nervous system was under attack.
And it seems I am not the only one. I speak to many friends at the moment who have become so sensitive to noise. I think that general levels of anxiety after a traumatic couple of years means that people’s nervous systems are totally fried and they are much more aggravated and jumpy to noise than before. But it’s always been a latent problem, gnawing away at our nervous systems; I think we are just noticing the effects much more now.
According to articles in Pubmed, apart from the more obvious damage that high levels of noise can do to your hearing, chronic low-level noise exposure causes mental stress associated with known Cardiovascular implications. Traffic for example causes increased stress hormone levels which activates the nervous system and causes oxidative stress and inflammation in the body. Not good!
According to the World health Organization ‘exposure to traffic noise is responsible for the loss of 1.5 Million healthy life years per year in Western Europe alone’.
In my home city of Barcelona 57% of the population are exposed to noise levels well above the recommended healthy levels. During the day, the culprit is traffic but during the evening and early hours, Nightlife causes as many issues. ‘Over 210,000 people suffer serious emotional, psychological or social effects due to noise in Barcelona while more than 60,000 have sleep disorders’ reports the Ayuntamiento. ‘In addition, around 3% of annual deaths in the city are from cardiovascular illness that can be attributed to the same cause’.
How to protect ourselves from noise pollution
So, how can we protect ourselves from this assault on our health and longevity? It would be lovely if we could all move to a rural setting and let the noises of nature have a more soothing effect on our bodies. It was interesting to see the mass exodus from the cities during the Covid lockdowns as people were searching not only for more nature but also a respite from the stress of city living.
However, some of us still need to work in Urban environments even after the big push of the Work from Home movement and for us single folk it can feel like social suicide isolating ourselves in the countryside.
For those of us that need to remain committed to Urban Living there are ways to reduce our exposure to the damaging effects of noise. Over the next month I will be posting a series of blogs, posts and graphics across social media with tips on improving acoustics within your existing home, noise considerations when searching for a new home and tools, products and tricks that will reduce those pesky decibel levels in your life. Let’s support our ailing nervous systems and give ourselves as much chance as possible to get those magic healing 8 hours of slumber.
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