Environmental sounds are driving me crazy!

[1piano4joe]

Hi all,

Dogs barking all hours of the day and night! Why are some people so rude and/or clueless?

Rambunctious teenagers dribbling their basketballs while I'm reading, watching TV or playing piano!

A crying baby sitting behind me on an airplane! This drives me up the wall.

Lawnmowers everywhere, everyday! This is my morning alarm clock.

Why does NOISE bother me so much? Yet, I love playing the piano.

Do these things bother anybody else here?

As I am typing this with doors and windows closed with tissue stuffed in my ears there is a dog barking, making my skin crawl!

Car horns, crowded supermarkets and especially restaurants with 6 loudmouthed women cackling away at the next table is a common nightmare.

I heard this is called misophonia. Misophonia, literally "hatred of sound", is a neurological disorder in which negative experiences (anger, flight, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds.

Does anyone here have any coping mechanisms they use? I sometimes turn on a fan in the house. For some reason this helps and doesn't seem to bother me.

Thank you, Joe.

P.S. I forgot to mention LOUD MOTORCYCLES rumbling the whole house!

[Bob]

Earplugs?

I've always hated when idiots purposely rev their engines up when driving by.

[indianajo]

I hate unscheduled sounds, that are loud.  I love to make loud sounds, "music" that are sure to not fit someone else's moods, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night and practice or play the stereo. 
So my advice to you, is work very hard when you are young and too irritated to sleep.  Spend less than you earn,  and learn to make do with fewer toys than the next guy.  Save up a big down payment. 
Then move somewhere that a lot of people don't live.  Buy the biggest lot you can afford.  Live in a small house in the middle of that lot, not a pseudo-mansion that backs up 2 meters to the house behind, which saves money on the utility lines.  Plaster over lathe walls are good, much better than sheetrock. 
That is what I did.  It is a great life. I'm 15 meters  from the nearest other house wall.   It is not perfect; they installed a factory across the street that runs a hydraulic garbage compactor every twenty two minutes, screeching and whining on both work days or weekend.  But I have enough room in the yard, I let a bird planted shrub grow in the middle of the yard. Behind that I transplanted a 3 m cedar tree, the kind that droops thick branches to the ground.  Take that, foul noise.   
Many nights I can hear the pilot light on the gas stove and the fan on the computer PS, as the biggest noises. 

[outin]

Do these things bother anybody else here?

Yes, I am quite sensitive to noise pollution. Cannot wear earplugs because the noises inside me start bothering me (I can hear every heartbeat).

In the long run you should try to find a quieter place to live. My present place is such that no road can be heard and while there's noise every now and then, it's not too bad. Yet I don't live in the countryside. It's perfect.

I almost always have music on earphones when moving around, that blocks most of the annoying environmental noises.

[lostinidlewonder]

I had a friend who had the same problem but it was further more problematic because he suffered severe tinnitus. The only way he could function was to use headphones listening to white noise. You can also move somewhere, or if you can't move go have a holiday.

[faulty_damper]

I heard this is called misophonia. Misophonia, literally "hatred of sound", is a neurological disorder in which negative experiences (anger, flight, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds.

I doubt this is a real disorder even if it's listed in DSM.  Most psychotherapists are idiots with no understanding of the human mind.  Anyway...

I am an HSP and am sensitive to most everything: sights, sounds, smells, touch, perhaps even taste.  I usually can't stand loud noises at restaurants or even at family dinners unless I have something to focus on which is almost always a book.  If it isn't a book, it's a person though it is rare to talk to anyone at these functions.  When playing the piano, I wear hearing protectors both to prevent hearing damage and to reduce the noise and allows me to inner hear.  I've also begun wearing hearing protectors during family dinners so the noise doesn't drain me as much, though I prefer to be totally deaf.  Maybe even blind, too, as I'm always wearing a hat to block out the lights.

[g_s_223]

I live (in London UK) within 1/2 mile of:
- a major A&E hospital
- a major district police station
- a principal district fire station
Each of these buildings regularly launches one (or often more) vehicles sounding sirens and alarms of ear-splitting intensity. Quite often an entire posse of them will set off to some incident, with a positively pandemonium-like racket arising.

Further, there appears to be an arms race of sound generation versus sound suppression, whereby the emergency services allege that car drivers can't hear them, and car manufacturers provide ever-better external sound suppression (e.g. M-B with double glazing).

Current sirens approach, if not exceed, the threshold of pain. And, as these call-outs often occur during rush-hour when the roads are choked, the vehicles often just sit there deafening those in the vicinity. In fact, I can envisage future claims for hearing damage from the operatives of these vehicles on these grounds.

Of course, I accept the argument that if "I was knocked over by a car" or "my house was on fire", etc, I'd like prompt support. However, I have the feeling these deafening sirens are a bit like the "security theatre" one gets at airports where 50ml of milk in a bottle is considered a hazardous substance to be siezed and destroyed.

[indianajo]

Yes, sirens on emergency vehicles are a hazard in themselves.  They are so loud now they bounce off the sides of buildings and you can't tell where the sound is coming from.
Sirens exceed DB ratings for hazardous locations in factories, I am quite sure.  I ride a bicycle a lot and got blasted by a police car yesterday going in the other direction 1 m from my head. He was approaching a traffic accident at 2 mph , but emitting 125 db.
The first college I attended, the dormitories were across the street from the medical center in Houston.  There were sirens every five minutes all day and night. I can't imagine why they thought I would want to live in a dorm. I lived at home with my parents, the cost of living in a dorm was higher than the tuition, which I was paying out of pocket from summer earnings. The fact that the senior class instructors couldn't teach, and all the real teaching was done at night by a gifted student in his dorm room, caused me to transfer to another college.  

[1piano4joe]

Hi faulty_damper,

Thank you for your response. I was quite anxious posting about this and was not expecting any sympathy or understanding here at all. What I was expecting was to be told to stop being so sensitive, etc.

I did a google search since I didn't know what HSP stood for. How is it possible that I have this condition and neither know it's a condition nor that there is a name for it?

Oh yeah, it's not just sound. I keep the lights off and the curtains drawn. I can smell a smoker from across the street!

When something bad happens, I keep replaying it over and over in my mind. I just can't let it go. I think I might in all seriousness need some kind of medication for anxiety.

I jog or walk alone. It takes me forever to make decisions. I'm introverted and highly detailed oriented. I sometimes cry but am not even really sure why. I believe that I can be at times overly polite and well-mannered and often wonder what's wrong with everybody else that isn't.

Thanks for sharing, it is very comforting to know that I am not alone. I read online that 1 in 5 people are an HSP. That was a real eye opener for me.

The huffingtonpost website has a post called, "16 habits of highly sensitive people". I had most of them.
 
I like the lathe plaster idea. I don't know if that can be done over existing walls but  I was thinking about soundproofing my exterior walls. I like the double glazed windows. I will have to look into that.

Thanks to all who took the time to read and respond to this post, Joe.

[faulty_damper]

The best thing about realizing you're an HSP is that finally, you can just accept that you are normal even if mainstream society/culture denigrates our traits, and us.  I used to stay up at night and my pillow would get wet while wishing I were "normal".  I know what it feels like to be black.  I know what it feels like to be gay.  Because I know what it feels like to be discriminated against.  But since accepting that I am highly sensitive, I've learned to harness my sensitivities and develop them further by paying attention to my senses.  It's been a wondrous past couple of years and I'm so much more confident and no longer ashamed to be who I am.

A few years ago, when entering Macy's or Nordstrom, I always had to hold my breath and close my eyes as much as I could while I quickly walked through the tear-inducing smog of perfume.  Twice, I had my friend with me and she would grab my arm while I held my breath and eyes closed and she would take me past hell at a blistering pace.  The sensation of not knowing where you're going and the fear of colliding into others was exhilarating, far more exciting than a rollercoaster.  Luckily, both Macy's and Nordstrom stopped that practice of making the entrances smell like sh*t.  I had always thought it was just the perfume they were selling but no, they were purposefully making it odorous because some idiot thought it smelled nice.

[rachmaninoff_forever]

I know what it feels like to be black.

Dude I totally forgot you were black!

[faulty_damper]

Dude I totally forgot you were black!

I'm not black.

[outin]

I'm not black.

I don't believe you, me or any other white person could really KNOW how it is to be black in the western world. When it comes to most things, one can at least temporarily pretend to be "normal" and gets treated as one, but skin colour is something that gets you labelled instantly and there's no way really to hide it. It's true that when you have felt and have been treated as an outsider you can better understand the feelings of being discriminated or feeling different, but it still isn't quite the same thing. Sex is another thing that is difficult (but not impossible) to hide. So you cannot really know how it is to be female, even though you may understand it much better than most men. I wouldn't claim to know how it is to be male either, although it doesn't really feel that strange of an idea, considering how little I care about gender roles.

[faulty_damper]

I'm not white.

[outin]

I'm not white.

Most of us are not exactly white or black. I should have written non-black, but that doesn't really mean anything either. My point was that whatever colour you are you can only really know how it is to be that colour in a society that cannot be colour blind.

[musikalischer_wirbelwind_280]

Hey, Joe!

I can understand you perfectly, even though in my case it's mostly just a few noises which drive me mad. Lately, some fools have started using the back part of the building where I live as a sort of pelota court, and it can be almost at any hour: 11 AM, 2 PM, 5 PM, 8-9 PM, there was a night when they ended their stupid game at about 11:40 PM!! And they keep yelling at the top of their voices, with 9 words out of 10 they say being swearwords, not giving a damn about how much they are screwing everyone who lives in the building, because they are so brave when they are together, and also because they're useless bums who are likely to throw stones at your window, or knife you, or shoot you, if you confront them. And the police? Don't even bother going to them, they won't do a thing about it.

But it's also the sounds they make that make my blood boil: the stupid little tennis ball bouncing against the wall of the building over and over and over, their loud and annoying voices so thin they almost sound female, only, unlike true female voices, these ones drive me up the wall instead of sounding pleasant to me, not to mention they also make sounds as if they were fighting the battle for mankind...bloody wankers.

Like previous posters suggested, I think the best solution by far would be to try to move somewhere else where you can reduce all (or most of) those environmental noises that bother you to a bare minimum. Making a single room really soundproof can already be so damn expensive and complicated, but if you can afford it, you could also give it a try and have at least one soundproof room at home.

Me, I can't afford soundproofing my home, so I chose to use earplugs that reduce sound by about 33 dBs. It's so bad you can't get more reduction with only earplugs, but I can tell you they've still been godsends for me! There have been nights when I've been able to sleep soundly only because of them, you know, like when neighbors decide to throw a raucous and stupid party in the middle of the night, and those repulsive electronic bass sounds keep piercing your walls as if they were made of butter, and bumping against your ears.

I hope you can find a quick solution to your problem soon.