I asked Zachary Rosenthal, director of Duke University’s Center for Emotional Regulation and Misophonia, for some advice on detoxing from noise canceling devices. He suggests assessing situations in which a person feels sensitive to sound to determine which situations are likely to lead to a particularly negative response, such as a tantrum. For example, if you know that sitting next to a crying baby on a plane is likely to make you angry in public, you can wear headphones when you hear a baby getting ready to take off. But if the situation is not serious, you can try distracting yourself by starting a conversation with the person next to you, switching seats, or finding another activity that captures your attention.
Gregory, from Oxford and a clinical psychologist, often encourages patients with vocal disturbances or sensitivity to noise to practice the “opposite action”: making themselves do the opposite. with what your emotions are telling you to do. One way to do this with noise is to imagine the sound being made by something else that doesn’t bother you. Another opposite action might be to smile warmly at the perpetrator.
I tried this with a leaf blower. I imagined a possible story for the blower operator, in which he became seriously ill and had to blow leaves at dawn – even though whenever I watched him from the window His gargoyle, like the gargoyle, never seems to have a leaf to blow – so his master will find no reason to let him go. Being a chronic redundant employee myself, this made me feel close to that man. When the potential of the first scenario disappeared, I imagined another possibility, and another. I understand this is called “empathy”. I haven’t grown up to enjoy the sound of a leaf blower, but it has become less annoying for me.
Acting in opposition has a distinct utility that I empathize with: It can make a person feel more in control in the face of noise. As the ultimate asshole, I’ve long felt like I have an inflated ability and responsibility to keep the world around me from falling into disarray. I do this by glaring. When you take a call in the quiet carriage of a train, in my eyes is a boring hole in your back. I often feel that if I do not If you glare at the offender, something will happen: The noisemaker will become bolder in front of my passivity and the sound will become more annoying.
But there’s also the shame of being a warrior of the quiet car. Trying to suppress the urge to glare—knowing that I’ll only feel like a noisy cop if I don’t yield—only makes things worse. So I sat there, eyes twitching, torn between irrational but powerful fear of escalating discomfort and horror of being a glaring Karen. The reverse action doesn’t require me to try to ignore a sound, that’s not possible. Instead, I implicitly allow the sound to exist. I’m still the boss.
my urge dealing with the world around me is the most persistent behavioral symptom of the lockdown. But even if my neighbor doesn’t collide beneath me for most of 2020, I think the pandemic will still make me increasingly eager to remove the noise. The sounds of others telling about their lives should have been soothing during this time of forced solitude. Instead, they become a reminder that others, perhaps potentially infectious ones, are around. Anything outside of our immediate community and environment becomes a threat, and everyone has their own way of self-isolating. Some of us disinfected groceries and incoming packages; some of us sterilize incoming sound. A 2021 review of social media in London found that tweets complaining about noise more than doubled during the lockdown (an additional survey supported the results). And in the United States, education enthusiasts have taken to Twitter to complain about the Blue Angels, whose rocking roar has always been one of the coolest sounds of summer for me. Any sound violates our fragile control.
Training myself to tolerate noise, and general discomfort, was part of a long process to get out of the bunker I built around me during the worst months of the pandemic. I experimented with allowing more sounds. I try to run without headphones once or twice a week; Sometimes I run along a creek, and its babbling is pleasant and, like summer, less repetitive than the sound of the creek provided by Noisli. In May, I purposely left the little white noise machine at home during a trip to West Texas (there’s no noise, to be honest) and I stopped eating breakfast with it. I try to focus on the morning birds, the wind in the trees, and other beauties of the forest.
I like to live without the illusion of being in control of everything around me—dancing in the wind like a man blowing a pipe. Unfortunately, you can’t force yourself into an entirely new personality. But you can remove the headphones.
