Air pollution and global warming get plenty of media attention, but noise pollution is the problem that no one is talking about. Noise pollution is any type of excessively loud or disturbing noise that disrupts a person’s quality of life. It’s a worldwide epidemic, and now that human civilization is so dependent on machinery, our daily lives are louder than ever. Unfortunately, all that noise takes a heavy toll. It increases your risk of mental illness, cardiovascular diseases, migraines and several other problems.
There are several obvious causes of noise pollution. Construction equipment, heavy traffic, and large city crowds are all big contributors. They aren’t harmful in the short term, but the cumulative effects of being exposed to the same high levels of noise on a daily basis can be disastrous in the long run. The World Health Organization reports that one million healthy life years are lost in Western Europe due to noise pollution from traffic. Disturbing noises makes us get ticked off, and over time, that feeling of being ticked off translates into high blood pressure. High blood pressure, in turn, is one of the leading risk factors for stroke, the American Heart Association reports. Deepak Prasher, a professor of audiology at University College in London, says that noise pollution is causing more cases of fatal heart disease than we originally thought. In studies conducted in Europe, it’s estimated to cause a total of 210,000 deaths per year from coronary heart disease, or about three percent of all deaths in Europe from CHD.
One of the scariest things about noise pollution is how easy it is to ignore. We can easily go about our daily lives through the most constant noises if we learn how to tune them out. However, tuning these noises out doesn’t help; they affect your health regardless of whether or not they bother you. “The biological effects are imperceptible, so that even as you become accustomed to the noise, adverse physiological changes are nevertheless taking place, with potentially serious consequences to human health.”
Noise pollution may also put your mental health at risk. Stephen A Stansfeld and Mark P Matheson write that industrial workers in high noise settings reported argumentativeness, nausea, anxiety, and changes in mood. However, it’s hard to say if noise alone causes this, as there are several other potential stressors associated with working in an industrial job. Lisa Goines writes in MedScape that studies are showing a correlation between high noise levels and an increased rate in mental-hospital admission rates. This doesn’t necessarily mean that sound is literally going to drive you crazy, but incessant noises aren’t good for anyone’s mental well-being. It also affects your sleep, as even slight disturbances during the night can completely hamper your sleep cycle. You don’t even have to fully wake up for the damage to be done. To put this into perspective, you need to be in an environment of under 30 decibels of sound in order to sleep properly. This is equivalent to the sound of a watch ticking or the quiet zone in a library. Anything above 40 decibels has the potential to affect your sleeping, regardless of how deep a sleeper you may be.
We’ve established that our current living environment is incorrigibly noisy. Many people don’t even care about noise; some of us even thrive in it. However, it causes health problems even to those that don’t mind it, and even the best of us find it hard to work to the sound of a jackhammer and a power drill from a construction site. Consider investing in a white noise machine, or otherwise plug your headphones into your laptop and listen to some meditative soundtracks on Youtube. There aren’t many ways to escape noise in public, but finding some time to go to a quiet place at least once a week could have monumental effects on your health. Until future technological advancements allow us to have less environmental noise around us, we’ll just have to make do with the resources that we have.
