It’s time to let the noisy world back in

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I asked Zachary Rosenthal, director of Duke University’s Center for Misophonia and Emotional Regulation, for some tips on how to stop using noise canceling devices. He recommended evaluating the situations in which one experiences sensitivity to sound to determine which may result in a particularly negative reaction, such as a tantrum. If, for example, you know that sitting next to a crying baby on a plane is likely to cause you to have a public meltdown, you can put on your headphones when you hear a baby preparing to take off. But if the situation is not serious, you can try to distract yourself by starting a conversation with the person next to you, changing seats or looking for another activity that catches your attention.

Oxford’s Gregory, who is also a clinical psychologist, often encourages patients who struggle with misophonia, or noise sensitivity, to practice the “opposite action” – forcing themselves to do the opposite of what their emotions are telling them to do. One way to do this with a noise is to imagine that something else that doesn’t offend you is making a sound. Another opposite action could be to smile warmly at the perpetrator.

I tested this with the leaf blower. I envisioned a possible backstory for the blower handler where he was very sick and had to blow leaves at dawn, even though whenever I watch him from my window, like a gargoyle, there never seems to be any leaves to blow, so his employer would find no reason to let you go. As a chronically redundant employee, this made me feel close to the man. As the power of the first scenario wore off, I envisioned another possibility, and another. I understand that this is called “empathizing.” I have not come to enjoy the sound of the leaf blower, but it has become less offensive to me.

The opposite action has a separate utility that resonated with me: it can make one feel more in control in the face of noise. As a terminal jerk, I have long felt an inflated capacity and responsibility to prevent the world around me from falling into anarchy. I do this dazzling. When you answer a call in a silent train car, I’m the one piercing your back with my eyes. I often feel that if I No If I look at an offender, something will happen: the noisemaker will be emboldened by my passivity and the sound will become more intolerable.

But there’s also shame in being a silent car warrior. Trying to suppress the urge to glare, knowing I’ll feel like a rowdy cop once I succumb, only makes things worse. So I sit there, narrow-eyed, torn between an irrational but powerful fear of adding to the annoyance and the horror of being a stunning Karen. The opposite action does not require you to try to ignore a sound, which is impossible. Instead, I give the sound my tacit permission to exist. I can still be the boss.

my urge to driving the world around me is the most persistent behavioral symptom of lockdown. But even if my neighbor hadn’t been banging below me for most of 2020, I think the pandemic would still have increased my desire to cancel noise. The sounds of other people going about their lives should have been soothing during a time of enforced solitude. Instead, they became a reminder that other people, perhaps infectious, were always around. Anything outside of our immediate communities and surroundings became a threat, and everyone had their own ways of isolating themselves. Some of us sanitize incoming food and packages; some of us sterilize incoming sounds. A 2021 assessment of social media in London found that tweets complaining about noise more than doubled during lockdown (an additional survey backed up the results). And in the United States, curmudgeons took to Twitter to complain about the Blue Angels, whose ficus roar has always been one of the most exciting sounds of summer for me. Any sound violated our fragile sense of control.

Training myself to tolerate noise and disturbance in general is part of a long process of getting out of the bunker that I built around myself during the worst months of the pandemic. I’ve been experimenting with letting more sounds in. I try to run without my headphones once or twice a week; Sometimes I run next to a stream, and its babbling is pleasant and summery, less repetitive than the sound of the stream that Noisli offers. In May, I purposely left the baby white noise machine at home on a trip to West Texas (where, truth be told, there was no noise anyway) and have stopped eating breakfast with it. I try to focus on the birds in the morning, the wind in the trees and other subtleties of the forest.

I would love to live without the illusion of control over my environment, to dance in the breeze like an inflatable tube man. Unfortunately, you can’t force yourself to adopt a completely new personality. But you can take off the headphones.