THE SOUND OF SILENCE
WASHINGTON, DC, October 14, 2018 – Have you ever stopped to consider the effects of noise on your health? Do you have your sleep interrupted constantly by loud music emanating from a neighborhood party? Do you fall asleep with the TV on? When you wake up do you feel rested, or like you are literally dragging your butt to the kitchen to get endless cups of coffee to try to chase the fog out of your brain?
Living in a city is noisy; there is no getting away from that. We walk down the street and there is the sound of traffic, interspersed far too often with car horns blaring, loud exhausts on large trucks, noisy motor bikes, and street vendors calling out to passersby. Some shops have their doors open, and loud music floods the street – as if there wasn’t enough noise already.
My refuge when I lived in Nassau was to take a drive to the western end of the island with my dogs, and go for a walk on a remote beach. The sounds of the gently lapping waves and light breeze rustling the fronds of palm trees were very soothing, and the feel of the sun on my face warming and therapeutic.
But when I got home, there was often no getting away from noise. Dogs barking as they roamed the streets in packs, a stereo blaring from a passing car, and all too frequently a noisy neighborhood party with that awful thumping bass that made the windows rattle on homes that were unlucky enough to be within earshot. Despite there being noise laws on the books, complaints usually went unheeded. Even the police seemed unable to achieve anything more than getting the sound turned down temporarily. I frequently suffered through the night from midnight until 5am, and would get maybe two or three hours of interrupted sleep, wake up with a throbbing headache and react like a fire breathing dragon if anyone dared to speak to me.
I moved to an apartment in the Seabreeze area for the last six months that I was in Nassau, and this was a vast improvement, as the area was away from the main roads and the town centre. There were still one or two dogs barking, but the nights were quieter, and there were far fewer noisy parties. I always woke up around 5am, though – there was a guy who owned a moped and it had a particularly whining and aggravatingly loud engine. It always seemed like it took him about ten minutes to pass our apartment building, as the road was very long and straight. You could hear him coming forever before he actually went past, buzzing like a very large, angry insect.
In 2016, I moved to Washington, DC to be with my husband. The windows of our apartment are large and double glazed. It struck me when I walked into the apartment for the first time how very quiet it was. There is a busy street outside, and one of the most popular theaters in DC, the Arena Stage, is directly across from us. We live on the third floor, overlooking the theater entrance, and yet no matter how busy it gets we never hear a sound. Very occasionally, depending on wind direction, we might hear the distant roar of a jet engine as planes take off and land at Reagan National Airport, across the Potomac river. And if there is a thunderstorm, unless it is right overhead we might not hear it at all.
It took me a few months to get used to the quiet. Ossie would leave for work before 9am, and I would pour myself a cup of coffee, settle in his La-Z-boy chair, turn down the TV, and log on to Facebook to catch up with friends back in The Bahamas. I could feel myself gradually unwinding, but after 35 years of dealing with so much noise almost every day, that unwinding feeling stayed with me for a very long time. I decided to do a little research on the effects of noise on our health, and found some surprising things.
Sound is an important part of our lives. We need to be able to hear sounds that may mean danger, or sounds of music that soothe us, to hear our children crying, or the kettle boiling. But at a point sound becomes noise, and noise can affect us in a very negative way. We don’t realise when we are asleep that the human ear is still filtering noises and that our bodies are responding to the sounds, even though we may seem to be peacefully unaware.
Sound causes hormonal responses, mostly through stress hormones which are released by the adrenal glands, two small glands that sit on top of the kidneys. Someone who sleeps with the TV on is unaware of how sounds in a movie such as gun shots, a telephone ringing, or a woman screaming are really invading their sleep. They may not realise that the sluggish feeling they have all day, their inability to be creative, or to concentrate on an important task, or even to drive a vehicle safely, is the result of a very disturbed night’s sleep where their adrenal responses have been causing their body to react in acute stress mode – a constant fight or flight response.
Being in a constant state of stress causes a great deal of wear and tear on the body, eventually resulting in high blood pressure and heart rate. These things can lead to more serious cardiovascular conditions. Prolonged acute stress can result in anxiety, depression, and other serious disorders. Studies done on people sleeping showed that brain waves spiked in jagged patterns when they were exposed to noise, even though they did not wake up or respond to the noise with any movement.
Noise pollution is a very real problem in our lives, and the sooner we recognise this and do something about it the better. Washington, DC has noise ordinances – it is against the law to make noise between the hours of 10pm-7am. And believe me this is strictly enforced.
We recently had a new apartment complex constructed next to ours. Both buildings are at least nine storeys high, so pile driving had to be done for the foundations of the new building. It only took place after 8am and was usually ceased before 4pm. Although it was extremely loud if you were outside, it didn’t affect us much indoors. However, if the construction crews started work before 7am, even just five minutes early, residents in the area were very quick to complain and make sure that this infraction did not happen again.
In Nassau, when I had occasion to complain to someone about their loud music the response was often that they had a right to listen to their music as loud as they wanted. I think people get far to carried away with their “rights”, and perhaps we need to return to a time when we thought about other people’s rights before we did anything that might infringe upon them. You may feel you have the right to listen to your music at an earsplitting volume, but I have the right not to hear it, especially in my own home. Be considerate of one another, turn the volume down, and maybe try finding a place where it is really quiet, and listen to the sound of something different – the sound of silence.
