Noise

Last week when my family got together for my sister’s wedding, my brother was explaining that he was sensitive to noise at time and his doctor was trying to fix it. He doesn’t get migraines, but there are times when he is more sensitive to noise. I can be very sensitive to noise at different times too, but I also get migraines and sensitivity to light.

The other day I saw an article on MSN called Is Your Life Too Loud. It talks about how sound around 70-80 decibles causes stress levels to rise in our body as a defence mechanism. It then goes on to talk about the sound levels of many common things in our life. Life is getting louder and louder. For some reason we feel the need to have bigger speakers in everything, to constantly have music or tv or some sound going. And it is ruining not only our hearing, but our health.

I keep my tv and radio turned down so I can hear them, but only just. There isn’t a need to turn it up as loud as I can. My students often ask me to turn up the volume on their computers. They don’t like it when I don’t. They can hear the computer, it just isn’t as loud as they are used to. I don’t want to damage their hearing anymore than they are already doing. Usually by the end of a work day the sound of the computer fans constantly going is enough to drive me crazy. I turn them off and try to make the room as quiet as possible as soon as I can. I wonder just how loud my classroom gets during the day. It would be interesting to find out. I’d probably guess it’s loud enough to significantly raise the stress level in my body though.

Why do we have to have so much noise all of the time? What ever happened to sitting still and pondering, meditating, relaxing, in the natural silence? I’m going to try to sit in the quiet more over the next few days; to enjoy the birds outside my window at my bird feeder; to relax.