Chronic Loud Noise May Shorten Your Life

Even if it doesn't bother you

I was already an anti-noise activist before I learned of this research. Until now I’ve found that American cities don’t often consider noise a high priority. This is a mistake. Most cities are already behind in addressing issues that, like chronic loud noise, degrade mental and physical health. But research increasingly shows it’s time to pay attention.

Besides noise from dense traffic as well as construction and landscape equipment, we’re bombarded by aircraft overhead at all hours, and artificially loud car engines made so on purpose by car owners who don’t care about the effect on children, pets, wildlife, and anyone trying to sleep or just relax. (Such cars barrel through my once-quiet street many times a day.) Then there are car radios, and sometimes neighbors’ radios, set at volumes high enough to cause suffering in others as far away as 6 or 8 houses.

Painfully loud music volume is rampant in restaurants and stores. I can’t go to malls or my local Target now. My favorite coffeeshop has cranked up the volume so high that I nearly threw up the other day and had to run outside to try to slow my pulse. The owners refuse to turn down the volume. Maybe it’s because marketers often tell restaurant owners that loud music brings higher profits (but that loud?) Some marketers even say if music is faster, it makes people chew faster! Why is that good? Because they leave faster? Or buy more food? (One person I told about the chewing remark responded, “Wow, that’s disgusting!” I agree.)

I call what I’ve just described sound bullying. If we’re to be less stressed and less sick, we need government leaders to help us stop this bullying. It may require some kind of empathy training. If nothing else convinces leaders, we can say it will save healthcare dollars.

Many Americans struggle with loneliness and the isolation of staying home that’s become more prevalent in American society. We need a sense of community, which is easier to get when we have places to go where we can get some coffee or read or just enjoy being with others—a basic human requirement for wellbeing (we evolved to feel safer and happier in groups). But how can we do that if our community places bludgeon us with insanely loud music?

The choice of music matters too. Very irritating bright or bass sounds can cause suffering. Also, people in, say, an urban coffee shop may be quite diverse. At my university area coffee shop I meet professors, seniors, visiting speakers, classical musicians, families with kids, etc. They likely don’t all love the loud. sharp voices at high volume that can sound as if they’re under attack and in pain. And there’s no quiet corner to escape to because the speakers are everywhere. Many customers use headphones, and I assume at least some are trying to block the sound being forced on them.

In CNN’s “The Dark Side of Music: Using sound in torture,” Nina Avramova writes that music has been used to create physical and mental suffering including severe anguish, fear, and pain throughout history by such tyrants as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Medical Daily reports that ancient Aztecs used music to torture. Loud or frightening sounds can strengthen effects of other torture methods. NYU Professor of Music Suzanne Cusick’s research includes Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan detainees’ stories of how torture through music, using techniques like “sensory overload” was harder to overcome than any physical torture.

I’ve often encountered hostile resistance by some managers for asking that volume be lowered even a little. As for car radios, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a headache and asked a parked driver to turn his brain-crushing bass down “a little.” He replied, “It’s public!” I guess he felt I’d stepped on his free speech rights. Arguing seemed hopeless so I just said, “I know, but it hurts.” He lowered it, resentfully.

In The New York Times’ article "Noise Could Take Years Off Your Life," the authors say research reveals that much of the loud noise we hear is dangerous. (FYI, silence is zero decibels or dB, and a firecracker exploding within a meter of the listener is about 140 dB.) They report that chronic noise such as jets overhead 280 times a day in one urban neighborhood isn’t just annoying, but a largely unrecognized threat, increasing risk of “hypertension, stroke, and heart attacks worldwide, including for over 100 million Americans.”

Limiting volume on headphones can protect hearing some, but it’s continuing daily loud noise that can have “lasting effects throughout the body.” You may feel you’ve adapted, but data shows “prior noise exposure primes the body to overreact, amplifying the negative effects.” Even in quiet rural areas, loud trains passing often will jar the body badly because there’s little ambient noise to “drown out the jolt.” (Noise from such trains can hit as high as 117 decibels.)

Doctors showed the authors how loud noise enters your body through your ears, and is relayed to the stress detection center in your brain, the amygdala, “triggering a cascade of reactions in your body. If the amygdala is chronically overactivated by noise, reactions begin to produce harmful effects.” The effects also occur in the endocrine system including the thyroid and pancreas. Your sympathetic nervous system can be hyperactivated, making your heart beat faster, raising blood pressure, and triggering inflammatory cell production. Over time these can increase and lead to plaque buildup, worsening risk of heart disease, heart attacks, and stroke.

Healthy people tested with simulated noisy nights during which planes and trains kept going by, showed by morning higher adrenaline levels, stiffened arteries, and spikes in plasma proteins indicating inflammation. Noise may even trigger immediate heart attacks. Higher aircraft noise in the two hours before nighttime deaths have been tied to heart-related mortality.”

The NYT adds that the World Health Organization says average road-traffic noise above 53 dB, or average aircraft noise exposure above about 45 dB are associated with adverse health effects. Nearly a third of us live in areas exposed to levels of at least 45 dB. Three million Americans may live in areas with average outside noise levels above 70 dB. WHO recommends less than 40 dB as an annual average of nighttime noise outside bedrooms.

A decade-long study of four million people found that, starting at 35 dB, risk of dying from heart disease increased by 2.9 percent for every 10 dB increase in exposure to road traffic noise. Even worse, risk of death from heart attack increased by 4.3 percent for every 10 dB increase. At my coffee shop, a phone sound meter shows volume often hitting the mid-to-high 70’s. How can staff not be at risk for early hearing loss and other damage due to long hours there?

The NYT article mentions that the poor and communities of color are more likely to experience excessive noise exposure because noisier places often have lower-cost housing. School students in those areas often have “heightened stress hormones, lower reading scores, and even hyperactivity…” Heart disease is more common in those areas because their average nighttime decibel level is higher than in richer communities.

A Noise Control Act was passed in 1972, but the Reagan administration defunded it. So OSHA’s 8-hour workplace noise limit is still 90 dB! Europe does a better job than we do with noise control. To learn more, look into the various requirements by the E.U, Paris, Berlin, and Switzerland.

The Times article adds, “unlike most other contributors to heart disease, noise cannot be addressed fully between a patient and a doctor. Protection requires changes in local, state, and federal policy.” We have to push our reps in government to require reasonable sound levels where we live, shop, and work. It’s our right not to be assaulted by painful, life-shortening loud noise.

Notes:

CNN.com, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/08/health/music-in-torture-intl/index.html#:~:text=But%20for%20some%20%E2%80%93%20like%20Jim%C3%A9nez,its%20use%20in%2030%20centers.

https://www.medicaldaily.com/torture-methods-sound-how-pure-noise-can-be-used-break-you-psychologically-318638

Emily Baunmgartner et al., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/09/health/noise-exposure-health-impacts.html?unlocked_article_code=z_CPg8FC3T763g3HYPvA1H1Us2T_9wIanpc1su7vVhlPbfyWo