Noise pollution is a problem that the entire planet is increasingly grappling with, as modern technology becomes more and more deeply entrenched in the communities where we live and throughout Earth.
Here in the United States, a vast majority of citizens is forced to contend with unwanted, disruptive noise on a daily basis, especially being that more than 82 percent of Americans live in cities and suburbs, where traffic noise, loud music, lawn equipment, and so forth, are a part of daily life.
Most of us are aware, to varying degrees, of the annoyance and physical discomfort that unwelcome noise produce in us. So much so, that in the U.S., a recent survey by the U.S. Census Bureau found that noise is now the number-one neighborhood complaint among Americans — ahead of crime and bad traffic!
In 1978, then-U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart declared that noise was a foe we needed to look out for and work to combat. “Noise must be considered a hazard to the health of people everywhere,” Dr. Stewart stated.
Indeed, unpleasant or unwelcome noises aren’t just disruptive to our trains of thought, conversations, or sleep — noise pollution is a problem that affects us at our cores.
Even noise levels that won’t harm our sense of hearing can cause other adverse health effects. Various studies have shown that noise can greatly diminish our quality of sleep (assuming we can sleep), our psychological well-being, and even fetal development. Latent mental illness appears to escalate by noise pollution, too. Community noise pollution has shown increased disturbances in people with depression and anxiety. Some studies have also found that noise pollution increases the use of sleeping pills and mental-hospital admissions.
Children and the elderly seem even more vulnerable. In one study, children exposed to noise levels above 55 decibels (normal speaking voice is 50 decibels) became inattentive, had difficulty with social adaptation, and displayed more hostility toward others, compared to children who were not exposed to the noise.
Disruptive noise triggers a “fight or flight” response in our sympathetic nervous system. Even if we are able to tune it out, tell ourselves that it doesn’t bother us, or are able to sleep through it, noise raises our blood pressure and heart rate, contributes to chronic heart disease, and causes anxiety-induced hormones to be released into our blood; these hormones can produce stress, nervousness, mood swings, and psychological conditions that interfere with a person’s normal mental functioning.
As many people have found, environmental noise can also cause tinnitus — a persistent ringing in the ears that can keep a person from being able to sleep.
Wanting to quantify the damage that environmental noise causes to human health, researchers with the World Health Organization analyzed data from many large-scale studies of environmental noise in Western European countries over a 10-year period. The results were published in a 2011 paper titled “Burden of disease from environmental noise.”
The WHO researchers came up with a mathematical model that calculated the number of years of life lost to ill health, disability, or early death, due to environmental noise. They coined the term “DALY” — Disability-Adjusted Life Years. One DALY equaled one year of healthy life lost per study subject, per year.
Sleep disturbance was the largest category where people were harmed, accounting for an estimated 903,000 DALYs lost every year. Noise-related ischemic heart disease (reduced blood supply to the heart) was blamed for 61,000 DALYs lost. One study of six European countries, included in the WHO report, blamed noise for close to 1 in 50 heart attacks across Western Europe.
WHO researchers estimated that in Western Europe, at least one million healthy life years are lost every year, due to traffic noise alone. Traffic noise was ranked second among environmental hazards to public health, behind air pollution. The researchers also warned that traffic noise pollution in Western Europe is rising steadily without abatement.
Noise Disrupts Our Sleep, Even When It Doesn’t Wake Us
Many people don’t realize it, but our brains are able to process noise while we sleep, even if we don’t awaken.
In one experiment by an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, healthy volunteers were put to sleep; their brain activity was then monitored as a surround-sound system played a series of 10-second clips of hospital noise (people talking, phones ringing, beeps, overhead pages, an emergency helicopter flying above, traffic noise below). The EEG recordings showed that brain waves were small and steady as the subjects slept. But when each of the noise clips was played, the brain waves zig-zagged in wider patterns, like those seen during states of wakefulness. Even normal conversation was almost impossible to sleep through.
Animals Suffer the Damage of Noise Pollution, Too
Household pets, as well as wild animals, are also subject to the annoyance and impairment that noise pollution can cause. We all know that dogs bark incessantly when they hear a disruption outside our door, or when we’re running the vacuum cleaner.
In the ocean, noise pollution is created by offshore oil prospecting and drilling, military sonar equipment, and ship motors, to name some sources. This is unfortunate, because many marine animals use sound echoes to identify their whereabouts and those of other animals. Noise can throw off migration patterns for species like whales and dolphins, causing them to become disoriented and lost.
Lesser marine species are affected also: mass strandings of giant squid occurred in 2001 and 2003 off the coast of Spain, when ships were in the area prospecting for oil using compressed air guns.
By Jamell Andrews