The quiet revolution
We all know noise pollution can be an annoyance, but could it also be doing real damage to our health? Wellbeing expert Louise Chunn investigates
Wellbeing expert Louise Chunn investigates the effects of noise pollution – and how to combat them
A washing machine pinging, a pair of
foxes shrieking, a team of leaf-blowing gardeners blasting the park across the road. The Grime Mix ringtone on a teen’s mobile in a Tube station, the revving of competing cars on a summer’s evening, the ear-splitting din of J-LO played in a gym class labelled ‘yoga’. These were the sounds I noticed crashing into my consciousness on the days soon after ELLE Decoration asked me to write about the effects of noise on our lives. And that’s before I remembered the sounds so ‘normal’ that I barely noticed them: planes overhead, the rumblings of trains and Tubes, the sirens, squealing tyres and grunting acceleration of traffic that is a constant roar in the background of London life.
When you get away from noise, it’s quite a shock to rediscover the power of quiet. Only a week before I’d been in rural Italy, starting my mornings with a meditative swim and breakfast accompanied by delicate birdsong; walking down country lanes hearing only the sound of my sandals on gravel; studying religious art in the silence of a church where even whispering was firmly discouraged. (There were more raucous times too, but you get my point.)
I felt the difference, sharply. And yet we tolerate this invasion of our minds and senses every day. We can close our eyes if we don’t want to see something, but we are forced to hear it. As Lisa Goines and Dr Louis Hagler wrote in their essay Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague: ‘Our hearing mechanisms are always “on”, even when we are asleep.’
We are living in a time of maximum connection and communication. Elements of that are good and informative. But other sides are psychologically and physically damaging. Excessive noise has been linked to high blood pressure, anxiety and hearing impairment. Exposure to significant road traffic noise, for example, increases the risk of a heart attack by 23 per cent*.
People who are more reactive to noise suffer the mental effects of stress: it can make them angry and trigger violence. The effects radiate through our lives, setting our teeth on edge, losing us sleep, grinding away at the possibility of optimum health and focused concentration.
Some of what we have to cope with is personal – one neighbour finds the dawn tuba practice charming; another flies into a rage over a full-volume TV or a dog barking. But, in general, there is a growing sense that noise is a problem that must be addressed. As former US surgeon general Dr William H Stewart said nearly 40 years ago, ‘Calling noise a nuisance is like calling smog an inconvenience. Noise must be considered a hazard to the health of people everywhere.’ Now, at last, people are taking action.
Poppy Szkiler grew up around the subject of sound. Her grandfather John Connell OBE was a businessman who noticed the roar of post-war industrial Britain and was not best pleased. In the tradition of the times,
When you get away from noise, it’s quite a shock to rediscover the power of quiet
he wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph asking if others shared his concern. The bulging mailbags that followed led to the establishment of the Noise Abatement Society, which led to the UK government passing the Noise Abatement Act in 1960.
Poppy’s mother, Gloria Elliott, continues to run the NAS, but Poppy has introduced a 21st-century sideline. Having dropped out of a successful acting career in search of something more meaningful, she started up Quiet Mark (quietmark.com), an assurance system for products and services – from extractor fans to aeroplanes – that are quiet, or at least make efforts not to be disruptively noisy. ‘I simply sat at the kitchen table with my mother and we designed it,’ she says. ‘Then, not knowing it wasn’t the done thing, I cold-called leaders of industry, somehow managing to get through. Before launch we had 50 global brands signed up including Dyson, John Lewis and AEG. They all loved the idea. They told me “you’ve hit oil”.’ quiet Mark lives by its principles. It’s run from a house in Hove rather than an office in a big city, and its focus is on space and peace. Szkiler herself builds quiet periods into her early morning and evening routines. She laughs when I ask what her telephone ringtone is: ‘A harp!’ (She actually plays the instrument, too.) Her quiet revolution is spreading with the documentary film In Pursuit of Silence, out now. Over 81 minutes, Us-chinese director Patrick Shen digs deep into the soul of silence, filming in remote places and talking to people who value absolute quiet. Szkiler became involved when Shen asked to interview her; their feelings were so aligned that she ended up as executive producer.
Among the people interviewed for the film are some who practice mindfulness meditation, a natural fit. But mindfulness doesn’t actually seek to stop the noise around us. As mindfulness expert Dr Craig Hassed has written, ‘It’s a matter of choosing what to be interested in so that the attention engages with that, and learning not to be interested in something else. We don’t have to block it out; the intrusiveness of it will recede by itself.’ Hassed has been responsible for bringing the practice into traditional medicine. In his latest book, The Mindful Home, he devotes a whole chapter to Hearing, focusing on ‘removing the sounds we don’t need and introducing the sounds we do’. Seeking out natural noises – water, wind, birdsong, gentle rain – whenever we can will, he says, help shift us away from default mental activity: ‘the stuff of distraction and worry, the poison we pour into our ears in the form of negative thoughts.’
But the sound that has the deepest effect on most of us is music. Whether we play it ourselves or listen to recordings or concerts, it is the sound that can calm our frazzled emotions or lift our spirits high (as long as you’ve chosen to listen to it, obviously). It can be loud and rousing or delicate and scarcely audible, but if it is music that we love, then listening to it can be as powerful and restorative as anything in the world. Including perfect silence. Louise Chunn is the founder of welldoing.org, an independent organisation that matches people with the best therapist for them.