Are the Sounds of London Making us Grumpier?
It’s my first week back in January, and today I walked into work a little bit miffed. I’ve had a big, long break from work, ample time to relax, but I just can’t seem to shake the Monday grumpies. The reason? I didn’t charge my headphones last night. For 34 whole minutes, I had to endure the piercing sounds of a London morning. Agony. Each honking car horn, wailing ambulance siren, and screeching howl of the Northern Line filled me with a tension that’s been hard to shake off. This got me thinking.
Emotional reaction to sound, from a biological perspective, is our mind’s way of triggering a response to our surroundings and allowing us to react appropriately. When we hear birds tweeting in a forest, our bodies are told that there are no predators around, and that the weather is good. Similarly, when we experience a consistent, moderate-volume, predictable sound, like waves crashing on a beach, our brains are able to adapt and relax. On the tube however, grinding, squeaking and rumbling are hard to predict and generally indicative of some kind of horrid mechanical fault. In the street, honking horns are a sign of rage that insight violence in other drivers, and ambulance sirens signal risk to life.
The London archetype is not a sunny-dispositioned picture of politeness; at heart, especially on the commute, we can be a pretty unforgiving bunch. I’m sure I’m not on my own in getting hung up on the Little Things (bit of brand identity for you) on a Monday morning, and I wonder how much that is related to the sounds I experience on my way in. Would London be a utopia if our daily decibel count fell to a more manageable level?
Either way, these sounds are inescapable in our buzzing capital, and maybe a bit of exposure therapy would help me get used to them. But for now I think I’ll carry on isolating myself from the world around me for 30 glorious minutes in the morning, and hope I’ll be less of an arsehole for it.
