SIZ Approved Course | Self-Development Course | | Lecture 5 | How Noise Pollution is Badly Affecting us?
Hello, SIZ Steemians!💓
Hope all of you are having a great time. If you're interested in self-development then, this course is gonna help you and I insist you to follow it 💖.
Here, I'm going to talk about How noise pollution is badly affecting us? And it's the last topic of this course😁.
You can read previous lectures on the following topics:
Lecture 1: How to discover your passion
Lecture 2: How to use Time Productively?
Lecture 3: Transform yourself without Social Media
Lecture 4: Can we Achieve Self-Development by Making Mistakes?
So, let's get started...
How noise pollution is badly affecting us?
It's no secret that the modernization of our world causes a lot of pollution to this planet such as air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution.
Some of you who already tried to watch the stars at night and some might have even witnessed light pollution but there's one type of pollution which nobody is aware of.
It is the one you can’t see, smell, taste, and can't feel. it is the pollution of sound. Today many places are noisy but believe it or not back then they sounded like the natural sound of creatures and something like that.
Do we get use to noise pollution?
We created all sorts of things that make us more effective and speed up the progress of humanity such as cars, trains, planes, ships, phones, machines, alarms, bells, and the list goes on.
To be honest, our modern world wouldn't even work without those sounds. Without them, we'd get up too late and it's important to phone calls or gets hit by a car. Throughout our history, sounds turned more and more into noise but what is noise?
What is noise?
One or many sounds especially ones that are loud, unpleasant, or that caused a disturbance. we hear millions of different sounds every single minute.
Thousands of layers on top of each other that it can actually be quite overwhelming and stressful but the thing is that we got used to this noise.
We even became addicted to it in some way. We want to have the loudest headphones, the loudest speakers, and go to the loudest concerts. We relate to noise on a subjective level which is conditioned by culture and noise is often an expression of power.
That's the reason why an early war battles that what drummers who created a powerful atmosphere said that:
“The soldiers could perform better” and it's the same in sports cars. Why sports cars have louder engines and why do we think so damn cool when we drive them.
The thing is that we not only became addicted to noise but that we also try to avoid silence. Whenever we find ourselves in quiet situations without the bustling sounds of the city; we try to fill the void with other sounds, we listen to music while we're on the train, put on the radio in the car, and turn on some random TV show in the background while we're at home.
We try to escape the silence because we aren't used to it and it scares us in some way.
Gordon Hempton’s take on silence
“Silence is on the verge of extinction”
That's what Gordon Hempton says. His mission is to go to some of the world's most remote places in order to record natural and environmental sounds and to track the amount of sound pollution.
His message really resonated with most people. It's kind of crazy but there are almost no places on earth left where no noise of human machines can be heard for more than just 10 minutes.The point is that the world in which we live became noisier and noisier.
Today the average noise level of 98 decibels exceeds the WHO value of 50 decibels allowed for residential areas. So it is almost twice as high as it should be and with that come a lot of consequences.
Effects of of Noise Pollution
Source
For us humans it causes
With the impact on wildlife, we don't even have to start as many animals mainly rely on their sense of hearing to detect predators of prey. Their risk of death increases and some species have already become extinct because of it. To sum it up, some pollution has a very harmful impact on our lives on this planet.
What does actually silence mean and why is it important for self-development?
And we could all receive huge benefits. We just had some more silence in our lives. It is important to point out that silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of noise or as Gordon Hempton puts it
“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything”
As soon as there is no more noise; you finally hear everything that's happening around you such as the wind blowing softly through the leaves, the bird singing out in the trees, and the flowing water of a river in the distance.
You suddenly become present at the moment and you're able to just be with yourself while we get lost in noise we find ourselves in the silence.
In this hectic world, we're so busy doing that we really forget just being and, to be honest, it's in the being where we find ourselves and where we consciously create our lives.
It is during those rare moments of silence where we finally take a step back from our everyday lives and reevaluate what's important to us. And that ultimately helps us to make healthy decisions.
I strongly believe that silence is actually really important and that we need more moments of silence in our lives. Well, you might think to yourself that you can just use noise-canceling headphones to drown out all the noise around you and to create silence.
But if you think so you're wrong because these headphones isolate you from every sound and you just listen to another distraction like music or a podcast. So it misses the whole point of being present.
How to Actively Create Real Moments of Silence?
Here are three tips on how you can actively create real moments of silence:
1. Get more into nature
The best way is to get more into nature. If you live in the countryside maybe a drive to the nearby forest. If you live in a city just go to a park, just try to find a place with the least amount of noise, turn off your phone or put it in airplane mode and just become aware of your surroundings.
If you live in a busy city and you don't have the time to go to a park then just find the quietest place available to you, put on some headphones, and listen to some natural sounds.
Gordon Hempton actually has some really really good natural recordings of different environments like a lake or a river or just a forest. and they're actually really good and they calm you down. You can find it on his Spotify.
2. Less music
Stop listening to music all the time. Just stop taking your earphones and it’ll turn out to be really liberating. Don't get me wrong but listening to it all the time also isolates yourself and distracts you from the real world.
3. let's silence happen
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with a moment of silence. You don't always need to fill that void with distractions or some stupid small talk. In fact, silence can even create some really intimate or even magical atmosphere between people because you can finally see behind their façade.
So the next time you find yourself in this kind of situation. Don't get stressed about it but just let it happen.
Why I Chose this Topic?
My main motivation to publish this blog post was to raise awareness of the noise in our modern world and the lack of silence in our own lives.
You might never even heard of the term “sound pollution” and the noise was always just something that seemed normal to everybody. We’re always just concerned about pollution as soon as we see it, smell it or feel it but nobody ever thinks about the pollution we hear.
We're only concerned about the noise when it is caused by individuals and we simply accepted it everywhere else because we can't change anything about it. Right?Unfortunately, we can't just shut down all of our machines, transport, and propagation systems.
So, instead I wanted to motivate you to just find your own moments of silence to become more present and to connect with yourself because there still is some silence out there and it can have an incredible impact on our lives.
Over to you!
I hope you enjoyed this content and it would be awesome if you share it with some of your friends who could probably also make use of this. Let me know in the comments what you think about this whole topic as I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
And if you think that this content was helpful or interesting in some way; make sure to upvote and this always helps me more than you think.
I'll see you soon 😍 😍
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Actually, I'll be unavailable for a couple of weeks due to some commitments. i was working on these articles from past days. i thought I should publish them before leaving.
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Amazing post ☺️